- by Graham Holton
- The Guardian
- Issue #2203
The Front (1976), starring Woody Allen
Fifty years on, The Front (1976), starring Woody Allen, is especially relevant with the Trump administration’s crackdown on freedoms taken for granted in the United States.
The film is set in 1953 at the height of the anti-Communist investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and McCarthyism, which ruined careers, broke relationships, and led to actors moving to Europe, abandoning their careers or even committing suicide. Actors, writers and directors who were ‘blacklisted’ were practically unable to work.
In The Front, television screenwriter Alfred Miller is blacklisted for showing pro-Communist sympathies, and cannot find work. He asks small-time bookie Howard Prince (Allen) to put his name to scripts for TV for a consideration.
Soon other blacklisted writers use Howard as a front. Fame goes to Howard’s head, and he starts putting on airs, much to the annoyance of the genuine creatives he’s helping out.
Howard is soon investigated by the “Freedom Information Services” and he’s subpoenaed by the congressional committee investigating alleged Communist influence in entertainment, to testify before HUAC. Will he turn the writers in, or show some unexpected backbone?
The film shows how political repression does not need a government to formally ban ideas or curb free speech. Fear, employment pressure, denunciation, and institutional self-censorship do that successfully.
Political repression doesn’t require everyone to support the regime – only to fear it. McCarthyism succeeded because people were afraid of association. To work it required corporate capitalism’s cooperation. Hollywood studios, television networks, producers and employers participated because they considered cooperation safer than resistance.
The Front demonstrates that Marxist concepts of labour apply to intellectual and cultural production. The workers are writers, who possess skills and imagination, but have no control over the conditions under which their work is produced. Their labour power is valuable to TV companies, but political authorities and employers determine whether they are permitted to sell it.
In the so-called ‘land of the free’ political associations are dangerous, and employers can dismiss workers while claiming they are protecting themselves. People start to police themselves. The blacklist destroys class solidarity by making workers suspicious of one another. In the paranoid anti-communist US of 1953, ideology becomes a moral panic. Repression does not need to imprison everyone. People discipline themselves.
When The Front was made, the US public assumed that McCarthyism was in the past. In this context Trump’s attacks on media organisations, universities, government employees and cultural institutions gain increased relevance.
Even before Trump started blaming everything on communism, the far-right movement he represents set out to intimidate cultural workers, with some success.
The important question isn’t simply whether someone is formally censored. It is whether people begin anticipating punishment and modify their behaviour accordingly.
In 2025, the American Broadcasting Company suspended Jimmy Kimmel, after political pressure from the administration, following his comments about the murder of Charlie Kirk. Trump publicly celebrated his suspension and called for other TV programs critical of his administration to be removed. After Trump’s second election, the owner of the Washington Post declared that his opinion pages would be about “personal liberties and free markets.”
As Trump continually tests the boundaries of his presidential power, many have folded rather than confront him. This makes The Front very relevant today.
