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Partners
Good Night, and Good Luck.Mike ClarkEdward R. Murrow walks tall staring down Sen. Joe McCarthy in Good Night, and Good Luck, which remains our good fortune. The only things missing from making this showdown worthy of a Western is Murrow's sheriff's badge, a dusty street and maybe a spittoon for McCarthy's infamous invectives. Flip, you say? Well, this viable awards contender isn't. So even-keeled that it allows McCarthy to play himself, using kinescopes from the era, Luck gleans extra depth from being the best movie ever about the in-bred tension between newsfolk and their advertisers. As such, George Clooney's second directorial outing couldn't be more topical, though the events it chronicles occurred over half a century ago. Newscasting deity Murrow, who placated the front office by conducting fluffy celebrity interviews on Friday night's Person to Person, took a corporately brave and controversial stand against the Republican Red-baiter from Wisconsin. The forum was CBS' hard-news show and Murrow's baby, See It Now. David Strathairn plays Murrow, a performance eerily on the money and tinged with irony: until now, the actor's standout role was playing future Red Scare casualty J. Robert Oppenheimer in the splendid Los Alamos TV movie Day One. Strathairn's Murrow is an internally churning, "wired tight" portrayal, down to his famed chain-smoking, on and off the air. At a time when even President Eisenhower never stood up to McCarthy's reckless smears, Murrow finally took off the gloves and exposed the senator's tactics after Milo Radulovich was dismissed from the Army Air Corps following shaky accusations of communist sympathies. The show aired in March 1954, and when McCarthy badly flubbed a televised rebuttal, it was the beginning of the end. Shot in black and white and narrowly focused, this 93-minute crash course gives actor Clooney a chance to play off his own sterling direction with a frill-less portrayal (glasses, pallor, some extra heft) of Murrow producer Fred Friendly. And though Frank Langella isn't an obvious choice to play CBS president and chairman William Paley, his penetrating eyes make him intimidating and authoritative, especially in the movie's best scene: when Paley promises no censorship but makes it clear that ruffling sponsors will come with a substantial price.
The extensive footage of McCarthy is artfully integrated. His flop-sweat and gauchely overbearing demeanor are almost guaranteed to scare the few little children who wander into this movie. For older audiences, he'll hang himself, just as he did in 1954 - not just on CBS but also on the televised Army-McCarthy hearings that crushed him. The DVD, Point of Order (originally produced in 1964), compiled from those hearings, arrives Nov 1.
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