This movie is mildly diverting, but it's by no means a comedy. Andrea Marcovicci's charming screen presence, and Dave Grusin's interesting music, make it palatable, but the rest of the movie is pretty heavy-handed in the message department.
We all know the story--it's become a staple of Hollywood legend, the sinister interrogators of the House Un-American Affairs Committee and the poor, victimized artists. But imagine how different contemporary attitudes about the blacklist would be had the writers been closet Nazis. Or for that matter, imagine how different the history of the world would be had all the Communists really been this nice.
The underlying controversy of the period in question was whether Communists in Hollywood used their positions to influence the content of American entertainment for the benefit of their Soviet bosses. Many would say they were just idealistic liberals, whose interest in Socialism was unrelated to their jobs as writers, directors or actors. But herein lies the irony: we're told at the end of this movie that many of the leading people involved in its making had indeed been blacklisted back in the 50's--and yet here they are making a movie whose only point is to propagandize against anti-communism. We even briefly see Communist icons Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, which I suppose was excusable before ex-Soviet sources corroborated their guilt, but it reminds us of the degree to which so many were duped.
If there's nothing else on, and you really need a TV fix, then, okay, watch the movie. But don't expect to laugh, and don't expect to learn anything.
We all know the story--it's become a staple of Hollywood legend, the sinister interrogators of the House Un-American Affairs Committee and the poor, victimized artists. But imagine how different contemporary attitudes about the blacklist would be had the writers been closet Nazis. Or for that matter, imagine how different the history of the world would be had all the Communists really been this nice.
The underlying controversy of the period in question was whether Communists in Hollywood used their positions to influence the content of American entertainment for the benefit of their Soviet bosses. Many would say they were just idealistic liberals, whose interest in Socialism was unrelated to their jobs as writers, directors or actors. But herein lies the irony: we're told at the end of this movie that many of the leading people involved in its making had indeed been blacklisted back in the 50's--and yet here they are making a movie whose only point is to propagandize against anti-communism. We even briefly see Communist icons Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, which I suppose was excusable before ex-Soviet sources corroborated their guilt, but it reminds us of the degree to which so many were duped.
If there's nothing else on, and you really need a TV fix, then, okay, watch the movie. But don't expect to laugh, and don't expect to learn anything.