If there's an entertaining way of looking at the late Forties' Communist witchhunts and their effect on those artists pulled into their web, chewed over and spat out into oblivion, then writer Michael Eaton comes close to it here. Ron Silver plays a blacklisted writer, an ex-Communist sympathiser forced to flee America sans famille before he can be sub-poena'd to testify about his affiliations and associates. In Britain, he does pretty well for himself, quickly sliding into the bed of his best friend's ex-mistress (Stubbs) and getting a job as a writer (under a pseudonym) on TV's Robin Hood. But old ghosts return to haunt him ... . . The back-and-forth flashback structure works to surprising effect, the settings are well in period, be it 1943, 1947 or 1954 and the performances, especially Travanti's, flesh out the characters nicely. The Robin Hood interludes look very much like the real thing, with Silver's vengeful bile for past wrongs occasionally spilling out amusingly in scenes that will never see the light of screen.

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