William Marantz

Woody Allen was excellent (very restrained for a change) but the movie was so-so. The script was fatuous. We were expected to believe: 1. That the Woody Allen character could “front” for 3 different television writers, who all sold scripts to the small TV drama department of the same network, without anyone getting wise. 2. That he could be living like a king on 10% of these writers' fees, of $750 to $1000 per script. Even if each writer sold 1 script a month, for 12 months of the year, Woody’s total take would be $3,600 which is hardly big money, even by 1950’s standards. The cinematography varied from mediocre to poor. It looked like the whole movie had been shot in a television studio. The credits proclaimed that the writer (Bernstein), Director (Martin Ritt) and most of the lead actors (Zero Mostel, Herschel Bernardi) were, in fact, blacklisted. It reminded me of a Woody Allen line in the movie, explaining why he refused to front for a lousy writer: “It’s not enough just to be blacklisted.” (Dwight MacDonald made a similar comment about the enthusiastic reception the work of mediocre blacklisted writers got, once the ban was lifted). The one good thing about the movie is that it didn’t portray these guys as innocent victims of “Red hysteria"; they really were Communist sympathizers.