The Front

I watched the Woodie Allen movie The Front last night. It was the first time I've seen this movie and I must say it bothered me enough to mention.

The movie takes place in the mid-1950's and the premise of the movie is Woodie Allen's character Howard Prince has a childhood friend who is a writer who has also been blacklisted because he has Communist sympathies. The friend asks Allen if he can use him to get his scripts approved and sold. In return Allen gets 10% of what the scripts sell for (its what the writer would have paid an agent anyway). The scheme works so well that Allen asks his friend if he knows any other blacklisted writers he can front for. His friend asks two other blacklisted writers to join the scheme.

In the process - the blacklisted writers make the same living they had before getting blacklisted and Allen's character becomes famous and financially solvent. A true win-win.

In the end Allen has to talk to a government committee and name a name or two to keep his own name clean (a name which has been made famous by fraud). All he has to do is name his childhood friend or one of the other writers as communist sympathizers and he's all set and he can go back to being a front and the win-win can continue. There would be no real harm since the other writers are already blacklisted.

Instead Allen takes a stand against "naming names" and tells the committee to fuck themselves. The movie ends with Allen going to jail.

Let me make a few points:

- Don't get me wrong, I think the HUAC activities were on the whole despicable. However, here the writers admit to either being communists or aiding and abetting communists. They weren't heroic figures - they were dupes.

- In the movie Zero Mostel plays Hecky Brown a character who had tangential connection with a May Day parade and other things that get him blacklisted. He can't get work and has to spy on the Woodie Allen character to help clear his name. In the end he kills himself. Mostel in real-life was black-listed which meant he couldn't work in movies or TV but could still work on Broadway.

- I know that at the time Mostel was considered a genius but I've never seen the attraction. I just don't get it.

- Today the pendulum seems to have swung completely in the other direction. Writers with rightist sympathies seem to be blacklisted in Hollywood while leftist drivel gets the greenlight no matter how bad the material. If a movie came out about a writer who was a big fan of Reagan and who couldn't get work because of his political beliefs - do you think it would get an Oscar nomination for the script? Somehow I doubt it.