The Front (Columbia, Devon/Persky-Bright, Jack H.Rollins-Charles Joffe Productions, 1976)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Sunday, December 3 my husband Charles, his mother Edi and I watched a movie: The Front, part of Amazon Prime’s redoubt of films by Woody Allen. The Front was a film made in 1976 about the blacklist in the entertainment industry, and it was largely made with blacklist veterans, including director Martin Ritt, writer Walter Bernstein and stars Zero Mostel and Herschel Bernardi. Allen played Howard Prince, a cashier at a bar and a spectacularly unsuccessful bookie who gets enlisted by a blacklisted TV writer, Alfred Miller (Michael Murphy), to serve as his “front.” The gimmick is that Miller will actually write the scripts for the hit TV series Grand Central, Prince will submit them as his own work, and Prince will kick back 10 percent of the writing fee to Miller so he can still work. It seemed odd that a movie both written and directed by blacklist veterans would have been based on a false premise; “front” writers actually existed, but they had to be real writers with a few credits under their belts. The best “front” story I can think of involved the script for the 1953 movie Roman Holiday, allegedly written by Ian McClellan Hunter but really written by Dalton Trumbo. Hunter was himself blacklisted just as the film was about to be released, and Paramount told Hunter they would have to remove his name from the credits. Trumbo was indignant and told Hunter, “They can’t do this to you!” Hunter had to remind him, “But, Dalton, you wrote that script!” In the movie, Howard Prince is virtually illiterate – “I can’t even write a grocery list!” he eventually confesses to his girlfriend, Florence Ballard (Andrea Marcovicci) – though Allen wasn’t the official director or writer I suspect he had a hand in the script and helped write his character as the typical Allen nebbish. Neither Charles nor I had seen this film in decades, and this time around I was particularly impressed by the performance of Zero Mostel as blacklisted actor and comedian Hecky Brown (true name: Herschel Brownstein).

For once in his career Mostel calmed down enough and showed some real pathos; he was able to use the “Zero Mostel characterization” while also making an effect, especially when he recalls that the only reason he ever got involved in Communist-front causes (he never joined the Party but what he did do for them, including briefly subscribing to the Daily Worker, marching in a May Day parade and signing a petition to support Loyalist Spain, was enough to get him into trouble with the inquisitors) was he was cruising a hot-looking young Communist woman. “And I never even got laid!” he moaned. It also occurred to me that the night after we’d seen both versions of Christmas in Connecticut we were watching yet another movie about a fraud; Woody Allen is shown receiving script revisions on the fly from a cab containing the real writer just like Barbara Stanwyck received recipes from S. Z. Sakall in the earlier Christmas in Connecticut. And the fact that Stanwyck was a major supporter of the Hollywood blacklist – she and her then-husband Robert Taylor were members of the pro-blacklist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals – just added to the irony. Also some of the blacklisting characters in the movie were based on real people: former FBI agent and current head of something called “Freedom Information” Francis Hennessey (Remak Ramsey) was really Vincent Hartnett of “Aware, Incorporated” (he published a book called Red Channels, whose cover showed a red hand smothering a microphone, and that and his later books, Confidential Report and File 13, were literal blacklists naming writers, actors and others he said the broadcast industry shouldn’t employ), and supermarket chain owner Hubert Jackson (David Clarke) is really Laurence Johnson, who successfully intimidated networks and advertisers alike by threatening to put up signs in his markets targeting certain products as “un-American” if they bought commercials on shows with blacklisted talent. Given that the impulse to blacklist has hardly died – one of Donald Trump’s promises in his 2024 Presidential campaign is to use the power of government to put MS-NBC out of business – The Front is an unexpectedly timely movie today, especially given that last Friday the real-life version of the Stanwyck and Allen characters, George Santos, was finally thrown out of Congress for his lies.