All the President’s Men, the Alan Pakula film, was a stand-out in 1976 largely because most other movies that year were so dismal.
Scripted by William Goldman, Men concerns the Bob Woodward-Carl Bernstein breaking of the ’72 Watergate story, and is as evenhanded about it as it needs to be, however skeptical I am about . . . this and that. In the final analysis, it’s not a very important film, merely a celluloid chronicle telling us a lot about the newspaper business but not much about anything else.
Even so, for a long time it’s very absorbing; all the time it’s wonderfully acted. It almost convinces me that the American media in the 1970s was not quite the joke it later became. Not THAT big a joke.
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