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We can believe that audiences would tune in to a news program that's half happy talk and half freak show, because audiences are tuning in to programs like that. We watch Peter Finch cracking up on the air, and we remind ourselves that this isn't satire, it was a style as long ago as Jack Paar.
THE MESSAGE 1976 REVIEW MOVIE
It deals with Holden's relationship with his wife of twenty-five years, but inconclusively.īut then there are scenes in the movie that are absolutely chilling. It attempts to suggest that multinational corporations are the only true contemporary government, but does so in a scene that slips too broadly into satire, so that we're not sure Chayefsky means it. It attempts to deal with a brief, cheerless love affair between Holden and Dunaway, but doesn't really allow us to understand it. Lumet's direction is so taut, that maybe we don't realize that it leaves some unfinished business. By the movie's end, the anchorman is obviously totally insane and is being exploited by blindly ambitious programmers on the one hand and corrupt businessmen on the other, and the scale of evil is so vast we've lost track of the human values.Īnd yet, still, what a rich and interesting movie this is. Paddy Chayefsky's script isn't a bad one, but he finally loses control of it. We are asked to laugh at, be moved by, or get angry about such a long list of subjects: Sexism and ageism and revolutionary ripoffs and upper-middle-class anomie and capitalist exploitation and Neilsen ratings and psychics and that perennial standby, the failure to communicate. As it is, we have a supremely well-acted, intelligent film that tries for too much, that attacks not only television but also most of the other ills of the 1970s. If the whole movie had stayed with this theme, we might have had a very bitter little classic here. And what "Network" seems to be telling us is that television itself is like that: An economic process in the blind pursuit of ratings and technical precision, in which excellence is as accidental as banality.
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It wasn't their job to listen to Howard, just as it wasn't his job to run the control board. What was happening - that a man has lost his career and was losing his mind - passed right by. They were all consumed with form, with being sure the commercials were played in the right order and that the segment was the correct length.