That doesn't describe the restrained, workaholic Hollywood movie director David Merrill (Robert De Niro) who has come back from a European vacation to an America where a Communist witch hunt has commenced. David sees his friends have either named those affiliated with Communism or they have fled the country to escape their subpoenas. The bitter screenwriter Larry Nolan (Chris Cooper) names names for the committee, the dreaded HUAC, and this affects his alcoholic wife, Dorothy (Patricia Wettig), whom he names as well. It is not clear from the start if David is keenly aware of what is happening around him until his boss, producer Darryl Zanuck (Ben Piazza), tells him to meet with a lawyer (Zanuck is the only actual real producer/Hollywood affiliate in this movie; everyone else is a fictionalized combination of actual people). David has been named as someone with Communist leanings from having attended a couple of past meetings, and maybe he can name those he associates with or is friends with. One gregarious film director flees to England (magnificently played by the fast-talking Martin Scorsese, who shaved his beard to play this role) and now David is faced with an unenviable task - should he snitch in the name of alleged patriotism or will he be blacklisted? David chooses the latter, though one wishes director Winkler let the blacklisted screenwriter Abraham Polonsky keep the original idea of David as a strict Communist intact (Winkler took over the writing duties). As the movie stands, David is simply a guy who attended a couple of meetings.
"Guilty By Suspicion" doesn't let anyone off the hook when it comes to the clutches of McCarthyism. It wasn't just that you couldn't get a job anywhere if accused - your dignity and your freedoms were being oppressed. David moves to New York to get a job and can't stay long enough at any job (including one at a camera store) with the Hoover boys watching his every move. Consequently, Ruth, his ex-wife (a woefully underused Annette Bening), moves out of her house with their son to an apartment and David ends up moving in with her. Ruth resumes teaching and you feel that the FBI can also ensnare her since she attended radical anti-nuclear bomb protests. Nobody is safe, not even a writer named Bunny Baxter (George Wendt), David's best friend, who feels the pressure of giving up David's name so much that he even asks him for permission!
"Guilty By Suspicion" moves along at an adequate pace with tensions filling the air of discontent. It is not a movie about the thrill of moviemaking or the victory lap of doing the right thing and showing McCarthyism in and of itself was on the wrong side of history. It is about ratting out your friends in the name of political freedom from anything un-American. If you are an American, you bear witness to Communism as an evil threat and it shan't be practiced on the streets or in the comfort of some secluded place for a meeting. The truth is that many Communists saw value in such a system, or at least a new way of looking at our system of democratic values. "Guilty By Suspicion" is not invested in that complexity but it is a film of dread, pessimism and unhappiness where one character would rather commit suicide than keep living through this pressurized nightmare.
