| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Movie Review

The Majestic. Dir. by Frank Darabont. Warner Brothers, 2001. 152 mins.

The Majestic is the latest in a series of films reinterpreting Hollywood's single greatest trauma (apart from box office losses): the red scare and the blacklist. Like The Front (1976) and Guilty by Suspicion (1991), it places its principal victim in the "innocent" category of a writer caught in the wide net cast by the investigations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Like Fellow Traveler (1989) and One of the Hollywood Ten (2001), which bring forward actual Communist party members as the main protagonists, The Majestic slips back into history, treating the context of 1940s Hollywood and the stultifying effects of blacklisting upon American cinema. Like The Way We Were (1973), by far the most commercially successful, its drama rests in no small part on a love story. 1

Historically trained viewers will grasp the affect of The Majestic in its first moments and again shortly into the film. A famous documentary clip of the HUAC hearings of 1947 shows us John Howard Lawson (an acclaimed writer of war action films but also reputedly Hollywood's "Head Red") attempting to argue for constitutional rights and being gaveled down. Soon, we see Jim Carrey as a vaguely liberal but basically apolitical screenwriter fired by the studio. He drives drunkenly out of Los Angeles and plunges off a bridge into a river, where he is rescued and brought to a small town: Lawson, California. . . .

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