Unlikely Hero, Guaranteed Villain

Have you been to your local cinema lately? If you go, as I did last dollar night, looking for “entertainment,” you may hear, just as the lights go down, a very smooth voice, with just a touch of pain in it, asking: “What would you think of a country in which the best writers were not allowed to write, the best actors not allowed to act, and the best comedians not allowed to make the people laugh?” Short pause. “It happened. The country was America. The year was 1953.”

And before you can ask that very smooth voice with just a touch of pain in it to hold on a minute, before you can ask which “best” writers weren’t allowed to write, before you can begin to recall what Hemingway, Faulkner, James Agee, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and even Ezra Pound were busy turning out in just that year, the face of one of America’s “best” writers appears on the screen: it’s Woody Allen, starring as “America’s Most Unlikely Hero,” in The Front, a movie about America’s Solzhenitsyns, those great writers who were “innocent victims” of the cruel McCarthy era. And this is just a preview. If you then go, as I did, to see Marathon Man, which reviewers are calling the greatest thriller in years, then your re-education has really begun.

GY

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George M. Young Jr.

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Have you been to your local cinema lately? If you go, as I did last dollar night, looking for “entertainment,” you may hear, just as the lights go down, a very smooth voice, with just a touch of pain in it, asking: “What would you think of a country in which the best writers were not allowed to write, the best actors not allowed to act, and the best comedians not allowed to make the people laugh?” Short pause. “It happened. The country was America. The year was 1953.”

And before you can ask that very smooth voice with just a touch of pain in it to hold on a minute, before you can ask which “best” writers weren’t allowed to write, before you can begin to recall what Hemingway, Faulkner, James Agee, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and even Ezra Pound were busy turning out in just that year, the face of one of America’s “best” writers appears on the screen: it’s Woody Allen, starring as “America’s Most Unlikely Hero,” in The Front, a movie about America’s Solzhenitsyns, those great writers who were “innocent victims” of the cruel McCarthy era. And this is just a preview. If you then go, as I did, to see Marathon Man, which reviewers are calling the greatest thriller in years, then your re-education has really begun.