Authentic piece of committed cinema.Irwin Winkler has some interesting films as director, but for me this is the best.One of the values of art is to make us aware of our history. It's good that making films in which a complaint is made about an unjust situation. "People should finally know the truth of what happened then, as this will understand better what happens now" Irwin Winkler said.The production is good, and i would like to highlight Michael Ballhaus photography and James Newton Howard score.8/10

Guilty by Suspicion is a film that was based on the Hollywood blacklist and associated activities stemming from McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee. It stars Robert De Niro and Annette Bening together with George Wendt,Sam Wanamaker and Martin Scorsese. In the story,David Merrill is a film director of the 1950's who is facing the end of his career after he was being accused of being a communist at a time when Hollywood intends to blacklist them.He then suffers a crisis in morality if he only implicates colleagues as Communist agents during this rise of McCarthyism and the Red Scare.He must decide whether to turn informant, or to stick to principle at the cost of his life's work.This film was written and directed by Irwin Winkler.Robert De Niro definitely does a great in his acting performance as Merrill.Also,the film provides a realistic depiction of McCarthyism and the Red Scare that occurred during the 50's in Hollywood.Also,it provides us a great lesson to become true to ourselves and to our conscience as it could become the best service that we can provide anywhere particularly for our country.It is one film that will definitely teach us this lesson.No doubt about it.

The anti-Communist witch-hunts of the late 1940s will always be a dark chapter in American history, but this heavy-handed melodrama offers no insight into any of the causes or consequences. Robert De Niro (in a role any lesser actor could have played just as well) stars as a Hollywood film director declared persona non grata for his refusal to name names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, but his blacklisting looks more like a blessing in disguise: curing his workaholic habits and reuniting him with his wife and son. The biggest problem with producer-turned-director Irwin Winkler's skin-deep screenplay is an unfortunate tendency toward soap opera histrionics, with most of the plot revolving around dramatic suicides, drunken tantrums, and one of De Niro's trademark rip-the-phone-off-the wall-and-throw-it-across-the-room scenes. The climactic hearing is just an excuse for some politically correct soapbox grandstanding, and of course there's a rolling moral before the end credits, always a tacit admission that a film has failed to communicate its message elsewhere.

It's almost impossible to write any kind of objective film about the blacklist, the wounds of it run deep in show business. Guilty By Suspicion has no pretense to objectivity, neither does that John Wayne epic Big Jim McLain which was favorable to the House Un American Activities Committee.Those who gave testimony at HUAC did so for a variety of motives. Some like Adolphe Menjou wanted the blacklist for everyone to the left of Herbert Hoover. Some like Robert Taylor felt they were doing a patriotic service. Some under the threat of not being able to work as artists in their chosen profession named names before HUAC. A very select few said stick it in your ear.If there any guilty parties it's not the artists whatever their political persuasion. It was the studio bosses and one of them, Darryl F. Zanuck is played here by Ben Piazza, who gave in without exception to HUAC and cooperated in the blacklist, who pitted the people of various political persuasions against each other. Sad to say that's not really demonstrated here in Guilty By Suspicion.The members of HUAC were 95% on the political right of both parties. The Democrats were mostly southerners and the Republicans were on the right in their party. The liberals of either party had more constructive ways to spend their time in Congess.Guilty By Suspicion tells the story of Robert DeNiro as a fictional film director who gets blacklisted because of secret hearing testimony given by Chris Cooper. His struggle to find work turns positively Kafkaesque until he agrees to go before the committee.DeNiro strikes all the right notes in his performance and is aided and abetted by the performance of Annette Bening as his estranged wife. Acting honors however go to Patricia Wettig who plays a distraught blacklisted actress with a drinking problem to start with.Guilty By Suspicion is not the ultimate telling of the blacklist's story, but it's still pretty good and does get a feel for the times the story is set in.