Thursday, January 20, 2011, 7:00 PM
(English) 90 minutes
The Front
The Front, the Festival’s first film retrospective, is a 1976 film about the blacklist during the age of live television written by Walter Bernstein, directed by Martin Ritt and starring Woody Allen and Zero Mostel. Because of the blacklist, a number of artists, writers, directors and others were rendered unemployable, having been accused of subversive political activities in support of communism or of actually being communists themselves. Howard Prince (Woody Allen), an apolitical man who needs money, agrees to become a front, signing his name to scripts submitted to a television network. Combining comedy and pathos, the film enlightens the viewer to the emotional consequences of blacklisting.