Le prête-nom

It's amazing to me that it has been more than a quarter of a century since this movie was made. I think at the time the movie was made it was said that it could not have been made before then because of the controversy; "Hollywood" would not have allowed it to be made.

This movie is of historical significance because it is based on reality; a reality that seems impossible now. I saw this movie in a theater in which another movie was shown first. The first movie was a documentary of the search for communists and the real-life story preceding the fictional portrayal of the same thing was a powerful combination.

I think this movie must be seen by all to see how unreasonable people can be if we are too intolerant.

It's the 1950's, and Senator Joseph McCarthy has whipped America and especially Hollywood into an anti-communitst frenzy. Anyone who ever had ties to the left wing is persecuted and denied employment. Which means a big opportunity for Woody Allen (acting only, he didn't write or direct) to make a few bucks selling scripts written by blacklisted writers, being the "Front" of the title. Little does he know what he's getting into. Woody's masquerade starts as a favor to a pal in trouble and a chance for easy money, but it quickly snowballs into serious involvement with some very ugly things.

Great script and excellent performances by Allen and Andrea Marcovicci, but the film is lifted to terrifying heights by the magnificent Zero Mostel as a blacklisted comic. Every indignity and loss he faces is reflected in his wonderful face with a terrible sweet-natured dignity, you can see the weariness and hopelessness growing in his eyes scene by scene. His tragedy changes the lives of all the other characters, and makes the film the fine thing that it is.

There's a lot of wit and black humor in this film, but overall it's a very affecting tragedy, one with a fine, strong, yet hopeful ending.

The Front (1976)

Deeply serious and sometimes hilarious, Martin Ritt makes an improbable critique of McCarthyism using several once-blacklisted actors and Woody Allen, then at one of his peaks of fame.

Allen, though, is limited by his role, and seems to be Woody Allen rather than one of his more exaggerated characters. Some of his lines seem written by him, rather than just for him, which would be appropriate (people writing under assumed names). The real star of the show is Zero Mostel as a blacklisted comic actor. He plays it straight and zany with equal power, a real joy.

Most of all is the point--that we can't forget how insidious this kind of spying and lying and persecution can get, so that even well meaning people go along as a matter of fear, or expedience, or just laziness. We'd like to think we wouldn't fall for a new McCarthy, but I think we very well might, in some new form, and sooner than we'd like. Movies like this (and Good Night and Good Luck) might forestall it. While not a work of terrible originality or genius, it's completely enjoyable and worth the time.

This film is directed by Martin Ritt from a screenplay by Walter Bernstein. Both director and writer, along with several members of the cast, were blacklisted during the 1950s. Woody Allen stars as Howard Prince a good-for-nothing restaurant cashier and part-time bookmaker. At the start of this film, Allen has the total schmuck persona that he used in many of his earlier films but as the film progresses he gradually develops a conscience until the ‘happy' ending when he performs an honorable act and is led away to prison. Ritt and Bernstein are highlighting the idiocy of the blacklist by having as their hero the money-grabbing, self-serving Prince. Eventually, even he cannot stomach what is going on in the name of decency and freedom. The film is darkly humorous and chilling in its depiction of an era when the owner of a small grocery store could dictate to a national network who it could and could not employ. At one point Prince has to rewrite a script about the holocaust because the programme sponsor is a gas company.

The film is a real achievement being both funny and a savage indictment of a crazy era, told with feeling by people who lived through it and suffered under it. The only misjudged performance is Zero Mostel's maudlin comedian. Michael Murphy turns up again as he does in many of Allen's early films. Andrea Marcovicci is effective as the beautiful and cerebral script editor who falls for Prince. Prince agonises over whether she loves the man or the artist, surely the inspiration for Allen's own exploration of the same theme in Bullets over Broadway nearly 20 years later.

Woody Allen is "The Front" for blacklisted television writers in the 1950s in a film also starring Zero Mostel, Herschel Bernardi, Andrea Marcovicci, and Michael Murphy. Several of the film's participants - director Ritt, writer Bernstein, actors Bernardi and Mostel, were themselves blacklisted.

Woody's character, Howard Prince, has moments of humor, but "The Front" is a drama, and a very good one. Prince agrees to front for a writer-friend and later takes on other blacklisted writers for money. Then comes the day that Prince himself is subpoenaed by the committee, and he has to make a decision about where he stands.

Along the way, Howard falls in love with a principled woman, Marcovicci, who becomes disgusted with the blacklist and quits her television job, and a pathetic comedian, Zero Mostel, who claims to have marched in a May Day parade and subscribed to a communist newspaper because he had a crush on a girl. Then he watches his career shrivel up.

I grew up in the '50s and remember the Red Scare very well, as in school we were always told that the Communists were coming. In Hollywood and Washington, it was believed that the Communists were here infiltrating our government, films, and television. Whether it was true or not is a separate issue from the persecution and hysteria that took place. Actress Lee Grant, for instance, was blacklisted because she went to a funeral of someone who had been accused of being a Communist. John Garfield, Kim Hunter, Gale Sondergaard, Mady Christians, Larry Parks - just a few of the actors blacklisted. There are many examples of people whose careers and lives were ruined because they had once attended a meeting to see what this political ideology was all about, or had a friend who was a Communist. Land of the free indeed.