The Talkies / The Front
Terzian, Philip
Truddine Cafe. It wasn't a successful performance and the backers, who resembled hoodlums, were very grim when everyone gathered for a drink after the show. Forty-six and forty-seven were quiet...
...One afternoon my walk...
...Of course, it is sufficient to say that we have come full circle since then--like postwar France it turns out that we were all actually members of the Resistance, just as in later days politicians were always doubtful about Vietnam...
...took me to the large library my father had established in our new house...
...I had, in my first thirty-six months, come to love life on this street: the strolls with Nanny each afternoon, the lush evergreens on the traffic islands at Christmas time, and the constant whirl of birthday parties, sometimes, more than one on a single Saturday afternoon...
...Few people know or choose to remember the lovely, more gracious Park Avenue of the early 1970s--but for me it seems like yesterday...
...There are, of course, obligatory sub-plots, but they have the unmistakable air of having been thrown in to pad things out, in unconsciously typical Hollywood style...
...The emerging issues of the postwar period were not clear...
...The symbolism of the city also changed with time--from magical opportunity and excitement to decay and disorder...
...It never crossed our minds that the city would become a jungle...
...We never thought of ourselves as innocents...
...It may be impossible to expect movie-makers to do otherwise, particularly those personally affected...
...New York, in that interval, fitted our mood and outlook...
...Of course, she wasn't asked what would be convenient for her...
...Or, why are the victims so ostentatiously Jewish and their tormentors non-Jewish, a state of affairs that must intrigue Roy Cohn and Alger Hiss...
...When I was three years old my family moved from Park Avenue, never to return...
...This was followed by summer again...
...There has, of course, been no mention in the press of Fudd's case...
...And when I saw this film the audience tittered and chuckled hopefully throughout, grasping desperately at evey Allenism (they abound), squeezing them for what they were not...
...The move from Park Avenue left a void in my life which Lincoln Logs and Dinky J. whitney Stillman works on Park Avenue in New York, but does not live there...
...The McCarthy era, like the 1929 crash, has so conditioned our way of thinking that its details are astonishing in review...
...AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS by J. Whitney Stillman A Marxist Remembers What follow are the first-person memoirs of William Bryant Bullitt, the child Marxist, during a vital period of our nation's history--the early 1970s...
...I can remember the pleasure of curling up in my father's armchair with a heavy Das Kapital in one hand and a cool glass of chocolate milk in the other...
...And that made things seem a little bit better...
...The scripts he is supposed to have written are, of course, brilliant, and The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 15 he achieves such renown that he is ultimately hauled before a congressional investigating committee (back when such things were run by the Bad Guys) where, on behalf of his suffering acquaintances, he is uncooperative...
...It would have been nice if, after the passage of so much time, a certain maturity had held sway in the creation of this story, a sense that the lessons are sufficiently self-evident to allow the film to run its own course, and permit the creator to sculpt what a "work of art" should be, and is best able to do...
...So it is with The Front...
...Movies have not depicted contemporary history for some time--at least not in any thoughtful fashion--and a sober treatment of the early 1950s would be welcome indeed...
...Her services had at one time been useful, but now she could be discarded without inconvenience to her employers...
...But human behavior is usually a little more mysterious than The Front suggests, and motivation much more interesting...
...Nor does anyone ever bother to inquire how one man manages to churn out the effluvia of three...
...The story is its essence, and succeeds only in trivializing the subject...
...Events proceed without much explanation, minds are changed by painfully obvious incidents...
...Woody Allen plays himself, or at any rate the persona he nurtures, this time in the guise of a restaurant cashier, "fronting" for three scriptwriter friends who have been blacklisted by a television network...
...The country changed as the world changed...
...Forty-six and forty-seven were quiet years, though years of personal exploration and discovery for a new generation...
...It was clean, safe, and elegant, unmistakably the world capital in a war...
...It's like a Restoration comedy with a score by Wagner...
...The scene, of course, is New York City in the early 1950s, and the designers have gone to considerable lengths to re-create the details of the setting: the clothes, background music, furniture, television commercials, all have been faithfully imitated...
...What, too, about Elmer Fudd...
...The personal discovery process in which we had been engaged in '46 and '47 seemed trivial and irrelevant and very far away...
...Political involvement still lay in the future...
...Nanny was dismissed...
...Separating the thin layers of time and holding each up to the light, recreating a real but finite world on the basis of fragments of memory, is a task for the archaeologist of human values and feeling...
...It is silly, and hypocritical, but at least demonstrates a kind of coming to the senses...
...But we were innocent in imagining that the only battles and crises we faced were battles and crises O f literary imagination...
...Ergo, this is not a Woody Allen movie...
...Yet leafing through the pages of his books I sensed that finally here was a man who could explain what Nanny and I had been through...
...THE TALKIES by Philip Terzian The Front By their promotion shall ye know them...
...All that seemed behind us in World War II...
...reacted in surprising and varying ways: how eager we were to dance to the McCarthyite waltz, how willing to suspend judgment, discretion, rationality...
...Two characters standing on the sidewlk are photographed from afar that we may see the vintage Plymouths in the foreground...
...Then our group dispersed...
...Without resorting to liberal hyperbole it is fair to say that the nation was seized by a kind of madness, a crippling bipartisan fear of the junior senator from Wisconsin, not unlike the mouse contemplating the snake...
...The terrible ors accumulate...
...Note: This is as good a place as any to mention a persistent annoyance of historical dramas, and The Front is a typical offender...
...Whatever his peculiar fascination for the press, whatever odd cathartic he supplied for a world-weary America, we were supine under his malevolent leer...
...It is about all one can do with the bits and pieces of a past that once existed but that ks now only a collection of images...
...Walt Disney, a beloved figure to many young people, made his first fortune on the backs of the dwarf miners in Snow White...
...And yet, among all this, the solecisms...
...Besides this there was the proximity to the world's finest toy stores, such as Rappaport's and F.A.O...
...There was the whole literature of Marxism to discover and, my father having attended Harvard, our library was filled with it...
...The political views expressed by Master Bullitt are not necessarily those of the tree they are printed on...
...how revealing and saddening...
...The plot is so transparent as to be silly, an excusable offense if the film had an inquiring nature, which it does not...
...The advertisements for this ostensibly serious treatment of the era of blacklisting show a quizzical Woody Allen peering out from behind his hornrimmed glasses, inviting us to laugh...
...That's it...
...I began to overeat and go on long walks which, out of regard for the rattlesnakes native to upstate New York forests, I chose to take indoors...
...Instead, the characters are wholly onedimensional, even, to use an over.worked word, stereotypical...
...It was perhaps the most exciting period of my life...
...I found the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and my life was changed forever...
...We wrote richly symbolic poems about the skyscrapers and the cars moving through the city's streets at twilight...
...Bosco has never tasted so sweet...
...A woman producer, for example, falls in love with Allen, and how she is able to reconcile his sensitive prose with the indolent, unlettered slob that he is remains a mystery to the end...
...I could not fully comprehend all, or perhaps any, of the passages in Marx...
...The idea of attending a 16 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977...
...At first I considered resisting my parents' plans...
...what is there cannot support what's missing...
...The Front is not a funny movie, nor is its subject funny even in retrospect...
...there isn't any more...
...One of the most gifted actors of his day, he represented in his roles the working masses, continually exploited by the idle class...
...They are paraded on and off the screen in soldierly drill: the ambitious man wrestling with the remnants of his conscience, the martyred family man, the courageous woman who sees through the shame of it all, the silkenvoiced shyster lawyer, the idiot antiCommunist merchant (whom I nearly expected to refer to "Communist preverts...
...wrecked world...
...It was not long afterward teat I decided to devote the rest of my life to the cause of Marxist-Leninism...
...Certain characters are such awkward symbols that it would have been better to hang signs around their necks and save dialogue...
...However, the studio chiefs finally caught on and today Fudd cannot find a job in the film industry...
...Instead, The Front demonstrates the age-old inclination for revenge, the reduction of a complex matter to a simpleminded passion play...
...For a brief time, New York had a special magic...
...II My Marxist-Leninist studies came to a halt that fall when I was enrolled--without consultation or explanation--in the nursery program at New Windsor Country Day...
...toys could not seem to fill...
...Woody Allen claims he has yet to "find himself" but nonetheless enjoys a good "relationship" with the girl--latterday phrases if ever there were...
...And we weren't, in the sense that our minds were influenced by the symbolic literature we admired so much and that many of us had our skills sharpened by very able refugee teachers from Europe...
...I was looking for anything which would take my mind from the broad boulevard that had until recently been home...
...Or, why is the network so eager to do the bidding of a professional blacklister...
...Bright young people could dream of careers as poets, playwrights, and novelists, not imagining the strife and divisions ahead...
...And therein lies a tale...
...And like all subject peoples Americans Philip Terzian is assistant production manager at The New Republic...
...At the same time my new political consciousness forced me into an agonizing reappraisal of much that I had previously taken for granted...
...It is twentyfive years ago and the men are wearing sideburns, their hair tumbling over their ears...
...Hostess Twinkies, I discovered, are manufactured by ITF, which murdered Allende and installed the fascist Pinochet regime in Chile...
...Autumn followed summer and turned into winter, which became spring...
...Woody Allen is customarily very funny...
...Schwartz--neither more than a brief taxi ride away...
...We were intent upon the city's splendor, especially those of us who were writers...
Vol. 10 • January 1977 • No. 4
