"I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE"
Network was released in 1976. According to the well-informed staff at Wikipedia, it earned 4 Oscars, although I think the one most-deserved went to Faye Dunaway. She shares billing with a ridiculous wealth of talent that also includes a pretty amazing William Holden and Robert Duvall, not to mention dapper Ned Beatty near the end. AND it was directed by Sidney Lumet, who also did 12 Angry Men and Serpico, among a ton of others.
I won't talk long about the movie: I don't know much about movies, and generally like or dislike them based on my own ideas. My opinion about film as an artform should be taken with as much salt as you can find, if you take it at all. But this movie was, if nothing else, highly thought-provoking, one of the best purposes of any art. On that I think we can agree.
The rough plot is: a aging network anchorman goes barmy and starts swearing onscreen and threatening to kill himself. Rather than yank him off and have him treated for depression, some hawkish executives turn him into a national sensation and reaps buckets of money as a result. It ends about how you'd expect. At the time of its release, Network must have seemed pretty histrionic: imagine a world where the TV airwaves were consumed with crazy people spouting any old thing, which people would accept purely because it was on TV! But watching it now, it's like writer Paddy Chayefsky was gazing (Sybil the Soothsayer-like, for those of you who have seen the movie) into the future, where he espied the likes of Survivor, the O.J. Simpson slow-motion car chase, Michael Jackson, etc.
Like a lot of movies from the 70's, the ideas in this one are more sound than the story itself. There's a love story in there between William Holden and Faye Dunaway that's distracting at best, ridiculous at worst, although I get it that there needed to be a real-world analog for the whole dissolution-of-the-soul thing that all the TV worship had to lead to. But it's not the most likely romance in the world. On the other hand, it produces some really great scenes between Holden and Dunaway, including at the first dinner of their affair, where Faye Dunaway perkily states, "I can't tell you how many men have told me what a lousy lay I am."
On the other hand, the writing is so overdone that you're alternately impressed with the extraordinary vocabularies of the cast, or letdown when you realize that not even a roomful of Harvard professors talk like that. I'm reminded a lot of Being There, where a great idea was paired up with an incredible performance, but was ultimately saddled with the other 90 minutes of the movie. On the other other hand, what do I know about writing? The screenplay also won an Oscar that year, one of four (the other three went to Dunaway, Peter Finch (who plays the messianic anchorman), and Beatrice Straight, who plays Holden's lady-cuckold wife.
I get a charge out of watching movies from the 70's, although they're always downers, so it's hard to decide to watch one. I was born in 1974. I don't remember the 70's, of course--by the time I was old enough to start noticing, Reagan was president and the coolest thing in the world was the brand new Space Shuttle. So when I see things set in the 70's, it's almost like looking at a time capsule: this is how things were, this is what people looked like, these were the circumstances surrounding the beginnings of my life.
I especially like the attitude of the 70's--everyone wearing these crazy jackets and wild hairstyles, and you can tell that the producers wanted everything to look super modern, super sleek. It's easy to forget when looking at a Nehru jacket that at one time they were hip, right?
But best of all is the light in 70's movies--I always notice that there's all this actual light everywhere. I don't mean bright light, but real light; or at least, real-appearing. Scenes will be totally dark, with just a disembodied face hanging in the frame, like the scene near the beginning where Holden and Finch are drunk in a bar. The light in a room might be obnoxiously bright, or dim and muddy; either way, it's how it is in real life. Life is rarely lit correctly, and almost never properly composed. Of course, all those 70's directors loved composition, so that clever sentence is only half clever.
But it's the first thing I notice about the movies of this time period: 70's movies are filled with the banal, unapologetically. The drama of the story is set half the time against the oppressive insipidness of life. Is this my imagination? It's hard to say--I wasn't really around back then. It may just be that the 1970's look boring now; but in most of the films of the decade, the world around the action has all the life and spark and electricity of a lawyer's bookshelf. The style of everything seems new and old at the same time--sleek, but covered in dust somehow.
The bad guy (other than just general concepts of greed and stupidity) in the movie is played by Robert Duvall, who if you put a gun to my head and forced me to name my three favorite actors, would probably be two of them. Think about Duvall in the 70's: The Godfather I and II, MASH, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now... he was like the Phillip Seymour Hoffman of his time. Not the prettiest actor in the world, but with chops; able to imbue the most complex performances with the basic humanity they need to work.
It was strange watching Duvall play young buck to aging William Holden; as of this writing, Robert Duvall is pushing 80. But in the film he's all fire and passion, while Holden seems tired, laconicly verbose. It's hard to believe he has the energy for a high-powered strumpet like Faye Dunaway. But watching these three actors on the screen together seemed a little like watching the history of film up to that time. Remember that Holden was a hero of the Western and one of Hollywood's studio stars from the 40's on. Seeing the now-aging Duvall screaming profanity at this legend was a real mind-blower at times, further cementing the strange anachronism of the movie, post past and future.
The idea that Holden, who started acting in movies in the 30's, played the lead in this grim 70's polemic is a real headtwister for sure. He carries all that history around with him on the screen, making it easy to believe that he is a tired newsman who doesn't buy all the hype and noise these days. There's something to be said for the early years of an artform--in 1976, film as art was what? Fifty years old? Citizen Kane had come out 35 years earlier. The glory years of jazz had already wound down by the 70's, and rock music is kind of sputtering and fizzling its way toward obscenity now. Could "Network" have been made today? I think yes, but with a lot more eye-rolling and winking, and a lot less class. I'm not sure that ANYone is making classy movies anymore.
Which Network surely is, for its strangeness and its several faults. Network is, if nothing else, a piece of art where someone had something to say and got some incredibly talented people together to help him say it. Here's Ned Beatty saying some pretty interesting stuff, from near the end of the movie--don't watch it if you haven't seen it before.