The second feature film, following The Front by fifteen years, to treat of the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s. (That's not counting indirect, veiled, metaphorical treatments like Elia Kazan's apologia on the virtues of becoming an informer, On the Waterfront.) Room remains for many other treatments, though we cannot have an acceptable one, much less an ideal one, unless the stigmatized moviemakers are properly identified as Leftists, whether or not official card-carriers, and unless their persecutors are portrayed as having some other purpose in life, some other motivation for their actions, than simply to be the liberal's boogeymen. The present treatment is not acceptable on either count. By depoliticizing the hero (Robert De Niro, with a sufficiently Bohemian haircut), it shrinks down into little more than a wrong-man plot. And Irwin Winkler, the veteran producer turned novice writer-director, both slows down and speeds up the hero's agony, inexplicably postponing his date with HUAC while madly accelerating his descent into Career Hell. The kind of injustice we're supposed to be addressing here is bigger in scope than just a false accusation. If he's not the right man, he can't as meaningfully stand up for what is. Annette Bening, George Wendt. (1991) — Duncan Shepherd
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