This week we look at a star-studded take on a classic novel, the last laugh for "The Big Bang Theory," and a Netflix movie that puts a sci-fi twist on a tragic reality.
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Title: Network (1976)
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| Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
| Faye Dunaway | ... | Diana Christensen | |
| William Holden | ... | Max Schumacher | |
| Peter Finch | ... | Howard Beale | |
| Robert Duvall | ... | Frank Hackett | |
| Wesley Addy | ... | Nelson Chaney | |
| Ned Beatty | ... | Arthur Jensen | |
| Arthur Burghardt | ... | Great Ahmed Kahn | |
 |
Bill Burrows | ... | TV Director |
|
|
John Carpenter | ... | George Bosch |
| Jordan Charney | ... | Harry Hunter | |
|
|
Kathy Cronkite | ... | Mary Ann Gifford |
|
|
Ed Crowley | ... | Joe Donnelly |
| Jerome Dempsey | ... | Walter C. Amundsen | |
| Conchata Ferrell | ... | Barbara Schlesinger | |
|
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Gene Gross | ... | Milton K. Steinman |
In the 1970s, terrorist violence is the stuff of networks' nightly news programming and the corporate structure of the UBS Television Network is changing. Meanwhile, Howard Beale, the aging UBS news anchor, has lost his once strong ratings share and so the network fires him. Beale reacts in an unexpected way. We then see how this affects the fortunes of Beale, his coworkers (Max Schumacher and Diana Christensen), and the network. Written by Bruce Janson <bruce@cs.su.oz.au>
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This movie came out when I was nine years old, and I saw it on network TV the following year, lured by the brouhaha that surrounded the use of the "barnyard epithet" during prime time. I loved this movie before I understood it, and I worship it now. Like "Elmer Gantry" or "1984," it's a work of didactic art that only fails on an imaginative level -- Sinclair Lewis couldn't grasp how debased evangelism would become, Orwell couldn't foresee the excesses of Mao or Pol Pot, and Chayevsky couldn't envision the absolute decline of television from a vast wasteland to a malevolent sewer. Fox News, reality TV, even the OJ chase, "Network" anticipates every vile bit of it.
Now, it's ridiculously overwritten -- NO ONE is as articulate as the characters in this film, and most certainly, no one who works in television is as literate as Diana Christensen (the Faye Dunaway character). I doubt that poet laureates or even Eminem could spew as witty an aside as "muttering mutilated Marxism." But damn if that isn't part of its charm. Plus, outside of Max Schumacher (William Holden), the characters are pretty much archetypes instead of real people (the Robert Duvall character might as well wear a black cape and top hat), but their two-dimensionality works as a good metaphor for Max's seduction into the "shrieking nothingness" or television. Plus the actors are so superb they make screeching caricatures into almost-sympathetic characters: Duvall is a credible and charismatic villain, Finch is a fine mad prophet and Faye Dunaway manages to make a shrill, manipulative, soulless neurotic so damn cute and sexy you'll want to leave your wife for her, too, just as long as she promises to keep sitting cross-legged on your desk and hitching up her skirt. (Therein lies the real eroticism, forget the intentionally mechanical, unerotic coupling later in the flick). Anyway, this is complex, high art masquerading as popular entertainment, go rent it now.