You'll totally work in this town again

Rounding out this month's Wex film line-up are new restorations of controversial pictures that put a sudden stop to their creator’s careers: Dennis Hopper’s legendary film maudit The Last Movie, screening August 24-25, and Henri Georges-Clouzot’s Le corbeau, screening August 30. These personal and political exiles from the big screen didn’t last, however, and both artists emerged from their forced fallow periods to go on to create some of their greatest—if not the greatest—work of their career.

That got us thinking about major comebacks from political and/or personal struggles by film artists, specifically comebacks that saw these creators go on to generate some of their finest work. The list is by no means complete, and primarily focuses on the political and personal fallouts from the Blacklist. It's just a small sample of comeback creators.

Dennis Hopper
Let’s say you’ve made a zeitgeist capturing, pop culture landmark—one that was not only a critical success, but also a box office hit. Where do you go from there?

If you’re Dennis Hopper in the wake of the groundbreaking Easy Rider, you take that cash and cache and head to Peru. The Last Movie was a dream project for Hopper and what he delivered is a sprawling and ambitious drama packed with a staggeringly deep bench of actors—including Kris Kristofferson, Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn, Peter Fonda, Michelle Phillips—in an unabashedly experimental and challenging film. His final cut enraged the studio, got rejected by critics (Roger Ebert called it “a wasteland of cinematic wreckage”), and flamed out at the box office. Though The Last Movie did garner some traction with European critics—it won the Critics Prize at the Venice Film Festival—it, for a time, became known as a notorious act of filmmaking hubris that stubbed out the career of its writer, director, and star.

While Hopper found work here and there post-Last Movie (notably in The American Friend and Apocalypse Now), his personal struggles rendered him untouchable by studios. That is, until a back-to-back set of performances in two wildly disparate 1986 films hit the big screen: the beloved crowd-pleaser Hoosiers and the David Lynch mind-blower Blue Velvet. Both draw deep from the well of Americana and the power of nostalgia, but both offer very different takes about their particular Midwestern settings. What they do have in common, despite their divergent tones, are memorable and potent performances by Hopper, who got an Oscar nomination for Hoosiers. But it was his role as the vicious, monstrous Pabst Blue Ribbon-swilling psychopath Frank Booth in Blue Velvet that would set the template for his latter-day comeback. He would play a wide variety of villains for the remainder of the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, emerging from the thicket of addiction and professional exile to re-establish a vital film career.

Henri Georges-Clouzot
The neighbors are up to something. Oh, and so’s your spouse. And the institutions they want you to trust? No good happening there, either, buddy. And why does it feel like somebody’s watching me?

Clouzot’s fascination with jealousy, deceit, and paranoia find vivid purchase in Le corbeau, a compelling tale of a small town besieged by a spate of anonymous poison pen letters that trigger chaos and, eventually, emotional and physical violence. Made during the Nazi occupation of France, the film was roundly criticized and pegged as a work of anti-French propaganda by the authorities, thanks in no small part to a funding stream provided by a studio with ties to the German government. The result? Clouzot received a government-mandated lifetime ban from filmmaking.

The ban was short-lived, however, and after the liberation of France, Clouzot was back behind the camera and Le corbeau was vindicated as both a scathing indictment of French citizens who collaborated with Nazis and as a landmark work of cinema. Clouzot would go on to direct a number of classics, including The Wages of Fear, which established many of the building blocks of contemporary action cinema, and the exquisite thriller Les Diaboliques, a favorite of no less an authority on suspense than Hitchcock.

Lee Grant
Earning an Oscar nomination for her big screen debut in William Wyler’s Detective Story (1951) should have set the stage for Lee Grant’s brilliant career. Instead, she found herself pulled into the morass of McCarthy-era madness.

Blacklisted after refusing to testify against Arnold Manoff, her husband, before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Grant was jobless and only occasionally scoring theater work or small roles on television, putting that brilliant career on hold. More than a decade would pass before she got back to film work, rebuilding a career that had been unceremoniously cut short. She scored an Emmy for her performance on the hit television series Peyton Place and returned to the big screen for a run of memorable roles in hits acclaimed by both critics and audiences, including an Oscar-winning turn in Shampoo, Hal Ashby’s satire of mores both sexual and political; In the Heat of the Night; Teachers (partially filmed here in Columbus); Defending Your Life; and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Grant’s big screen comeback included two more Oscar nominations and a move into directing and producing, including snagging another Oscar for her documentary, Down and Out in America.

Ring Lardner, Jr.
Before he hit 30, Ring Lardner, Jr. had an Oscar (for penning the George Stevens classic Woman of the Year) and a screenwriting credit for the iconic noir, Laura. His extraordinary talent, like Lee Grant’s, found itself hijacked in its early prime by the Red Scare. Part of the Hollywood Ten, he was held in contempt of Congress and did time in federal prison for it. He ultimately took to writing under pseudonyms to keep the ink flowing and the creative spirit burning. When Lardner, Jr. returned to credited screenwriting, he did so with a vengeance, writing the Steve McQueen gem The Cincinnati Kid and Robert Altman’s era-defining smash M*A*S*H. The blockbuster was an authority-flouting middle finger directed at the hypocrisy and madness of war and remains one of the great works of American satire.

Dalton Trumbo
Blacklisted and jobless, Trumbo, like Lardner, Jr., worked pseudonymously to maintain a career. After the success of his groundbreaking novel Johnny Got His Gun, Trumbo moved to Hollywood and created a body of work that operated with a keen awareness of social justice and awareness. When he finally moved out of the shadow of the Red Scare, Trumbo penned the screenplays for two definitive Hollywood epics: Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus and Otto Preminger’s Exodus.

Orson Welles
Starting a film career with what is generally considered to be one of the two or three greatest films ever made—one that altered cinematic language and style on a molecular level—Orson Welles still faced unprecedented studio interference and interruption. A visionary with an enfant terrible reputation and an outspoken political awareness and sense of justice, Welles departed for Europe at the moment the blacklist was shifting into brazen, full-vile gear. During his European exile, Welles turned in an iconic performance in Carol Reed’s all-timer The Third Man and directed his fascinating adaptation of Othello and Mr. Arkadian, but eventually returned to the Hollywood system for Touch of Evil. The sweaty, sleazy, and hugely entertaining noir was proof positive that Welles’s prodigious directorial gifts were still at full power (that bravura opening tracking shot is a clinic in framing, blocking, and generating suspense) and that he could still work within a studio framework, subverting it all the while.