THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
NIT WORK THE SCREEN As ousted news chief Max Schumacher (William Holden) is walking out on mistress-producer Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), he observes that his departure is just the final...
...Knowing what we do today, we can see that there was only one thing to be then, the thing Woody always is: a loser...
...The reason we can no longer take seriously the ideological wars of the fifties is that it's apparent to us that the institutions which waged them were all corrupt, no matter which side they were on...
...It is the whole idea of politics...
...Max is also our boy, our hero, because he gets fired from his job and never can do anything about it...
...In like manner, when he at last refuses to testify before HUAC, Howard becomes heroic not because he has stood up to the Committee, but because he has turned his back on TV, success, etc...
...But then, you must keep in mind that these are both movies about the television industry...
...Howard's submissiveness at this moment is a fitting image for the political wisdom our movies so often contain...
...Its message must be, as in The Front, that the only possible heroism is to take it in the neck...
...In contrast to everyone else's clothes, Woody Allen's two-button suit with wide lapels is distinctly contemporary...
...This kind of moral transference, which Camus rendered absurd, is a code that soap opera in all its forms takes very seriously...
...The preoccupation of each is absolutely fake...
...Once Howard has admitted to Florence that he's a front, she can love him again, not because he has told the truth but because he has revealed himself to be a nudnik...
...He rents a hotel suite just for the occasion and clowns for the bellboys before taking the plunge...
...It is not just an international Communist conspiracy that is being made preposterous in this ending, or even TV's exploitation of such a bugaboo...
...Thus, where Network makes the consequences of politics into something preposterous, The Front makes them into something ludicrous...
...And like his clothes, his heroism is out of place in the early fifties...
...This is a quality Howard in The Front shares with Max in Network...
...He's today's culture hero, an utter schlemiel, a man whose heroism lies precisely in the fact that he has no talent, no courage, nothing...
...What is more, the joke tends to become most intense at those moments when the tragedy should be greatest, as when Hecky jumps out the window...
...The reason these two wear clothes appropriate to the times-taffeta petticoats, three-button suits with narrow lapels, and argyle socks-is that both are very dated characters...
...As a comparison of these men's deaths shows, too, the movies in which they occur are completely like-minded in their preoccupation with politics...
...His hero, you may recall, is brought to trial for killing an Arab, but found guilty because he behaved callously at his mother's funeral...
...He becomes Messianic during his final appearances on the air, and Diana, realizing the potential of Messianism in news, talks the network into keeping him on...
...They are the anti-Communist lawyer who persecutes everyone and Florence (Andrea Mar-covicci), Howard's girlfriend who resigns a good job at the network to devote herself to exposing the blacklist policy...
...But what really pushes Hecky out that window isn't his persecution by red-baiters...
...His behavior, like his suit, has a certain timelessness that transcends ideology...
...This is essentially what Howard does when he appears before HUAC...
...It is interesting, however, the way that Max's self-evaluation applies to Martin Ritt's new film, The Front, as well...
...It must teach passivity rather than political action...
...To be a popular art in this country, art must be safe...
...The writers Howard fronts for, who really do have talent, could never be the heroes of this film...
...Hecky has to jump out that window not in unjust atonement to the Committee for being pink, but in atonement to us for having gone through Howard's desk...
...With this remark Sidney Lumet's Network leaves itself so open, I don't think I need to lay a glove on it...
...Having passed through assorted trials by fire, and perished, Howard is a man Florence can accept for himself-or rather, his non-self-as he's carted off helplessly to jail...
...NIT WORK THE SCREEN As ousted news chief Max Schumacher (William Holden) is walking out on mistress-producer Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), he observes that his departure is just the final episode in a TV series...
...Being about the early fifties, The Front is in effect a costume drama...
...it's the offense he commits against the film's hero, Howard Prince (Woody Allen), when he agrees in a weak moment to cooperate with HUAC by spying on Howard...
...Here too we have the feeling we are watching network pulp: a TV movie, a few episodes from a series, installments in a soap opera called As the World Burns...
...The real conspiracy uncovered in these films is television itself...
...It is quite right that his whole role in this story should be that of an impostor, a front, because he is fronting for something-for the values of our own times...
...He is the man who fires Hecky, not out of any conviction about Communism, but just to protect the network...
...Where the real writer gets an ulcer, Howard gets the girl...
...Fired because of low ratings, Beale freaks out...
...The star of his own series in the early 1950s, Hecky suddenly finds himself blacklisted because he once marched on May Day, and in the end he jumps out a hotel window...
...Consider for instance the death of TV comic Hecky Brown (Zero Mostel) in The Front...
...The same thing happens in The Front...
...The best of them (Michael Murphy) ends up in the hospital with an ulcer, thus proving that talent and success, even surreptitious success, are corrupting...
...with Allen and Mostel as the stars it is essentially a comedy...
...yet, only two characters are really in costume...
...So Diana calls in a hit from the technical advisers on another show she has developed, a weekly series about left-wing terrorism, and has Beale assassinated right on the air one night...
...In fact, one reason why The Front can't seem to deal with the political issues of the fifties is that neither Communism nor anti-Communism now seems so subversive to the filmmakers as television itself does...
...He is, once again, Camus's stranger without the irony...
...Hecky's death has its counterpart in Network in the death of Howard Beale (Peter Finch), a TV news anchorman...
...Each was written by a television malcontent- Network by Paddy Chayevsky and The Front by Walter Bernstein, who was among the writers blacklisted-so it's not surprising each turns out like a first-hand account of Jimmy Carter's inauguration written by Gerald Ford...
...It must be soothing rather than inciting...
...In The Front there is actually a dress code of sorts that telegraphs the moral code by which history is judged...
...On the other hand, the big executive producer, Sussman (Herschel Bernardi), wears double-breasted suits right for the fifties, but equally right for today too...
...It is the threat against which the films are warning us to be ceaselessly vigilant...
...Like the Stranger, he is accused of one thing, and condemned for another...
...Beale ends where poor Hecky begins: as a (so to speak) dupe of the international Communist conspiracy...
...Soap opera of this sort is like Camus's The Stranger without Camus's irony...
...Howard Prince in The Front, indeed Woody Allen in general, embodies this disbelief of ours...
...Despite the fact that The Front is supposedly a memorial to victims of the blacklist (and had its premiere as a benefit for A.C.L.U...
...The only problem is that once he has founded his church, a prophet is usually more trouble than he's worth...
...As heroine and villain, they are passe...
...Only losers are redeemed in our eyes since only they, by virtue of their exclusion, can be free from guilt...
...Thereby freed from all accomplishments and ambitions, he becomes someone worthy of Florence's love (and someone lovable...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Finally, giving us the ultimate high sign such heroism can have, he loses interest in trying to do anything about it...
Vol. 103 • December 1976 • No. 25
