The Front is an exceedingly competent film with a sturdy script and a fine sense of morality decades after the blacklist tore Hollywood and American society writ large apart. It's hard for me to conjure too much to say about The Front even though the HUAC hearings and the blacklist are a personal source of fascination in Hollywood history. Many of the creatives who worked on this film were themselves caught up in the blacklist that by the 1970s felt like a black mark on the film industry, swept up in the conservative paranoia of Joseph McCarthy and his ilk and leaving dozens of lives ruined in its wake. There's a lot to admire about The Front: the character of Hecky is a great source of pathos in the film as he finds himself in a downward spiral once he's named and let go from his job; the cinematography captures such rich images of midcentury New York; there's a few really great emotional spots or questions the film dwells on in the second half. But there's always a sense that it never really commits to one mode or take on the blacklist other than its effects on those unfairly maligned by it. It's a film that politically assumes you've done all the hard work coming in of knowing all this background information and then leaves its own statements to be implications or disregarded entirely. There's no real juice in this film even when it feels like there should be something beneath everything pushing us forward to the admittedly wonderful ending. I can see bits and pieces of this film working for me but on the whole its ambitions never rise to be anything other than good enough.
The Front is an exceedingly competent film with a sturdy script and a fine sense of morality decades after the blacklist tore Hollywood and American society writ large apart. It's hard for me to conjure too much to say about The Front even though the HUAC hearings and the blacklist are a personal source of fascination in Hollywood history. Many of the creatives who worked on this film were themselves caught up in the blacklist that by the 1970s felt like a black mark on the film industry, swept up in the conservative paranoia of Joseph McCarthy and his ilk and leaving dozens of lives ruined in its wake. There's a lot to admire about The Front: the character of Hecky is a great source of pathos in the film as he finds himself in a downward spiral once he's named and let go from his job; the cinematography captures such rich images of midcentury New York; there's a few really great emotional spots or questions the film dwells on in the second half. But there's always a sense that it never really commits to one mode or take on the blacklist other than its effects on those unfairly maligned by it. It's a film that politically assumes you've done all the hard work coming in of knowing all this background information and then leaves its own statements to be implications or disregarded entirely. There's no real juice in this film even when it feels like there should be something beneath everything pushing us forward to the admittedly wonderful ending. I can see bits and pieces of this film working for me but on the whole its ambitions never rise to be anything other than good enough.
