Main Cast: Dean Martin, Anthony Franciosa, Shirley MacLaine, Carolyn Jones, Joan Blackman
Release Year: 1959
Country: US
Run Time: 105 minutes
Plot
Playwright James Lee adapted his off-Broadway play for the screen in this high-strung adaptation, directed by Joseph Anthony. In this simplistic, backroom show-business-success saga, Anthony Franciosa plays Sam, a struggling young actor who will forsake his family and take any type of menial job in order to become a Broadway star. Dean Martin is on hand as Maury, an aspiring director also trying to claw his way up the ladder of success. When Maury gets his big break, Sam wants a part in his show, but when Maury, who is unwilling to cast Sam in the production, turns down Sam's request, Sam seduces and marries Maury's girlfriend (Shirley MacLaine). In spite of everything, Maury wants his girl back, and Sam agrees to a divorce on the stipulation that Maury cast him as the star in his next show. Once again, Maury reneges and, before Sam can exact his revenge, Uncle Sam comes to the rescue and he is drafted into the army. While Sam is in the army, the era of the communist witch hunts are in full flower, and since Sam and Maury were both members of the Communist Party, upon Sam's return home he discovers that they both are blacklisted. Their passion for success still burning bright, they decide to collaborate and put together an independent production that will either mark their complete success or their complete failure. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
Review
Although generally acclaimed upon its first release -- the New York Film Critics nominated it for best picture, director and screenplay -- Career has lost a lot of punch over the intervening years. Much of the problem is that the film focuses on a milieu -- the backstage world of the theatre - that is overly familiar to many audiences. The screenplay does provide an interesting twist; whereas most films of this stripe allow the protagonist to "make it" halfway through the film, Career's Sam Lawson struggles from beginning to end. The film also gingerly comes out against the McCarthyite blacklist, but this seems more grafted on than truly sincere. Otherwise, there's little that's fresh to the screenplay, although many of the scenes are dramatically effective, even if trite, and there is some potent dialogue handed out along the way. Among the cast, Anthony Franciosa gives what is arguably the finest and most powerful performance of his career, and Carolyn Jones is touching and affecting. Shirley MacLaine takes advantage of the showier part of the alcoholic love interest, and Dean Martin turns in one of his better, more committed performances. Career also benefits from an accomplished team of designers, especially Joseph La Shelle, whose careful lensing provides atmosphere and tension to the story. MacLaine and Martin had worked together before (Some Came Running)and would again in several more films, including Oceans Eleven. ~ Craig Butler, All Movie Guide
Career is a 1959 film drama about actor Sam Lawson (Tony Franciosa) bent on breaking into the big time at any cost, braving World War II, the Korean War and even the more recent blacklist, something that writer Dalton Trumbo knew all too well from being blacklisted himself.
The supporting cast includes Dean Martin as actor-director Maurice "Maury" Novak, who works with Lawson at an early grassroots theatrical group later targeted as "subversive" for its liberal views. Novak left the theater to become a well known Hollywood director brought down by the blacklist himself. Shirley MacLaine played Sharon Kensington, the alcoholic daughter of a powerful Broadway producer Robert Kensington, played by Robert Middleton.
Lawson continually tries to establish himself as an actor, suffering the slings and arrows of rejection despite his dedication and passion for the theater. It costs him his first wife, played by Joan Blackman. Lawson's long-suffering agent Shirley Drake (Carolyn Jones) attempts to get him work and he slowly begins to rise, even managing to land work in a Kensington production. Just as he's about to land a major role in a TV series, his loyalty is researched and the ties to his allegedly "subversive" theater work with Novak are revealed. As Novak has been wrongly brought down, the now blacklisted Lawson, reflecting the realities of real-life blacklisted actors, is forced to take work as a waiter. In one sense this was among Hollywood's first direct documentations of the blacklist in a dramatic film.
Novak, himself on the skids, returns, vowing to start from the beginning, with a new off-Broadway theater and offers Lawson a chance to work together again. After agonizing, Lawson accepts the offer, and with the blacklist past, the new play becomes successful and heads to Broadway. With Lawson finally emerging as a major actor, Drake, who's fallen in love with Lawson, asks him in the final scene, thinking of his struggles and humiliation, if it was "worth it."
