By Martin Ritt, 1976.
Starring Woody Allen, Zero Mostel.
Rating: 3/10, 3.5/10.
I desparately, desparately wanted The Front to be good. Not that I had any suspicion of how horrible it would be before I saw it, but I had very high hopes for it. I’d never seen a movie about the blacklists (for all I’ve heard there might not be any others), and just on principle a movie about that is worth seeing. And besides, Woody Allen and Zero Mostel, aside from the fact that they’re both horrifically talented, seemed just the people to make a move about it. Especially Mostel, who is equally talented in intellectual and slapstick arenas, and was in fact a victim of the blacklists himself. But Allen, too...well, just think about it. Don’t you want to hear what he has to say about the Hollywood blacklists?
One of the main problems, I think, with this movie is that neither Allen nor Mostel had major creative input into the movie (none credited, anyway, and that’s all I can go by). Neither had a hand in writing or directing it. If they had, I can imagine that an entirely different, good movie could easily have come out of it. As near as I can tell without actually knowing anything about the production of the movie, the director and writer (both blacklist victims) came to Allen and Mostel and asked them to be in it, and they couldn’t very well refuse.
Of course, I’m sure that the aforementioned writer and director had lots of talent. But it takes a certain kind of talent, the kind I suspect Allen and Mostel could have brought, to get the right kind of distance from the material. This is emotional stuff, and it’s very clear to see that The Front is a movie made in pure, passionate anger. But since the driving creative forces, quite understandably, don’t seem to be able to distance themselves properly, it all just came out misdirected and extremely, tragically, miserably terrible.
It’s terrible both in theory and in practice. Let’s talk about theory first. It’s a movie lashing out in anger at the blacklists. OK. That’s a great idea, I’m 100% behind it. The blacklists were terrible and I think it’s a travesty that many people don’t even know they happened, especially today, on the eve of the resurrection of the HUAC (not that that matters in the context of when this movie was made, but I thought I’d mention it anyway). But. The blacklists were in the 1950s, and this movie came out in 1976. Again, the blacklists were still relevant then, still are today, but only if they’re made relevant, if you know what I mean. Like, the movie expends a lot of energy to saying "the blacklists were bad," which we already know, and none to saying "the blacklists are still bad" or "the blacklists could be bad again," which makes it utterly useless as a protest, or as a movie. The creators were too close; they made their personal vent movie, and it’s no use to anyone but themselves.
Even aside from all of this, it is just a clumsy, clumsy movie. One of the weirdest things is to hear these words in Woody Allen’s mouth. As any regular reader of my reviews knows, I’m a huge admirer of Allen’s dialogue. Recall, if you will, my review of Hannah & Her Sisters, in which I, with no exageration and with all due respect to Chekhov, called him the single best writer of realistic dialogue in all of history. So to hear him working his way through this stilted ugliness is something akin to tragedy.
And that brings up another point. Our two leads really seem to be working their way through the material. Take a look at Mostel in The Producers, or Allen in Annie Hall, just as examples, and tell me if that seems like work. It certainly is, very much, in both cases, but does it look like it? Of course not. Here it does. And it’s not pleasant.