The Front

The Front is a 1976 American comedy-drama directed and produced by Martin Ritt and written by Walter Bernstein, in which a small-time New York cashier and bookie lends his name to blacklisted television writers during the McCarthy era and is eventually called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).^{1 • 2} It was made by people who had lived through the blacklist themselves: Ritt, Bernstein, and several of its actors had been blacklisted in the early 1950s.¹

The blacklist background

The film is set against the Hollywood blacklist, the period after HUAC's 1947 investigation of communist influence in the film industry when writers, actors, and directors suspected of Communist leanings could not work under their own names.¹ The practice of using surrogates and phony names to keep working became the basis of the film's premise.¹⁰ The Toronto Film Society's notes observe that the blacklist was almost impossible to fight as an individual, because no one in authority would admit it existed, and the networks and studios went along with it because that was easier than resisting.³

Personal history. Ritt and Bernstein had wanted for years to make such a film, but studios would not touch the subject, and without a star the project was considered hopeless; Woody Allen, then less famous than he would shortly become, was a personal friend of Bernstein's and sympathetic to the blacklistees.^{9 • 11} Studio resistance gave way only in 1975, when they went to David Begelman, head of Columbia, who had once been their agent.^{12 • 13}

The film opens with an almost literal re-enactment of a conversation by the three principal writers of the television series You Are There, all of them blacklistees writing behind pseudonyms and looking for a front, though Allen's protagonist is more naive than the stand-ins of the time.⁹ Hecky Brown's fate draws on two sources: partly Mostel's own experience, and partly that of Philip Loeb, co-star of The Molly Goldberg program, who in 1955, after years of unemployment, persecution, the death of his wife, and his son's breakdown, took his own life.^{9 • 2} The scene in which Hecky appears before the "Freedom Information Service" is drawn from Mostel's own televised 1955 HUAC appearance, where he answered questions with comic routines and gave the committee no information, invoking the Fifth Amendment by holding up his right hand and wiggling five fingers.²

Production

Principal photography began on 15 September 1975 in New York City and continued for eleven weeks, with locations including the Cloisters Museum gardens, a sailing pond in Central Park, the Plaza Hotel, Grand Central Station, the RCA Building, PJ Murphy's restaurant, the Argosy Book Store, and Brown's Resort in the Catskill Mountains.¹ Michael Chapman was the cinematographer and Sidney Levin the editor.¹ The film marked the theatrical feature debut of Andrea Marcovicci.¹ For Allen, it was a new direction: his first straight dramatic role, which Ritt hoped would bring the history to audiences unaware of the period.³ The end credits begin by identifying the six blacklisted cast and crew members, each credit followed by the year blacklisting took effect.¹

Reception and awards

Bernstein's screenplay received an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, and Mostel received a BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actor; Marcovicci was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Acting Debut in a Motion Picture, Female, and the National Board of Review named the film one of 1976's Top Ten.^{4 • 1}

Critical response was mixed. Roger Ebert, writing in October 1976, called the film the victim of its own publicity and argued that it abandoned the blacklist theme to follow Allen's personal rise and fall, while singling out Mostel's performance as Hecky Green as the element that told viewers what they needed to know about the blacklist's effect on people's lives.¹⁴ Time Out was harsher, calling it "an empty monument to the senility of American liberalism" and arguing that the film, though made by blacklist survivors, pulled its political punches.^{5 • 15} Vincent Canby of The New York Times gave it 3.5 of 5, writing that it "recreates the awful noise of ignorance that can still be heard".⁵ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 67% Tomatometer from 27 reviews and a 73% audience score from more than 2,500 ratings.⁵

A recurring critical observation is the film's tonal balance. Reviewers of the 2025 4K release note that it resists easy categorization, not severe enough for pure drama and not consistently funny enough for comedy, with Mostel's heightened tragic performance set against Allen's deliberately subdued, ordinary persona.^{8 • 16} The same reviewers credit the firsthand experience of its makers with giving the film a weight it might not otherwise have.¹⁶

Later availability

Sony Pictures released the film on Digital and DVD, and a 4K UHD Blu-ray edition appeared with a Dolby Vision HDR transfer and a legacy audio commentary featuring Andrea Marcovicci with film historians Nick Redman and Julie Kirgo.^{7 • 8} The film was also screened at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in 2005.⁹

References

1. The Front (1976), AFI Catalog of Feature Films
2. Review of The Front, The Young Spartacus (December 1976), Marxists Internet Archive
3. The Front (1976), film notes, Toronto Film Society
4. The Front (1976), Awards, IMDb
5. The Front, Rotten Tomatoes
6. THE FRONT: Bleaklist, Richard Schickel, TIME (October 11, 1976)
7. THE FRONT, Sony Pictures Entertainment
8. The Front 50th Anniversary 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray review, High-Def Digest
9. The Front, film archive description, Jewish Film Institute
10. The Hollywood Blacklist (PDF), libcom.org
11. Under Fire, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine
12. CINEMA
13. An Interview with Walter Bernstein, todlippy.com
14. The Front (1976), review by Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
15. The Front, Time Out film review
16. THE FRONT (1976) in 4K UHD, Films in Review

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of the 1970s › Released 1970 to 1976

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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