Career (1959 film)

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.

Plot

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,...
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