The Front (1976)

Directed by Martin Ritt. Starring Woody Allen, Zero Mostel, Andrea Marcovicci, Michael Murphy, Herschel Bernardi, Remak Ramsay, David Margulies, Lloyd Gough, Joshua Shelley, Marvin Lichterman. [PG]

Seriocomedy with a brittle edge set in 1953 NYC at the height of the HUAC investigations. In a rare performance for a movie he neither wrote nor directed, Woody plays a bartending schnook who gets approached by a blacklisted television writer friend (Murphy) to serve as a “front” by signing his name onto the friend’s scripts and collecting a small percentage; soon, he’s fronting even more writers and befriending an aging entertainer (Mostel) who was recently fired from his show for subscribing to The Daily Worker to impress a girl with “a big ass.” The fusion of darker, angrier material about the indignities and horrors of McCarthyism with neurotic Woody Allen one-liners and romantic troubles isn’t always cohesive (resulting in simplification of a daring and complex subject), and the film tends to be far more engaging when dealing with Mostel’s tragic figure than with Allen trying to secure the affections of a script editor (Marcovicci), but the actors and attitudes hold it together, and the ending satisfies on an elemental stratum—one wonders if anyone in the same position didn’t fantasize about saying the same thing. Several of the filmmakers and performers (Mostel, director Ritt, scriptwriter Walter Bernstein, etc.) had been blacklisted themselves.

77/100