Martin Ritt (1976)

A straightforward, rather thin film about blacklisting in the entertainment business during the McCarthy era:  several of those involved in The Front were themselves blacklisted at that time[1].  Woody Allen gives an intelligent, idiosyncratic performance as Howard Prince, a restaurant cashier and low-stakes bookie who becomes ‘the front’ for a team of blacklisted television writers, including Howard’s friend Alfred Miller.  Allen manages to modify the prevailing bitterness of the story – as does Michael Murphy, who’s likeable as Alfred.  The Front is a strong idea but the script by Walter Bernstein doesn’t give enough sense of how the untalented Howard manages to pass for a writer for so long, in the whirl of social events and TV interviews in which he gets involved (or of what he felt about his dead-end job(s) before celebrity was desperately thrust upon him).  Bernstein may be writing from personal experience but his characters are mostly clichés:  tight-lipped, malignant Red-hunters; an intense young woman who works for the television network and, puzzlingly, becomes Howard’s girlfriend (she’s played with excruciating sincerity by Andrea Marcovicci); a pathetic, buffoonish, blacklisted comedy actor struggling to hold back the tears of a clown.  Zero Mostel’s strong screen presence makes this character compelling, however; and the scene in which Hecky commits suicide is the most economical and imaginative of any in The Front.  The film is visually very flat.

[1970s]

[1] Afternote:  These included the director Martin Ritt, the writer Walter Bernstein, and the actors Zero Mostel, Herschel Bernardi and Lloyd Gough.