Word: mosteller
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...counter-plotting all the moves to freedom. His role is the centerpiece of the musical, and he adds direction and keeps the musical teetering somewhere out on the brink, where, of course, it is supposed to be. The trouble with doing Forum is that the shadow of Zero Mostel looms over this central part like a chicken hawk over the barnyard, ready to swoop down on young actors. Zax stacks up--he won't make anybody forget Mostel, but he will make a lot of people laugh...
...chance to show a class of Martians any ten American comedies, this would be included in the green syllabus because, as Alex Haley might point out, of its roots. Like tumescent udders (ech!) Mel Brooks's toors hang, full of borscht and seltzer while the crazed milkmaids Mostel, Wilder, Dick Shawn and Kenneth Mars squeeze and squeeze and squeeze. So much of the American comic strain flows through this film that it makes a pallid commentary like Bob Fosse's Lenny a misrepresentation. That movie tried to deal with other, broader things, not what Lenny lived for; this does...
...stretches and sprawls and sometimes the interviews just go flat. But it is by far the best work done on the ugly little freak blacklist, and it is hard to imagine anybody attempting to match the ambitious perspective of Hollywood on Trial. It pulls in Herbert Hoover and Zero Mostel. Joseph McCarthy and Walt Disney, and although it doesn't have the footwork some documentaries do, it is an impressive mosaic...
Before long, Allen is fronting for more than one talented writer. Then come the investigators. The witch-hunters just cannot believe that a scriptwriter this skillful has not committed an investigatable offense. Along the way Allen becomes involved with a comic named Hecky Brown (Zero Mostel), whose career is destroyed by the witch-hunters and who then destroys himself. Allen's consciousness (and his conscience) have been steadily expanding. In the end, he heroically-and funnily -defies the congressional committee that tries to pry from him at least a few suspect names...
Blacklist Victims. The Front's scriptwriter, its director and one star (Zero Mostel) were themselves victims of the blacklist. Despite many virtues, however, the picture seems thin and schematic. Part of the problem lies in the fact that many of the incidents used in the story are taken directly from history. Whether they seem familiar or not, they are never as fully developed as they might have been in a documentary film, nor as fully digested as they should have been by any first-class dramatist. An even more serious flaw, however, is the fact that not a single...