The Front **** (1976, Woody Allen, Zero Mostel, Herschel Bernardi, Michael Murphy, Andrea Marcovicci, Lloyd Gough, Remak Ramsay) – Classic Movie Review 4905

Co-producer/ director Martin Ritt’s engrossing serious-minded 1976 comedy drama about Hollywood’s Fifties anti-leftist witch-hunts stars Woody Allen in one of his few films as actor only. Ritt called it ‘a film filled with bitterness and irony that reflect the ludicrousness of the time of the blacklist,’

Allen commendably plays it straight as restaurant cashier Howard Prince, the little guy who poses as a writer blacklisted film writers use as a front to submit their work through. The intolerable injustice makes him take a stand.

The Front is led by a number of impressive performances, notably from Allen and Zero Mostel as Hecky Brown. Mostel is one of a number of the cast members who suffered from being blacklisted in real life, also Herschel Bernardi, Lloyd Gough and Joshua Shelley. So were director Ritt and writer Walter Bernstein.

Hecky Brown is loosely based on actor Philip Loeb, a friend of Mostel who had been blacklisted and committed suicide. The Front is Mostel’s last appearance in a movie.

The movie provides a riveting look at, and insight into, what really went on in an era Hollywood for long preferred to forget – at least until Robert De Niro’s very similar film Guilty by Suspicion (1991), Jim Carrey’s The Majestic (2001) and Trumbo (2015).

Also in the cast are Herschel Bernardi as Phil Sussman, Michael Murphy as Alfred Miller, Andrea Marcovicci as Florence Barrett, Lloyd Gough, Joshua Shelley, Remak Ramsay as Hennessey, Danny Aiello, Josef Sommer, David Margulies, Norman Rose, Scott McKay, Julie Garfield and Charles Kimbrough.

Allen said later: ‘The reason I did The Front was that the subject was worthwhile. Martin Ritt and Walter Bernstein lived through the blacklist and survived it with dignity, so I didn’t mind deferring to their judgment.’

Herschel Bernardi’s career suffered when he was blacklisted for alleged leftist sympathies and was forced to go through the process of being ‘cleared’ by the anti-communist witch-hunters.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 4905

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