The final scene? Are you sure? I watched La Dolce Vita a few months ago and the Trevi fountain sequence was in the first hour or so. The movie ends on a beach, doesn't it?

The Trevi fountain was about halfway through the film.

Haven't seen the film in 20 years, and I guess that shows. Maybe I should! Correction in progress.

Unfortunately, the comments section on Andrew O'Hehir's previous post closed before I could add my thoughts on Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo was a great talent and a victim of anti-communist hysteria that ravaged this country since the middle of the Truman administration -- it should not be forgotten that Obama is not the first Democrat to sell out our civil liberties, although Truman did so for the specific reason of getting Vandenberg and others in the Republican-dominated Congress to back the Marshall Plan. On the other hand, O'Hehir and other liberal and leftist chroniclers of those times, such as the creators on the mid-70's documentary "The Hollywood Ten" and Patrick McGilligan in his "Tender Comrades", succumb to the fallacy of the superior virtue of the oppressed. When Trumbo and fellow members of the Hollywood branch of the American communist party took over the Screenwriter's Guild, they were every bit as intolerant of dissent as any rightwinger. IIRC, Trumbo even rejected a letter to the guild's publication that took issue with the leftward tilt, saying something like "freedom of speech does not extend to intolerable thoughts." And anyone who thinks this was an isolated example of the Hollywood branch's insistence on party-line thinking should look up the Albert Maltz affair, where the screenwriter, soon to become one of the Hollywood Ten himself, was forced, by Abraham Polonsky among others, to recant his recommendation that works should be reviewed on their merits instead on their congruence with the current party line. (Maltz had committed Party heresy by simply pointing out that when the anti-Nazi "Watch on the Rhine" debuted on Broadway in 1940, at the time when the Hitler-Stalin Pact was still being honored by the Nazis, communist writers condemned it, yet when the movie version came out in 1942, subsequent to Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, communist writers hailed it.) Another point that's often overlooked in the hagiographies of Trumbo is that he rejoined the CPUSA in the mid-1950's - a fact he buries in a footnote in his early-70's book -- at a time when there was no doubt about Stalin's evils.

An objective researcher into this period will find it more complex than the Manichean framework into which those understandably sympathetic to the victims usually put it. Nixon, then a freshman congressman, was far more fair-minded during the HUAC's 1947 hearing on communism in Hollywood than one would suspect from his later red-baiting (although he was right about Hiss), and as a friendly witness Reagan, there as a SAG official, comes across almost as a liberal. (The questioning of the "unfriendly" witnesses was, of course, a farce; the secretary of the Hollywood branch was working for the FBI and had provided the committee with the witness's membership cards, so the famous question, "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party," was rhetorical.)

The real Hollywood heroes of this period were the anti-communists liberals in the Screenwriters Guild like Philip Dunne and especially Emmet Lavery Sr., whose testimony in the 1947 hearings was left unmentioned in Gordon Kahn's 1949's pro-Party history of the hearing, "Hollywood on Trial: The Story of the 10 Who Were Indicted" and in most of the subsequent hagiographies. Maybe someday these defenders of free speech and free though will be the subject of an admiring work like "Trumbo."