Screenwriter blacklisted in
Hollywood for leftwing sympathies who based The Front on his own experiencesIn Martin Ritt’s 1976 film The Front, Woody Allen plays an unassuming dolt who agrees to pose as the author of scripts written by blacklisted victims of the anti-communist McCarthy witch-hunts, which resulted in the hearings of the Huac (House Un-American Activities committee). Ritt himself was a survivor of the blacklist, as were several of his cast members, including the
Actor Zero Mostel and the film’s writer, Walter Bernstein, who based the Oscar-nominated screenplay on his own experiences.
Bernstein, who has died aged 101, joined the Young Communist League at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in 1937 and the Communist party shortly after the second world war. His membership lasted until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The initial blacklist, of the so-called Hollywood Ten, occurred in 1947 when his screenwriting career was just starting. “I never thought it was going to affect me,” he told the Television Academy Foundation. “I was too respectable, too accepted.”