Not since Chaplin's A King In New York had there been a theatrical feature film which attacked the House Un-American Activities Committee, and certainly never one in this country. The Front is both an entertaining and serious film, a comedy-drama which, as Andrew Sarris wrote in The Village Voice, "takes dead aim at the television blacklisters of the 1950s and shoots loads of buckshot at these baddies. Director Martin Ritt and scenarist Walter Bernstein know whereof they speak when they reenact the era of Joe McCarthy and his minions. Ritt and Bernstein were themselves blacklisted at the time, along with cast members Zero Mostel, Herschel Bernardi, Joshua Shelley and Lloyd Gough. Woody Allen, who clearly sympathizes with the sufferings of this period, plays the 'front' who peddles scripts by blacklisted writers to the unsuspecting networks.... The Front deserves a great deal of credit for having been done at all."