DVD Reviews: Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, The Prisoner, Guilty of Treason - Page 10

In The Prisoner, the fact that the Cardinal is not explicitly named as Mindszenty frees Guinness to create a character, a man who has refined the earth in himself. (Though the differences between Mindszenty's experience and Guinness's as the Cardinal did make Mindszenty deeply skeptical of the movie. In the Preface to his Memoirs he noted acerbically, "[T]he interrogation is conducted along the well-mannered lines of good society. The prisoner is even addressed as 'Your Eminence.' The mere fact that the guard so much as speaks to the prisoner must seem astonishing to anyone who has been interrogated by Hungarian Communists.") The Prisoner doesn't state its anti-Stalinism explicitly, so Guinness's Cardinal can speak for himself rather than for "us."

Guilty of Treason has Bickford speak for Mindszenty, and, in the subplot involving Stephanie's insistence on playing Hungarian music in the state-run school, it dramatizes the nationalism in which he believed. Plus, the granitic Bickford is monumental to the sight in a way the more decorative, though infinitely more talented, Guinness is not. But if Guilty of Treason preserves Mindszenty as a public figure, it also pushes him to the side of the story. His martyrdom somehow becomes Stephanie's story, with Kelly stating "our" reaction to it the way Joel McCrea broadcasts "our" reaction to the international threat of fascism after it's been dramatized for us in Foreign Correspondent (1940).

Finally, Guilty of Treason has certain similarities to George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005). Both are about crusading journalists who cover the story of a public figure at the center of a Cold War political storm, and both public figures speak in their own, historic words. Both movies incorporate a pair of young lovers threatened by the political gear-grinding around them (as does The Prisoner). And each movie begins and ends with the hero's admonitory speech to a gathering of journalists.

Unlike Good Night, and Good Luck., Guilty of Treason is not a sleekly crafted or deftly acted work. But Clooney's movie isn't any less cornily heroic as romance than Guilty of Treason, which does not end with the victory of its grizzled knight. Moreover, Clooney's use of McCarthy as a metaphoric bogeyman to shame current journalists and artists is embarrassingly facile, and, as Jack Shafer's 5 October 2005 Slate.com article attests, Good Night, and Good Luck. isn't as much as journalistically accurate. Much of Lavery's script for Guilty of Treason was scraped off the bottom of the barrel, but at the same time the movie offers a snapshot of genuine historic outrage and that's something you can't laugh off.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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