One of the most vicious forms of blacklisting in the cinema's history was the list compiled by the House of Un-American Activities Committee in the years following the war.

It put thousands of actors, writers, directors and technicians alleged to have had connections with Communism in trouble, in prison, or just plain out of work.

Star Woody Allen takes a straight role - although fragments of the Allen comedy persona keep breaking in, like Hyde occasionally getting the better of Jekyll - as a man who 'fronts' for three blacklisted writers, that is, they all work under his name.

It may give you quite an insight into the things that went on at the time (even a funeral is spied on to discern who the deceased Communist-sympathiser's friends were).

But it's probably to the film's disadvantage that it was made by a writer and director (Walter Bernstein, Martin Ritt) who were themselves blacklisted.

Perhaps they don't have as clear a perspective as they might on how this should work as a film.

Never mind, Zero Mostel gives his best performance in many a day as an actor who finds even nightclub fees cut in half after suspicion clouds his horizon.