Rhapsodies

For this week I did the second of my “forgotten Oscars” selection though in this case, neither of these films are anything that I would call “forgotten” since 1976 was probably the best year for film for a long time before and after and I’m just a little embarrassed that I’ve never seen either of these before.

The first of the two “All The President’s Men” tells the true story of Watergate (give or take a few embellishments) and the newsmen who let us know it. This in mind is very close to being a perfect film, my only real nitpick being where they chose to actually end the film, though the one they chose, Nixon’s second inauguration playing on the television while Woodward and Bernstein work on their next story, works as well as any other.

I’ve always enjoyed procedural dramas be they police or legal… All the President’s Men, I believe is the first time I’ve ever seen a Journalistic procedural. Our two protagonists,  Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward played brilliantly by  Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman have to comb through a ton of extraneous data and seemingly endless number of interviews.

This is a smart movie and it assumes you the viewers are intelligent too and expect you to notice the tiny bits of data or hear the slip of the tongue of an obstructive interviewee, and rewards you for paying attention.

Finally, I find it very interesting how our public perceptions of a film are different from the film itself. In this case, I’d always imagined Deep Throat as being someone like the Smoking Man from The X-Files, a mysterious operator who exists only in shadows, completely in control of the situation, who decided to contact our protagonists out of a capricious whim. Here in the film, it is completely obvious that Woodward knows who he is, having contacted him first. While he still is in shadows we see enough of his face to know exactly how much he knows his ass is on the line.

Network is a brutal satire of the state of the media in the seventies. But does it in a way that makes it brutally timeless. It tells the tale of Howard Beale, a fading news anchor, who, after being given his two-week notice, breaks down on national television. The station’s corporate owners, who have been looking for shows to boost their rating, (the other show shown being worked on is a reality show featuring a group of Marxist Terrorists robbing banks) as well as trying to bring the news department under their control see this as rating gold and give him his own show to rant on. They quickly lose control over Beal’s content and as his ratings sag, they finally arrange his assassination (just as if it were another meeting item in the board room.)

This is all packaged in a brilliant script by Paddy Chayefsky and every word of dialogue is amazing! It’s really hard to tell what is best. Certainly, the “I’m as mad as Hell” speech is the one that everyone knows but almost as good, if not better, is Ned Beatty playing the head of the corporation who takes Beal into his office to straighten him out. Framed by a line of lights of a large conference table he gives his “You have meddled with the primal forces of nature” speech, a corporate sermon right up there with “greed is good”

Network takes no prisoners in its picture of corporate greed and corruption other than the completely insane Beale nobody is safe from this (even the Marxists argue about percentages and subclauses in their contracts) What makes it all the more difficult to watch today, is what Network satirized came true and, what’s worse, we take it for granted. As I watched Howard Beale ranting on his program I kept finding myself thinking of Glenn Beck at his most theatrical. The main difference is a guy like Beck can only dream of being Howard Beale.