The Front has Woody Allen in a semi-serious role about a very serious subject -- the blacklisting that went on in Hollywood in the ‘50s. The Front also stars Zero Mostel and Hershal Bernardi, is written by Walter Bernstein, and produced and directed by Martin Ritt, all of whom were blacklisted themselves for years.
Woody Allen is Howard Prince, an enterprising restaurant cashier and part-time bookie who fronts for three blacklisted writers. Since he presents the material of three men to the studios as his own, he appears to be a fresh and uncommonly productive young writer. He enjoys success, money, and the adoration of a young woman who is in love with his literary prowess.
The blacklisting seems to produce three types of people: those who join with the right-wing witch hunters, those who protest and are destroyed, and those who compromise. Howard Prince is basically a compromiser, who strangely finds himself on the side of right by providing the banned writers with an income (after skimming off his percentage).
The film opens with a montage of newsreel footage contrasting images of the '50s: Marilyn Monroe, the Rosenbergs, soldiers, and more soldiers. A family descends into their bomb shelter, reminding us of the irony of a nation that built thousands of bomb shelters while escalating a weapons industry to make the use of those shelters more likely. Instead of working for peace, people devised schemes for survival on a wasted and polluted planet.
The mentality was that we could destroy a good portion of the world while remaining untouched by that destruction ourselves. There would be no loss of comfort, at least for those who could afford a shelter. Today we have an underground village designed for the refuge of America’s ruling elite, so that the people responsible for plunging us into a nuclear war can escape its consequences.
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