- published: 30 Nov 2012
- views: 3541500
Career is a 1959 blacklist film drama co-written by Dalton Trumbo and starring Dean Martin, Tony Franciosa, and Shirley MacLaine. The movie involves 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 top-billed 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 plays Sharon Kensington, the alcoholic daughter of a powerful Broadway producer Robert Kensington, portrayed 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.
hey there missy what's that on your mind?
i see you tossed out all your papers and gotten out of line
you wanna throw your life away looking for a sign
think of all you're risking just to have a spine
(chorus)
they talk, they talk, they talk, they talk
they shove it in our ears
they say you gotta feed your dreams
to the jaded beast, career
but when you're sitting at the helm
of some misguided corperate plot
you'll not know what victory is
you'll know what it's not
come here sonny we like to start 'em young
you gotta rise above the rest, you must be number one
i still remember the words my wise pappy said to me
"i've no time for play, child, work's my destiny"
wake up mom and dad, can't you understand?
would you rather have your children under the command
of some grinding oncler with another thneed
or living unrespectably for what they believe?
(chorus)
now i believe in hard work, fingers to the bone
but it's gotta be for more than just my greed alone
or even worse than that, empowering some suit
i'd like to see the love of money underneath my boot