Tag Archives: Woody Allen

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Blu-ray Review: “The Front” (1976)

Front

Since his directorial debut in 1969, Woody Allen has rarely appeared in movies he himself did not at least write. A rare exception was The Front (1976), a comedy-drama made by his regular producers, Jack Rollins (nearly 99 today!) and the late Charles H. Joffe. It proved a very worthwhile project, a movie about, directed, written, and co-starring real-life victims of the Blacklist. The film strikes a somewhat uneasy balance tailoring its script, somewhat, to Allen’s familiar screen persona with fact-based anecdotes and even a few autobiographical ones.

At the time of the film’s release, victims of the Blacklist had been able to work openly for only the past decade or so, the House Un-American Activities Committee having only been abolished the year before, and then as now attitudes toward American Communists or communist sympathizers remain divided. But for those unaware of how talented (and predominantly Jewish) artists were tragically and unjustly treated, The Front is like a crash course in dark period of American history.

Twilight Time’s Blu-ray of this Columbia release is exceptionally good. The film had always looked pretty grainy in previous home video incarnations, but their disc is almost impressively clean and includes a couple of good extra features.

Lowly cashier and small-time bookie Howard Prince (Allen) is approached by school chum Alfred Miller (Michael Murphy, Manhattan), who needs a “front” so that the blacklisted television dramatist can continue to support himself. Offering a percentage of his writing income, Miller has Prince present himself to the network as a talented new writer. Miller’s teleplays, submitted under Prince’s name, impress drama anthology producer Phil Sussman (Herschel Bernardi) and script editor Florence Barrett (Andrea Marcovicci). Prince hits on Florence, already dating somebody else, but through the tenderness and insight of “Prince’s” scripts she gradually finds herself drawn to the supposed scribe. So in demand are Prince’s teleplays he agrees to front two more blacklisted writers (one played by Lloyd Gough), which in turn gets Prince out of perennial debt.

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Meanwhile, the anthology show’s serio-comic host, comic Hecky Brown (Zero Mostel) runs afoul of the network after his past participation in Communist meetings is exposed by Freedom Information Services, an organization pattered after Red Channels. Sussman is forced to fire Hecky (while vehemently denying his past political associations is the reason) and the comic is forced to accept a low-paying gig in the Catskills, where the hotel owner, taking advantage of Hecky’s inability to otherwise work, blatantly short-changes his previously agreed-upon fee.

The Front is unusual in the way it grafts something like a typical Woody Allen movie (the schlemiel seducing a beautiful woman with his self-deprecating humor, the Bob Hope comedy-influenced ruse constantly in danger of completely unraveling) with a straightforward dramatization of how the Blacklist operated and its devastating impact on its victims. Allen’s performance isn’t great; he’s a bit awkward in the straight dramatic scenes especially, though for the most part he’s okay. He’s also playing against type insofar as he’s playing a three-time loser: a bookie who can’t pay his debts, and a “nearly-illiterate” and apolitical working class New Yorker.

But as a primer on the Blacklist, particularly in terms of its impact on New York-based network television, The Front is all aces.  The end credits, in which director Martin Ritt, screenwriter Walter Bernstein, and actors Mostel, Bernardi, Gough, and Joshua Shelley (as Sam) are listed alongside the year in which they were blacklisted, validates everything that came before, and usually startles first-time viewers of the film.

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Bernstein’s Oscar-nominated screenplay draws on real events. The three writers Allen’s character fronts for were based on Bernstein, Abraham Polonsky, and Arnold Manoff, while Mostel’s character is a composite of Philip Loeb, co-star of the early television comedy-drama The Goldbergs, and Mostel himself. Hecky’s humiliating weekend in the Catskills happened for real to Mostel after he was blacklisted and it’s easy to read a kind of post-traumatic rage in his performance of those scenes. Myriad other moments, from Prince’s complaints that one writer’s latest work isn’t up to snuff to a gas company’s complain about a concentration camp script (it’ll give gas a bad name) likewise really happened.

And humiliation is mostly what The Front is about: pressure from sadistic (and frequently anti-Semite) people in power to pressure the helpless into untenable name-naming, of surrendering friends and colleagues whose political leanings are already known. The Front lays bare this raw bitterness, taking form as a kind of glorious revenge film.

Twilight Time’s Blu-ray of this 1.85:1 release is positively pristine, with no signs at all of age-related wear or damage, and on larger monitors and screens it’s fascinating to looks at this sometimes anachronistic ‘70s depiction of early-1950s New York. The audio, DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 English, with optional English subtitles, is also good considering its monophonic limitations.

The disc includes an audio commentary featuring Marcovicci and Twilight Time regulars Nick Redman and Julie Kirgo, the latter also providing the disc’s booklet essay. Also included are the original trailer and a limited isolated score (by Dave Grusin) track.

Crimes Featured

Blu-ray Review: “Crimes and Misdemeanors” (1989)

Crimes and Misdemeanors

Capping off the strongest decade of Woody Allen’s career, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) is a nearly ideal synthesis of Allen’s strengths as a writer, director and actor. That might sound strange if one considers Allen’s talents to be primarily comedic — Crimes and Misdemeanors can certainly be funny, but the humor hardly undercuts the fundamental darkness of the material.

Nevertheless, this is where it all seems to come together. Allen’s attempts at brooding, intense dramas can fall flat, particularly when he’s aping Bergman (comedic emulations of Bergman, like Deconstructing Harry, are another, more successful story). But in its riff on Dostoevsky, Crimes and Misdemeanors strikes a meaningful, weighty tone. The film also incorporates Allen’s strongest comedic tenor — wry and rueful. Allen’s documentary filmmaker character isn’t radically different from any of the other men he’s played in his films, but the way he’s stymied at every turn adds an extra dimension of melancholy to his wisecracks.

Crimes and Misdemeanors is also one of the most convincing examples of Allen’s skill as a director, generally the most maligned, or at least ignored, aspect of his career. The construction of this thing is remarkably elegant, cutting back and forth between parallel stories and only gradually emphasizing the thematic similarities. One doesn’t tend to associate Allen with intricately designed visual rhymes, but here we are.

The first moral crisis we’re introduced to is that of ophthalmologist Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau), a man who should be entering into contented golden years, having achieved professional success and surrounded by a loving family. Instead, he’s forced to confront his own transgressions, brought forcefully to the forefront of his life by Dolores Paley (Anjelica Huston), a flight attendant and his mistress. The luster has worn off the affair for Judah, and Dolores, motivated by a combination of vengefulness and guilt, threatens to tell all to his wife (Claire Bloom).

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Panic-stricken, Judah contacts his brother, Jack (Jerry Orbach), who arranges for a hit man to take care of Dolores. The ensuing scene is disturbingly matter-of-fact; there’s a methodical, almost banal quality to it that makes a woman’s murder seem like the most ordinary thing in the world. Later, Judah visits her apartment to recover some incriminating evidence, and the scene strikes a similar tone, flatly showing Dolores’s lifeless body and Judah’s understated reaction. His subsequent mood is far more distraught, but that owes more to his newfound conception of himself rather than her murder. The moral inquiry that proceeds from here is hilariously self-focused, an existential crisis that’s completely crass in its dismissal of the value of someone else’s life.

Allen crosscuts this story with Cliff Stern’s (Allen himself), a filmmaker who longs to make important, serious documentaries, but has to settle for a puff piece on his TV producer brother-in-law, Lester (Alan Alda) to pay the bills. Lester is comically pompous, but Cliff isn’t much better in the self-awareness department, cutting together a pathetic attempt to embarrass Lester and clumsily pursuing Halley Reed (Mia Farrow), the producer on the project.

Like many an Allen protagonist, Cliff can be charmingly self-effacing, with his Indian takeout and Singin’ in the Rain on 16mm, but he also overestimates himself. The scene in which he learns the subject of his passion project has died and decides to make a pass at Halley is painful. Never mind the fact that Cliff is married, however unhappily to Wendy (Joanna Gleeson). Here’s another character whose thoughts turn only to himself in moments of crisis.

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Allen’s playful interrogation of his characters’ moral fiber and the audience’s perception of that morality makes for a rich work. Where on the spectrum of right and wrong do these characters’ actions fall, and does it even really matter? Happiness doesn’t seem to have much correlation with morality, as Allen underlines in the film’s final scene when Judah and Cliff’s storylines finally intersect, and the two men share a moment of reflection. In Allen’s conception of the world, there’s hardly a clear-cut answer, but at least we have laughter, even if it’s of the bitter type.

After a run of decent-to-strong Woody Allen Blu-ray releases, it appears Fox/MGM is unfortunately getting out of the game of distributing his catalog titles on Blu-ray, handing Crimes and Misdemeanors and the forthcoming Broadway Danny Rose (and let’s be honest — probably a number of others) off to Twilight Time. Aside from Twilight Time’s signature extra, this is virtually identical to what Fox/MGM would have given us — only at twice the price. Oh well.

The 1080p, 1.85:1 transfer is similar to what we’ve seen on the previous Allen Blu-rays. Detail levels are solid, the image is reasonably clean and clarity represents a nice improvement over the DVD, even if it’s not mind-blowing. Grain is cleanly rendered, offering a fairly film-like appearance. Sven Nykvist’s slightly burnished cinematography is appealingly presented; autumnal browns are warm without looking oversaturated. A few speckles pop up here and there, but aren’t too concerning. Digital tampering doesn’t appear to be an issue. The 1.0 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack presents the classical and jazz tunes clearly, while dialogue is adequately clean.

Allen’s home video releases are almost always essentially barebones, and this one is no different. Twilight Time includes the usual music and effects track, but this seems even less useful than usual, as the film doesn’t possess a traditional score. The original theatrical trailer is also included, along with a booklet with an essay by Julie Kirgo.

 

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor, the Twilight Time’s Titus Blu-ray rates:

The Film (out of ****): ***1/2

Film Elements Sourced: ***

Video Transfer: ***

Audio: ***

New Extra Features: *

Extra Features Overall: *

 

Twilight Time

1989 / Color / 1.85:1 / 104 min / $29.95

 

Dusty Somers is a Seattle-based writer and editor who splits his critical ambitions between writing Blu-ray & DVD reviews and theater criticism. He’s a member of the Online Film Critics Society and Seattle Theater Writers.