[Note: Part 2 of the Winona entry is coming.]
[An asterisk after the names of several people who made this movie relates to the footnote at the end of this entry. Edited a tiny bit on 4/16/12 and 4/18/12. Also, I added references to two "end notes" that will appear in a subsequent (April 16) blog entry. These are just to back up statements to show I am not talking loosely on some important things (while I feel it's OK to talk loosely on others).]
In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, there is a joke in which Yossarian finds that chess games with someone “were so interesting, they were foolish.” In a way, that’s how themed entries like my look at Winona Ryder’s movies can be: they take you in so many intriguing directions, they start seeming (to me as the writer) ungovernable, and you (I, anyway) become a little desperate to wrap them up. So how about a break and a delving into stinky-guy stuff? Some fairly ordinary war stories? How about going from the rich talk, emotional engagement, and possible pleasant redolence from hair-care products that seem associated with Girl, Interrupted, and a pause for some, in effect, pastrami sandwiches with a klatch of Manhattan kibitzers?
Judging from a videotape cover, you might think The Front was another Woody Allen movie that, if you’re a fan, you somehow missed out on and want to see. His image is used to market the film, and indeed he has a central role in it. But this film is unusual, having come between Woody’s Love and Death (1975) and his new-direction-marking Annie Hall (1977). He didn’t write or direct The Front, and though his typical acting persona is here—as he plays a nebbishy character, with his deliberate-yet-spontaneous, pause-marked way of speaking—and he gets off some funny one-liners, this is not a laugh-a-minute comedy about a quintessentially New York social situation. It is an engrossing story (with occasional comedy) about the intrigue and paranoia, politically oriented hypocrisy, and occasional blunt tragedy waged by the blacklisting of major artists, on an esoteric level, during the McCarthy era in the early 1950s.
In this way, the film is something of a civics lesson on a par with the jury-deliberation drama Twelve Angry Men (1957). But The Front also employs a mild but still pointed irony and humor, as we can start to tell when its opening sequence includes a Frank Sinatra recording of “Young at Heart” playing under sepial-toned newsreel footage of stuff like a smiling Harry Truman, bombs dropping, a bomb shelter being occupied, and—not least important—glimpses of the Rosenbergs, of the famous atomic-secrets spy case, being ushered around.
For a bit of historical background: Though some in the U.S. were suspicious of the Communists before World War II, we were allies during that war not only with Great Britain but with the Soviet Union, even as it was helmed by Josef Stalin, who was second only to Hitler as a mass-murdering world leader. [See end note 1 in April 16 blog entry.] Then our alliance with the Soviets frayed as the Cold War started to coalesce after about 1946. When China
Thus, if an actor or a script writer got branded as a full-fledged Communist, or as some kind of “fellow traveler” with the Communists, he or she was then “blacklisted,” in whatever form a “list” of “people not to be employed” took. (It didn’t help that these hapless professionals had actually been involved in some May Day parade years ago, or had once subscribed to a Communist newspaper—as more or less a youthful indiscretion.) All this may either seem familiar enough (to older readers) or some kind of musty history lesson (to younger readers), but of course, different forms of the same sort of insidious hyper-stigmatizing insinuations, and resultant character assassinations and loss of work opportunity, can and do go on today.
The interesting story that can be seen in this is by what peculiar “mechanisms,” in terms of apparent legal “processes” and office politics, individual artists had their reputations sullied and careers hindered by blacklisting during the Red scare period. We will return to this theme shortly, especially when I discuss the character of Hennessy. (This story also comes in a movie that has a humor of earthy by-the-seat-of-the-pants dealing that’s on a par with that of The Blues Brothers [1980].)
Producers and actors—some with asterisks for this blog entry
Let’s look at several of the people who made this film. First, Woody Allen’s longtime producers Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe helped, one would presume, get the financing. Walter Bernstein* wrote the screenplay; Martin Ritt* co-produced and directed. You may not have heard of them; neither did I before I saw this movie. Two of the co-stars, however, you may have heard of: Zero Mostel* and Herschel Bernardi.* People my age and older may have heard of Mostel: among his credits, he played Tevye in a 1960s stage version of Fiddler on the Roof, and played Max Bialystock, one of the scheming producers in Mel Brooks’ first (1968) movie version of The Producers. Herschel Bernardi may be another, if less, familiar name. I don’t know many of his credits, but I do feel his Wikipedia bio is too skimpy. The multi-talented Bernardi—who looks in this film, with bald head and mustache, like what he apparently was at one point, the first voice of Charlie the Tuna in the old Starkist commercials—also played Tevye in the stage version of Fiddler on the Roof. I remember his hit-single record version of “If I Were a Rich Man,” which was on the radio in 1967. According to his Wikipedia bio, he was in the Yiddish theater.
Another actor, rather central to the story, is the somewhat un-prepossessing Michael Murphy, an apparent Irishman who turned up in a few movies that would seem to have been the province of largely Jewish actors and producers: he was also in Woody Allen’s Manhattan
Pedestrian production for a riveting story
Despite the New York-entertainment-veteran pedigree, this movie is cheaply produced and directed, though this will turn out not to matter: the camera movements are fairly pedestrian—they even seem a bit clunky for a TV movie of the mid-’70s—and the lighting, which I think was sometimes (or often?) natural, makes for some rather ugly scenes (some shots look as if they were made through the side of a dirty fish tank, though maybe that’s a reflection of the old videotape I saw the film on). Some scenes, such as early ones in the TV studio, seem handled—with blocking of the actors and continuity of who is where and so on—are so clumsy, they seem to have done in one or two takes. The sound on the old videotape I watched is rather crude, but the talk in the movie comes through clearly enough.
This movie is almost like a film school exercise, but the directing is handled just well enough to suit the script, which itself is the real gripping element here: this story of what happens when a nebbishy small-time diner cashier and bookie who is hard-pressed for money, Howard Prince, played by Allen, helps a friend, TV writer Alfred Miller (played by Murphy), get his scripts bought by a local network-TV studio because Miller has been blacklisted for alleged past Communist sympathies and/or involvements. In short, Miller continues to write and earn his living, but through Prince, who presents himself to the TV studio as if he is the new genius-writer in town, and he gets 10 percent of what the scripts are bought for—fair enough to each man.
A friend-helping scheme that turns out not to be failsafe
Prince finds this such a helpful arrangement to all concerned that he starts similarly fronting for other local blacklisted writers (played by Gough and Shelley), whom he meets with in a local diner, for 10 percent of the sales price for each script from each. His life, just when it needs it, improves: he can pay off debts, he buys new clothes, and he even gets a fancy new apartment. When he appears at his bank one time, the teller delicately asks him what he does, with his banking activity “up and down, up and down” all the time; Prince answers breezily, in good Woody style, “Futures.”
This arrangement at first seems solid, whereby the writers perform an end-run around a politically perverted system that has suddenly made them unemployable. But as such a relatively devious arrangement would go, it might run into snags, right?
A freelance Red-sniffer begins to have a cancerous effect on TV-production friends
And the real source of trouble comes from a stiffly-talking, pinheaded narc named Francis K. Hennessy, who helms the local, apparently long-running, and apparently freelance “Freedom Information Service,” which the network rather pathetically depends on—indeed, pays—to “vet” writers and even actors with respect to their political sympathies. Hennessy is a former FBI agent, as it’s suggested early on in the movie (so he must know his business, right? Or maybe today we can assume he was something of an FBI hack who found it more lucrative and emotionally satisfying to set up a sort of private-eye type firm—and maybe he doesn’t even remember his cases from his FBI stint).
Per his job, Hennessy tries to squeeze what info he can out of writers, actors, and their associates, to see if they are free of the taint of Red-ness. If he can’t get info from the subject of his interest directly from that subject, he will get it from his associates; his investigations will rely on snitching and friends being turned against one another. In this way, he claims to be able to make his subjects—if results are good—more able to work, though it seems he inevitably has the effect of making them unable to work further. (In a good reflection of his parasitical-jackass way of thinking, he sternly reminds one subject of his inquiries, “I don’t do the hiring, Mr. Brown, I only advise on Americanism.”)
Whether this sort of “vetting” firm actually was in operation in the 1950s (there may have been more than one), it strikes me as credible, both in general terms of what a legal professional can do (in blindly and rigidly supporting any sort of ideal in an ambiguous [if simply not-black-and-white] area of the economy) and in terms of what did go on during the Cold War anyway. When it comes to paranoia associated with a perceived political danger or an alleged conspiracy, interestingly the people guarding against that sort of danger, even in a democracy, end up echoing, in their behavior, the same sort of spineless, corrosive political-operative behavior that they decry (a sort of insight voiced by Hannah Arendt in her The Origins of Totalitarianism). In general, I feel that even in a country, the U.S.
Even if you don’t grant this idea, it’s not hard to see that during the Cold War, some sort of pseudo-legal organization like Hennessy’s would sprout up and be staffed by a probably 10th-rate former legal professional like Hennessy: maybe true to what he saw as his ideals, but cravenly conformist in terms of performing a function that a seemingly mindless, inadvertently insinuating husk of a person is best equipped to perform—conformist in the sense of the Nazi Heinrich Himmler, who I think it was who said “my honor is my loyalty.” [See end note 2 in April 16 blog entry.] (A less politicized reading would be: Hennessy is half interrogator, half unpromising “fixer,” and all jackass.)
An actor I didn’t know about until this movie, Remak Ramsay, played Hennessy, but the flat, ’70s-style “Establishment stiff” voice and the intent, humorless drilling manner of his specific demands—all fits this type to a T: he’s someone colorless who nevertheless lives up to two senses of being a “private dick,” and manages to be an effective match for the positively spirited Hecky Brown, played by Zero Mostel; Hecky is an actor who plays a sort of jovial MC or narrator on a TV series. His having flirted with Communist activities years before is suddenly grist for the mill of those want to get “pink” types out of the TV industry. Hennessy’s relatively (and humorlessly) “fascist” operative reduces the humorous Hecky, over a series of encounters, to a pathetic semi-weasel before too long. In turn, what starts the undoing of Howard Prince (Woody Allen’s character) is none other than the undoing of Hecky Brown, for whose TV show Prince has starting fronting Alfred Miller’s (and others’) scripts.
Zero Mostel is a magnificent stage-type actor—he is equipped for the stage, with sonorous baritone voice, and his strengths (and sometimes over-strengths) on the movie screen reflect his stage capability. He is, I think, on a par with Tim Curry in the latter’s Dr. Frankenfurter role in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, such a strong stage-type actor that even in a movie, where subtlety can work better, his own performance overpowers everyone else (though it may be suitable enough for his own character). Mostel, when he’s up (and as Hecky is still working), just delights with his ebullience, with his broad face and somewhat comically worn porkpie hat that make him seem both an instantly ingratiating famous character like Groucho Marx and whatever character he is shoehorned into playing.
So it’s rather striking what happens to Hecky once the TV studio’s execs (with the outside sponsor really having most of the prerogative) get cold feet about having Hecky on the show, because Hennessy is running into diminishing returns in squeezing Hecky for a “sincere” letter outing all his Communist past and whatever else (incriminating of others) that Hennessy might want, and Hecky is released from his TV work…. The superior who gets the hard task of firing Hecky is TV producer Phil Sussman, played by Herschel Bernardi in classic style of a generally well-meaning mensch (though his close associates get bitter toward him) who tries to handle a difficult demand (of the type “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”) as best as he can…. Andrea Marcovicci’s character Florence, a script editor and subordinate to Sussman, eventually quits her job, to more idealistically pursue exposing the blacklisting that is going on. (It is characteristic of this film, which seems mainly to tell a story about a “male problem,” that the only female character of note is a political idealist, though in the Communist direction; a lover of art; and a love interest.)
Well, to see Hecky crestfallen as he hangs disconsolately around Hennessy’s office again, wondering what he can do to right things, shows what a disservice it was for Hecky to have lost his job as he did. Hennessy can only give the rough equivalent of promise to him if Hecky gets the goods on another TV success story for him: what about this Howard Prince? Whom has he associated with—were they Communist?
You want me to spy on him? Hecky asks, not at all relishing the idea. Hennessy offers as “ironclad rationalization” a classic type of McCarthyist paranoid line that seems like something ironically presented in Joseph Heller, or even (from a politically far different direction) the Nixon White House: We are “dealing with a ruthless and tricky enemy who would stop at nothing to destroy our way of life.” In short, the fate of the free world hangs on whether some TV creative-type has had Communist associations or sympathies. So Hecky ends up agreeing to spy on Howard Prince for Hennessy.
Meanwhile, Florence Barrett tries to appeal to Prince’s conscience, as their personal, outside-work relationship flourishes, by trying to win him to her project of exposing the blacklisting; but Prince begs off, noting his current success, while unable to tell her how he’s helping blacklisted friends (the disguise was essential early on, and has to remain so); so he’s beginning to be backed into a corner of a crisis of conscience.
Blacklisting and demonizing—then and now
As Hennessy said, we were “dealing with a ruthless and tricky enemy who would stop at nothing to destroy our way of life.” Yes, people actually thought that way in the early 1950s, and it’s reasonable to assume that the many actors and the like who helped make this movie made it as a—well, labor of love is not quite right: it’s more like taking the opportunity when, 20+ years after the fact (and with Communism no longer quite the burning issue, with the Vietnam war over), the almost Stalinist stigmatization and gallingly ludicrous paranoia of the McCarthy era can be depicted for its ugly and destructive self in a story that, whether or not it’s actually a work of nonfiction, certainly reflects how lives were severely damaged in the 1950s by sheer suspicion and innuendo.
And is this so relevant today? Well, with Communism as a source of deathly stigmatizing having been replaced by—oh, I don’t know, let’s check the newspapers—“sexual indiscretion” or “sexual abusiveness” (not always well founded) or “being a scammer” (again, not always well founded), don’t we have people unfairly shut out of career routes today by similar smearing, paranoia, and rushes to judgment?
Hecky’s own fate rather brings this home strongly, and I don’t think it’s spoiling the story for potential viewers to reveal what happens, because the real climax of the story, which I won’t reveal, is what Howard Prince does in consequence of what Hecky does.
After traveling with Prince to a Catskills resort, all the while trying to glean from conversations with Prince what associations he has, etc., Hecky opts to perform in one of the last few gigs he can manage, ending up getting paid far less than he’d originally thought was agreed on (his fee used to be $3,000; the club owner had promised for tonight $500, and now suggests it will be $250; Hecky presses for $300; the club owner will see what he can do). After the lively show, with the club owner giving Hecky only $250, Hecky’s protesting about not getting the original $300 fee results in a bitter squabble with the club owner, with the result that the latter man castigates him bitterly as being Red, etc., in public: he couldn’t be more virulent with “You’ll crawl in the gutter, you Red bastard, you Commie son of a bitch!”
Final destinies show the darkness of the situation
In a post-humiliation confidential exchange with Prince at Prince’s home, a drunk Hecky, among what else he says, reveals to Prince his original name when, with the self-doubt, anger, and anguish his blacklisted state has put him in, he calls out his real name as if to a repulsive enemy: “Herschel Brownstein” [sp?]. (In a tortured state, after Prince has gone to bed, Hecky snoops through Prince’s desk.) Though the movie does not make this point explicitly, and maybe in 1976 this particular point was either considered too risky an additional one to make or was unnecessary, it still suggests that what the blacklisted actors and writers who supported this movie wanted to decry wasn’t only 1950s American anti-Communist hysteria but also an anti-Semitism that was closely tied to it but not outwardly acknowledged by the McCarthyists.
Long story short: Hecky, after a last, cordial visit with Prince (whom he knows he has inculpated insofar as he reported his associates to Hennessy’s firm), and disguising his intention with Mostel’s trademark jaunty ebullience, checks into a motel room, has a swig of Champagne or wine, sings low to himself, and with everyone who last dealt with him none the wiser from his smiling, tip-lavishing demeanor, he opens a window in his high-story room, and….
Howard Prince’s shocked, sobered face as he watches across the street from mourners filing out from Hecky’s funeral show he’s starting to get grounds to change his whole career course, to put it mildly. This ties to the fact that he has been served with a subpoena (which was initiated before his last involvement with Hecky) to appear before a government subcommittee, which we know has been done on the basis of what info Hennessy has gleaned (and with Hecky’s less-than-willing help), and at first Prince feels confident he knows how to deal with the subpoena—even trying to assure his writer-friends for whom he fronted….
But it turns out he shows that, whether by our own morally creative choices or by circumstances (or a combination thereof), life is what happens when you make other plans. Another lesson: it pays to be a vigilant citizen in questioning some pseudo-legal entity that, in investigating some nefarious conspiracy, is more effective in ruining people’s lives than in making any appreciable improvements.
* He was blacklisted within the period 1950-53 (during the McCarthy era), according to the closing title sequence.
