Category: Journalism film

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig investigate unspeakable evil in David Fincher’s superb The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo adaptation

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Daniel Craig (Mikael Blomkvist), Rooney Mara (Lisbeth Slander), Christopher Plummer (Henrik Vanger), Stellan Skarsgård (Martin Vanger), Steven Berkoff (Dirch Frode), Robin Wright (Erika Berger), Yorick van Wageningen (Nils Bjurman), Joely Richardson (Anita Vanger), Goran Višnjić (Dragan Armansky), Donald Sumpter (Detective Morell), Ulf Friberg (Hans-Erik Wennerström), Geraldine James (Cecilia Vanger), Embeth Davidtz (Annik Giannini), Julian Sands (Young Henrik Vanger), David Dencik (Young Morell), Tony Way (Plague), Alan Dale (Detective Isaksson)

At the time of its release, there was a slightly cool reaction to David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Most reviewers were already familiar with the story twice over, firstly as the best-selling thriller then as the Swedish film starring Noomi Rapace. Perhaps fans were similarly slightly indifferent, while newbies had already declined the first two options, as the film struggled to crawl its way to breakeven. However, rewatching it, I feel this intriguingly well-made film deserves to be mentioned in the same discussion as another adaptation of a pulp thriller made 20 years earlier: The Silence of the Lambs.

Mikael Blomqvist (Daniel Craig) is a crusading financial journalist and co-owner of Millenniummagazine, whose career is in ruins after his article about the CEO of a major company leads to him losing a costly legal battle for libel. He is approached by retired businessman Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), who asks him to investigate the 40-year-old disappearance of his niece Harriet Vanger, who vanished on their privately owned island estate. Blomqvist is hired after an exhaustive investigation into his personal life by emotionally challenged hacker and private investigator Lisbeth Slander (Rooney Mara), who is facing her own problems of gaining her independence from her position as a ward of the state, represented by her vile guardian Nils Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen). As Blomqvist investigates, eventually with the help of Lisbeth, the trail takes a very dark turn suggesting a sinister hand behind the disappearance not only of Harriet but also of a number of other women around Sweden.

Fincher’s crisply made, icily cold movie embraces the coldness not only of wintery Sweden, but also the film’s chilling subject matter. There are very rarely – if ever – flashes of colour or light, with the world taking on an oppressive blackness and grey or windswept bleakness. It’s a perfect metaphor for the horror of what people do to each other. It’s brilliantly assembled, as you would expect from Fincher, and made with such consummate skill and excellence that its professional chill becomes almost oppressively unsettling, much like the plot itself.

Re-watching it I was put very much in mind of The Silence of the Lambs. That too was a masterfully made adaptation of a pulp novel that found a poetry and depth in the book, framing it around a series of unconventional relationships, with a female lead pushed into a role that sharply defies expectations. Both have at their centre a dangerous figure whose interests align with the other characters. Brilliantly, here the role of dangerously unpredictable genius and unexpected female role are both taken by Lisbeth Slander. (In fact Lisbeth is like a fusing of Clarice and Lector into one character). 

Like Lambs, which tapped into the 1990s obsession with the power of psychiatry and self-analysis and used it as the key to uncovering and defeating criminals, this takes our fascination with computers and the internet and uses that as silver bullet for finding criminals. Just as in the 1990s psychiatrists seemed to have access to some sort of mystical alchemy no one else could understand, so the film shows Lisbeth’s hacker skills as some sort of super power that can blow down secrets and accomplish things no one else can do. 

The film also echoes Lambs in its fascinating look at the place of women in the world. The film revolves around historical violence against women – when we finally have the killer unveiled he confirms women have only ever been his targets – and the film is heavy (in often wordlessly narrated flashbacks) with ominous feelings of danger from a domineering male culture. The world clearly hasn’t changed that much either. The killer continues to operate, everyone in a position of influence we see is an ageing man, Lisbeth’s ward is a vile sexual abuser. But, in this milieu of threat to women, Lisbeth becomes a sort of icon of a woman living life on her terms and taking control of her own life.

Impressively embodied by an Oscar-nominated Rooney Mara, Lisbeth is the sort of character you would normally expect to be a man: surly, anti-social, difficult, prone to violence, sexually indiscriminate, determined to always be in control and decisive in her relationships. She quickly takes the lead in her relationship with Mikael, professionally and later sexually (right down to her telling him where to put his hands during their passionate but also functional sex scenes). Mikael meanwhile takes far more the traditional “female” role: dedicated, hard-working, maternal, competent but better placed as the assistant to a true genius. Daniel Craig gives him a slightly rumpled middle-age quality, combined with a feckless recklessness that lands him in trouble.

The film is Lisbeth’s though, and Fincher brilliantly uses early scenes to establish her defiant, independent character. From snatching her bag back (brutally) from a would-be mugger on the underground, to a surly, blunt lack of respect she shows to a client, she’s painted clearly as a person who will respond how she wants, regardless of any “rules”. But Fincher also makes time to show her vulnerability. Lonely and insecure, she has worked hard to kill any vulnerability in her and protect herself from emotional pain. To see the small notes of tenderness she allows out – from her reaction to a former guardian suffering a stroke to her increasing emotional investment in Mikael – is strikingly engaging.

And we definitely see her suffering. If we had any doubts about one of the themes of this film being about how powerful men abuse and control women, the sub-plot of Lisbeth’s abusive warden (played with the pathetic, creepy relish of the small man enjoying what control he has by Yorick van Wageningen) hammers it home. The four key scenes between these characters cover a mini-arc in themselves from abuse of power, assault, revenge and power shift. Lisbeth may suffer terribly – more than she expects, much to her shock – but the sequence not only shows her ability to survive but also to turn the tables to her advantage. You could argue that this sort of rape-revenge fantasy might trivialise the impact rape has on real people – but it’s crucial for the theme of the film that there is hope that the sort of scum that abuse their positions can be stopped and that victims can survive and thrive. 

And you’ll need this as the film expands both into the past and the present day into a series of increasingly grim cases of historical abuse and murder. Fincher presents all this with the same brilliant, non-exploitative control that Jonathan Demme managed in Lambs. Despite the horrors of the themes, there is no lingering on anything graphic. Instead Fincher uses the tension of slowness, of steady camera work, of careful pacing to let tension and unease build up as we feel something is horribly wrong but never can be quite sure what. The final confrontation with the killer is not only deeply unsettling for it being one of the most brightly lit sequences of the film, but also for the middle-class banality of the villain’s taste (you’ll never listen to Orinoco Flow in the same way again) and the fascinatingly business-like approach he brings to his deeds of slaughter. 

The Girl with the Dragan Tattoo is such a well-made film that perhaps that’s its greatest weakness. It’s a little too easy to see a lack of personality in it, a professionalism, a clean perfection, a master craftsman quality, that you feel you are watching a studio picture made by a great director. And maybe you are: but then you could say the same about many of Hitchcock’s film, a director Fincher consciously echoes here. Superbly acted not just by the leads but by the whole cast (Plummer, Skarsgård and Wright are excellent while even Berkoff gives a restrained performance) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the sort of film that will surely only be considered in a warmer and warmer light as time goes by.

The Front Runner (2018)

Hugh Jackman in the centre of a media scrum in misfiring biopic The Front Runner

Director: Jason Reitman

Cast: Hugh Jackman (Gary Hart), Vera Farmiga (Lee Hart), JK Simmons (Bill Dixon), Alfred Molina (Ben Bradlee), Sara Paxton (Donna Rice), Mamoudou Athie (AJ Parker), John Bedford Lloyd (David S Broder), Spencer Garrett (Bob Woodward), Steve Coulter (Bob Kaiser), Ari Garynor (Ann Devroy), Steve Zissis (Tom Fiedler), Bill Burr (Pete Murphy), Mike Judge (Jim Savage), Kevin Pollak (Bob Martindale)

In the 1988 Democratic primaries, Gary Hart (Hugh Jackman) was the man to beat: a telegenic liberal with an attractive programme of policies and a forward-thinking vision for America. No one could beat Hart. Except for Hart himself. A man with a history of affairs, he became embroiledin a sex scandal after an ill-advised friendship (the film is coy on taking a stance on whether this friendship was sexual or not) with a young woman, Donna Rice (Sara Paxton). Angrily denying anything was going on, Hart unwisely challenged journalists to follow him: which the Miami Herald did, soon finding Hart had skipped campaign events to invite Rice to come and stay with him at his Washington home for a long weekend… Cue a media snowstorm and an imploded campaign.

Reitman’s film is a pretty decent chronicle of this early media sex scandal. I say pretty good because it does what it sets out to do with a solid observation of the facts and a general even handedness between Hart and the media. However it never really quite sparks into life, and Reitman’s attempt to make this story into something with huge relevance for how the modern media has developed, and how the world of politics has led us to Trump, just doesn’t really work. 

What the film instead becomes is a slightly dry but enjoyable enough docu-drama, that covers a period of history that should feel tumultuous and should create a sense of setting the table for the future but doesn’t. The idea that it was only at this point that American politicians suddenly had interest from the press in their personal lives is nonsense for anyone who had even a passing knowledge of the careers of Kennedy and Nixon. The film’s attempt to make us sympathise with Hart is also undermined by the high-handed arrogance with which he treats even the slightest inquiry into his personal life from anyone, be it press to members of staff who simply want an explanation of why their leader consistently demonstrates such astonishing poor judgement.

This is despite a decent performance of charisma from Hugh Jackman, possibly better than Hart deserves. The film does demonstrate – amidst its general sympathy for Hart – his willingness to throw Donna Rice under the media bus and his stubborn refusal to acknowledge any wrong-doing on his own part. I can’t say I actually really felt much sympathy for him over the course of the film, which I’m not sure was the film’s intention.

Neither did I really feel the film really skewered journalism. I think it wants to lay a suggestion that this was the first descent on a slippery slope, where gutter press, personality led journalism led to only egotists of mediocre talent wanting to take on the challenge of running the country. Or rather, that we get the politicians we deserve. While you could say there is some merit in this, I’m not sure this film manages to present that fully (Hart’s behaviour is at least partly self-destructive and would have been in any era) or that it really establishes that we are living in the shadow of times like this. And the investigation into Hart’s lies and evasions is hardly gutter press journalism. Neither does the film make a real case for Hart being some sort of potential great leader: while he has some decent, liberal, ideas he’s also short-tempered, lacks focus and has a tendency to snap at or cold shoulder underlings.

A bit of spin in the movie is got out of Jack Kennedy’s numerous affairs not being covered by the press. And while that is true, this seems less because of a natural shyness of the press, but rather because Kennedy was more astute at making friends in the fourth estate, and more willing to share parts of his life outside politics with them for stories (essentially, he made news for the press, making them more willing to keep quiet about his adulteries, while Kennedy avoided doing anything too blatant that the press would find impossible to ignore). Hart’s real problem was less that he was in a more censorious or gutter press era, and more that he was inept at press (and people) management, treating those around him with high handed contempt, mixed with challenges and threats. The film could almost be a textbook on how not to use the media.

It’s telling Hart’s only real relationship with a reporter in the film is with a young, impressionable (and fictional) Washington Post journalist (played very well by Mamoudou Athie). Hart comforts him through a mild panic attack during a flight and they develop a friendship, which I think the film wants us to think the journalist betrays by asking Hart the difficult questions about his lack of faithfulness and proclivity for affairs (all pretty well documented historically). I’m not sure that is the case. Surely, by this stage almost any thinking human beingin the States was asking these questions, and by putting them to the candidate, surely this journalist was simply doing their job? The “tragedy” of Hart was his incompetence at working with people, rather than his questionable private activities being brought to light.

The film struggles with all these themes and I don’t think it really successfully tackles any of them. The case it tries to set out doesn’t really work and, despite some fine observational moments of politics in action and a good performance from Jackman, it never really takes flight as it should. It’s a decent effort but a misfire.

The Fifth Estate (2013)

Benedict Cumberbatch and Daniel Bruhl struggle through this turgid retelling of hacking derring-do in The Fifth Estate

Director: Bill Condon

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch (Julian Assange), Daniel Brühl (Daniel Domscheit-Berg), Alicia Vikander (Anke Domscheit-Berg), Anthony Mackie (Sam Coulson), David Thewlis (Nick Davies), Stanley Tucci (James Boswell), Laura Linney (Sarah Shaw), Moritz Bleibtrue (Marcus), Carice van Houten (Birgitta Jónsdóttir), Peter Capaldi (Alan Rusbridger), Dan Stevens (Ian Katz), Alexander Siddig (Dr Tarek Haliseh)

In 2010 the world was thrown into turmoil when a website called Wikileaks published a host of top-secret government documents that revealed a never-ending stream of Western wrong-doing during the war on terror. The leak was co-published by WikiLeaks and the Guardian and New York Times. However Wikileaks founder Julian Assange (played here by Benedict Cumberbatch) had other ideals – namely that the files should not be redacted in any way to protect serving US officials or informants in hostile countries. 

It should be a gripping story of the state failing to keep up with the speed of modern communications. But instead this is one hell of a turgid, dull info-dump of a film that turns this potentially explosive event into something about as gripping as watching a series of people type into a computer. On top of that, the film totally fails to develop any proper personality dynamics to engage your interest, and instead falls back into the usual crude filmic language of a star-struck protégé realising his mentor has feet of clay.

Bill Condon’s direction is totally incapable of making the entry of data into a computer dynamic or visual, and is completely unable to bring the world of computer hacking and data search to life. In fact, there is so much information given to the viewers (rather than drama) that the impression I was left with is that Condon doesn’t really understand what’s going on in the movie anyway. He certainly doesn’t manage to make it interesting or feel that important. 

Visually, the film is flat and falls back on superimposing text on the screen when people type or creating a sort of “mind palace” office to represent the inner workings of the Wikileaks server (which is basically just a big office space). In fact, the film gets less interesting as it progresses – which is a real shame after a nifty credits sequence that chronicles in images the development of the press from cave paintings, through the Rosetta stone, printing, television and the internet. 

Not to mention the lack of drama about this. Things are just happening – we never get any sense of the danger or the world-changing impact, or any reason why we should care. Poor Anthony Mackie, Laura Linney and Stanley Tucci are wheeled out as a trio of American government big wigs who talk at each other at great length about what is going on and how it will endanger government assets – but it’s all show and not tell. The plight of a Tunisian informant – played with his usual skill by Alexander Siddig – is reduced to a few scenes, a human element that gets trimmed so much it carries little impact. 

The film also deals with the personality clashes Assange inspires, here interpreted as a borderline sociopathic monster, an egotist and liar interested only in his own legend. Benedict Cumberbatch gives a superbly detailed and richly observed impersonation of Assange, but the character has no depth. He’s merely a sort of phantom monster, who the film slowly reveals has no conscience. Compare it to the presentation of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network (a film that is everything this clunking disaster is not). That film is also told from the prospective of a disillusioned former colleague, but there our view of the central character is shaded and given depth – and we are encouraged to recognise we are seeing one person’s perspective. Here the film swallows whole the side of the story presented by Daniel Berg.

Berg played with a disengaged flatness by Daniel Brühl, snoozing through a part shorn of any dynamism, whose views oscillate constantly until he finally settles for being a campaigner to keep sources safe. Alicia Vikander gets shockingly short shrift as a girlfriend – she even has the obligatory “stop working on the management of earth-shattering leaks and come to bed” scene. Berg allies himself with the traditional media, similarly portrayed with a clunking obviousness: David Thewlis is a standard shouty journalist, Peter Capaldi a chin-stroking concerned editor. 

The Fifth Elementis flat and unable to dramatise the world of computer coding. The dialogue is turgid and obvious (there is a terribly obvious metaphor of Assange constantly lying about the reason for his white hair – he can’t be trusted you see!) and the performances are either dull, clichéd or saddled with this terrible writing. At the end, as Cumberbatch plays Assange denouncing the entire film in a reconstruction of a talking head interview, you get a sense of the more interesting, fourth-wall-leaning film this might have been. But sadly the rest of the film reminds you what a flat, tedious, stumbling, confused, inexplicable misfire this really is.

Peterloo (2018)

Mike Leigh’s passionate but dry, overlong film brings the Peterloo massacre to life

Director: Mike Leigh

Cast: Rory Kinnear (Henry Hunt), Maxine Peake (Nellie), Pearce Quigley (Joshua), David Moorst (Joseph), Rachel Finnegan (Mary), Tom Meredith (Robert), Simona Bitmate (Esther), Karl Johnson (Lord Sidmouth), Sam Troughton (Mr Hobhouse), Roger Sloman (Mr Grout), Alastair Mackenzie (General Byng), Neil Bell (Samuel Bamford), Lisa Millet (Jemima Bamford), Philip Jackson (John Knight), John-Paul Hurley (John Thacker Saxton), Tom Gill (Joseph Johnson), Lizzie Frain (Mrs Johnson), Ian Mercer (Dr Joseph Healey), Nico Mirallegro (John Bagguley), Danny Kirrane (Samuel Drummond), Johnny Byron (John Johnston), Tim McInnerny (Prince Regent), Vincent Franklin (Reverend Etlhelstone), Jeff Rawle (Hay), Philip Whitchurch (Colonel Fletcher), Martin Savage (Norris), Al Weaver (Hutton)

Perhaps one of the most pivotal moments in the struggle of the working classes to gain political and social rights was the Peterloo massacre of 16th August 1819, at St Peter’s Field in Manchester. At a meeting of over 60,000 people, officials ordered first the mounted yeomanry and then soldiers to attack and break up the crowd. At least 15 people were killed and hundreds more wounded, either from the indiscriminate sabre blows from the yeomen (probably drunk) and soldiers (unable to control the panic), or crushed in the frantic attempt to escape from the confined square. The immediate reaction from the authorities was praise at breaking up this “Bonapartist” piece of revolutionary nonsense. The lasting effect was condemnation of the brutality shown towards a peaceful demonstration and the massacre becoming a major cause celebre. It was ultimately influential in the passing of the Great Reform Act, which greatly extended the franchise and rebalanced much of Parliament (at this point so unbalanced by age old tradition that while some tiny hamlets returned MPs, the whole of Manchester had no representation).

It’s still an emotive subject for many today, and with this reverent film, overflowing with anger at the hypocrisy and injustice of the ruling classes, you can’t doubt that Mike Leigh and the makers of Peterloo are among them. But however sincere their personal passion about the subject is, what they fail to bring to the film is any real dramatic impetus to make us care. Instead this is an inert, over-long, often (if I am being completely honest) tedious film that takes nearly an hour to get going and then only offers flashes of dramatic interest before culminating in the massacre itself (very well shot and staged, but still itself a rather distant viewing experience).

 A large reason for this is the film is so reverential towards the campaigners for liberty, that the overwhelming majority of their scenes are given over to very good actors giving spirited renditions of actual speeches and pamphlets at a series of political meetings, shot with a reverent simplicity by Leigh. Much as it is can be interesting to hear quotes from things like this, by the time we are onto our twelfth political speech covering similar ground, delivered with another bout of fiery passion, you’ve started to glaze over. What we don’t get from many of these campaigners is any reason to really care about them – either as people or as part of a movement. Instead the film ends up like a cinematic Rushmore, carving their representations into celluloid for us to gaze up at in awe.

A similar fate befalls the working-class characters in the film, who are lacking any real character or story at all and whose main function seems to be to exist so we can experience both their misery and their awakening political awareness. Our main family is a group of mill workers, with Maxine Peake (does anyone do “hard-pressed working class stoicism hiding pain” better than Peake?) as the matriarch, welcoming her son home from Waterloo. These people talk at each other, quoting various current issues and bemoaning the hardness of living at a time of near universal poverty – but other than the fact that they are poor and suffering we are given very little reason to care for them. Like the rest of the working-class characters, they seem more like passengers in the film, meaning when the swords start flying, it’s actually very hard to get worked up as much as we should as members of this family are hacked down. 

The one exception in the entire campaign-side of the narrative comes with the introduction of “Orator” Henry Hunt, a prosperous middle-class man who became a famed agitator for working men’s rights. Wonderfully played, with a an air of arrogant grandiosity mixed with genuine commitment to the cause, by Rory Kinnear, Hunt shakes up the pattern the film settles into over its first hour. Acutely aware of his position as the nominal head of a national movement, Hunt has little patience (and even a touch of class-based distance) from the mostly lower middle-class campaigners he mixes with in Manchester (while never being anything less than scrupulously polite), and his fish-out-of-water awkwardness around them raises several laughs (the only ones of the film). Scenes in which he imposes his own conditions on the internal politics of the Peterloo meeting (who will speak, who will be on the podium, will there be weapons in the ground) not only feel more real than anything else we’ve seen in the film, but they are also far more entertaining and engaging than anything else connected to the massacre’s build-up.

Leigh was perhaps so hidebound by wanting to honour the men who campaigned for liberty that, other than with the larger-than-life Hunt, he seems too restricted dramatically – as if adding too much of that essential for drama, conflict, would somehow undermine them. Ironically he has far greater freedom with the authorities – and the film’s more engaging sequences (outside of those with Hunt) are all based around the arguments, clashes, plots and fury of the various levels of authority in the country, from the corpulent Prince Regent through the Home Office to the local magistrates.

The film gets more juice from its righteous anger at the unfairness, arrogance and hypocrisy of these men than it does from almost everything else. It also gives the actors playing these roles far more to work with. Karl Johnson stands out as a stammering but adamantine Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth, paternalistic but totally unwilling to budge an inch. The real stars, however, are the magistrates we follow in Manchester, each introduced trying a trivial case (drinking an employer’s wine, an argument over a watch, stealing a coat) with ludicrous hard-line punishments (flogging and imprisonment, transportation and execution respectively). Played with a lustful relish by Philip Whitchurch, Jeff Rawle, Martin Savage and most expressively of all Vincent Franklin (who nearly goes too far with the lip smacking, until a scene later we see even the Home Office officials eagerly reading his latest dynamite dispatch with a barely suppressed chuckles at his OTT rhetoric), these characters argue the fine points of law and lustily denounce the working classes with such fire and energy that you conversely get more wrapped up in their scenes than almost anything else in the film. Maybe Leigh felt he had greater freedom to create characters and drama here, but it does feel unbalanced.

All that said, the massacre itself when we reach it is brilliantly staged, immediate, deadly, meticulously reconstructed and filmed with a documentary anger at its brutality. You can sense the creeping tension throughout the film and the explosion of violence afterwards, for all the problems of the film, is genuinely horrifying. In fact it wraps you up so much, I wish the film had dealt more with the aftermath of the clash (there is a very good scene as stunned journalists walk St Peter’s Field with horrified fury) and the impact it had, rather than the film wrapping up swiftly with funeral of one of its working-class characters (it’s not a surprise which one).

But then that’s part of the whole film’s problem. It feels like a missed opportunity. It’s a stately civics lesson, a film that hammers home the importance of what it is presenting to you, but never really gives you a reason to invest in the real stories and passions behind the history. Instead it presents everything as important, because it is, rather than making it important to us. It feels at the same time a film that is preaching to the choir who already know this history back-to-front, and also a dry history lesson introducing it to a new audience. Either way it fails. Despite one or two good scenes, a dull, underwhelming, preachy disappointment.

Network (1976)

Peter Finch rants and raves in media satire masterpiece Network

Director: Sidney Lumet

Cast: Faye Dunaway (Diana Christensen), William Holden (Max Schumacher), Peter Finch (Howard Beale), Robert Duvall (Frank Hackett), Wesley Addy (Nelson Chaney), Ned Beatty (Arthur Jensen), Beatrice Straight (Louise Schumacher), Jordan Charney (Howard Hunter), William Prince (Edward Ruddy), Lane Smith (Robert McDonough), Marlene Warfiedl (Laureen Hobbs)

Is there any movie ever made that has been more prescient than Network? So spot-on was its vision of television becoming pushed to extremes by its obsession with ratings that when it was screened a few years ago for a group of teenagers in America, they allegedly didn’t realise it was meant to be a satire. I’m also pretty sure you would have to go a long way to find a better written movie – it’s no surprise that this has been converted into a successful play, it’s basically one already.

In the 1970s, UBS is a struggling TV network trying to find a niche among the giants. Its news show is losing its timeslot in the ratings – which is bad news for its respected anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch). Informed he will be fired due to falling ratings, Beale goes on air and casually announces he will blow his brains out live on air next week. When this sends the ratings rocketing, the network sends him back on air, encouraging him to speak his mind more rather than just report the facts. When Beale suffers a full blown breakdown, his anti-establishment rants touch a public nerve and Beale becomes a ratings smash – with the news show taken over by ambitious Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), Head of Entertainment, who turns it into a bizarre light entertainment show, with the increasingly unhinged Beale the main entertainment. It’s perfect for everyone – so long as the ratings hold…

Network could so easily have become a shrill, OTT satire. Writing down the plot summary there, it even reads like that – a big, stupid, pleased-with-itself film that hits its points hard and where every character is a grotesque caricature. But that’s not the case here. This is a brilliantly written film – Paddy Chayevsky is surely one of the greatest writers in film history – a fiercely intelligent piece of satire, which most importantly crafts its characters with empathy and understanding. Some of them may be larger than life, and some of them may do things that are just this side of heightened reality, but at heart they all feel real. The film is shot through with heart and a sense of realism that underpins the razor sharp satire.

And that satire is all around the world of television. So astonishingly prescient is the film about the rise of reality TV, ratings obsessed and lacking in real soul, that many of its jokes pass by almost unrecognised today. Respected news producer Max Schumacher’s throwaway line about an hour of network TV drama being made up of films of car chases (and crashes) from the police? Done to death already. The idea (again unthinkable in the 1970s) that a news anchor could litter the air with their own opinions on the news and current affairs – half the anchors in America now run their shows like editorial pieces. The concept that the public could be entertained by watching someone clearly not completely normal, throwing crazed statements at the camera – it could only be a fantasy right? A TV network completely in thrall to its corporate masters, following the line from the bosses? Yup surely that could never happen.

What Chayevsky does so well is turn these into masterpieces of rhetoric. Some of the greatest speeches ever written in film appear here, and they work because not only do they showcase some superb writing, but also every moment is crammed with ideas and real genuine feeling. Howard Beale may well be as mad as hell and not going to take it any more – but he articulates his reasons for feeling this with an acute emotional reality. Schumacher’s paens to the changing world of television, and his own lost place in it, are beautifully done. Diana’s ratings obsessed spewing of TV related facts and figures is sharply underpinned by our awareness all the time of the emotional reality of her near-inevitable emotional breakdown (surely only a few years at most down the line).

Given these lines, the acting is extraordinary (it won three of the acting Oscars in 1967). There isn’t a duff beat or performance in this film, and the delivery of the high-blown dialogue is simply outstanding, brilliantly directed by Lumet who was always a highly skilled director of actors. In fact, Lumet is often easy to overlook here, but his understanding of the material, and handling of its message and delivery, is a big reason for why it never becomes overbearing or trying. Away from the leads, he also gets superb performances from Duvall (chilling and on the verge of rage in every scene as the corporate suit who really calls the shots), Beatty (who had basically one speech, worked a day, and got an Oscar nomination) and Straight as Schumacher’s wife (who went one better than Beatty and won the Oscar for her one scene – the shortest Oscar-winning performance ever at just a few minutes).

Peter Finch won a posthumous Oscar for his role in this film – ill health restricted his “mad as hell” speech into only two takes (an extraordinary thought when you watch it). Beale is a gift of a part, an intelligent, compelling piece of showmanship – but Finch’s gift is to make the part feel real and human under the genius dialogue. The early scenes showcase Beale clearly struggling with depression, under the smiles, and already starting to crack. I love the way Lumet often frames Finch during these scenes – in group scenes he’s often to the edge of events, and he only slowly comes to the fore to gain a close up. Heck most of his first outburst on television is only seen by us on a viewing monitor in the control room (only the viewer seems to be listening by the way – the technicians are either gossiping or mechanically going through the motions of running the live broadcast, including countdowns to commercials).

Finch basically steals the movie, because you can’t shake from your mind his delivery of scenes like this one:

It’s even harder to believe that so many actors turned down the role – perhaps worried that it would seem like a pantomime role. One of those actors was William Holden – and thank goodness he did, because his grounded, bitter, crumpled, but still idealistic Max Schumacher is one of the film’s highlights. Holden gives one of his greatest performances – often overlooked under the flashy roles of Finch and Dunaway – making Schumacher the still centre of the film and, by its end, something approaching its powerless voice of conscience. 

Faye Dunaway (also Oscar-winning) makes a great deal of the demonic role of Diana Christianson, the representative of the next generation of TV producers, concerned only with ratings over morals. It’s probably the least “real” of the characters, but Dunaway finds the vulnerability and fragility carefully hidden under Diana’s chilly self-confidence and ruthlessness. 

It’s Diana who drives the film, overseeing the transformation of the news hour into a bizarre variety show (including a soothsayer, amongst a host of eccentric magazine feature slots) where Beale is bought on to rant about the emptiness of our world and the horrors of our soulless age like some sort of dancing bear, his inevitable fainting fits greeted by roars of applause. (“What are you?” asks the warm up man of the studio audience “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!” they delightedly cheer back).

The film runs a particularly dark streak alongside this with Diana’s plan to build a solid hour of entertainment every week from an embedded camera crew following the exploits of a gang of radical Marxist black-pantherist terrorists. The film gets a lot of slightly more obvious satirical material from this – the terrorists quickly lose their Marxist principles in hilarious fights around things like negotiating syndication rights – but its vision of television turning real-life horrors (repackaged) into entertainment for the masses is only a few degrees shy of where many channels have ended up today. 

That’s the whole film – sharply intelligent about where the world is heading, but balancing this with a genuine sense of humanity and emotional intelligence around its characters. If Chayevsky’s screenplay – or Lumet’s direction – hit us over the head with the points the film was trying to make, we’d quickly switch it off. Instead it makes its points with wit and a sense of reality that makes it both horrifying and entertaining. But then it would always have its place in film history with that dialogue and the acting it inspires from the cast. Most of the actors give their best ever work here, and the script is one of the finest around. As for the view of television – well, if we haven’t reached where Network was by now, it’s surely only a few minutes in the future.

The Post (2017)

Hanks and Streep bust Watergate in advance in Spielberg’s too dry The Post

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Meryl Streep (Katharine Graham), Tom Hanks (Ben Bradlee), Sarah Paulson (Tony Bradlee), Bob Odenkirk (Ben Bagdikian), Tracy Letts (Fritz Beebe), Bradley Whitford (Arthur Parsons), Bruce Greenwood (Robert McNamara), Matthew Rhys (Daniel Ellsberg), Alison Brie (Lally Graham), Carrie Coon (Meg Greenfield), Jesse Plemons (Roger Clark), David Cross (Howard Simons), Michael Stuhlbarg (AM Rosenthal)

There are few things newspaper journalists like more than old-fashioned films about the glory days of the press, showing journalists to be uniformly noble, upstanding, seekers of truth. There are few things Hollywood likes more than films the feature Streep and Hanks and/or are directed by Spielberg. As such, it’s not really a surprise that The Post received laudatory reviews, or that it crept into the Best Picture list of 2017 (it only got one other nomination, inevitably for Streep).

The film covers the Washington Post’s decision in 1971 to publish details from the Pentagon Papers, originally leaked to the New York Timesby former Defence Department official Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys). The papers detail the American government’s deceptive public messages on Vietnam, a war they knew to be unwinnable for almost ten years. The Nixon administration has blocked publication in the New York Times, but when the Post gets the same papers, owner and publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) and editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) have a difficult decision to make – suppress the truth or publish and face crippling legal penalties that could destroy the business.

The Post is quite similar in some ways to Spielberg’s far more successful Lincoln – a po-faced history lesson, told with panache, but essentially a dry civics lesson which draws some neat, but a little too on point, parallels with current events. Certainly it’s clear whom we are meant to be thinking of when the camera shows a shadowy Nixon in long shot from outside the White House, ranting into a phone in the Oval office late at night (admittedly, in a nice touch, the film uses the actual audio from Nixon’s Oval Office recordings). The parallels between press freedom and the spin of politics (or the charges of Fake News flung at any story the powers that be don’t like) are pretty clear. They are also pretty obvious.

Part of the film’s problem is that, unlike All the President’s Men (where the story covers full investigative journalism and Woodward and Bernstein need to piece the story together against the odds), this film hands everything to the journalists on a plate. It doesn’t even try to put a puzzle or some form of mystery before the viewers. Instead, the history is painstakingly (and drily) explained to give us the context, then each stage of the Post getting the papers is shown in simple and rather undramatic steps. There isn’t a sense – despite Bob Odenkirk’s deputy editor doing a bit of legwork – that the Post needed to work that hard to land the story. Crikey, you can see why The Times (who really did the crack the story) were a bit pissed at the film stealing their glory.

Once the papers are in the Post’s hands, the story almost immediately jumps to one night in which the papers are read and the board and the journalists squabble over whether they can legally publish or not. After that we get a swift coda where everything turns out fine, backs are slapped and the Supreme Court says it’s all good. There just isn’t quite enough drama. In fact we feel like we are watching a footnote, rather than the real story, which seems to be happening on the margins (for starters, the scandal of government lies on Vietnam, how The New York Times broke the story, and the Watergate break-in, a recreation of which rather clumsily closes the picture).

And I get that the film is trying to tell a story about how important a free press is and, yes, it’s great – but despite having a number of characters talk at length about this, I’m not sure what the film really tells us that we don’t already know. Instead it moves methodically but swiftly through events, carefully telling us what happened but never turning it into a really compelling story. Pizzazz for its own sake is not a strength, but a little more oomph in delivery here might have helped.

Alongside this, the film also wants to make points about the struggle of a woman in a man’s world and the institutional sexism (that probably hasn’t changed that much) of many boardrooms. Meryl Streep’s Katharine Graham – having inherited the company after the suicide of her husband – is a brow-beaten woman struggling to impose herself in a room of men whom she feels inferior to. Even this plotline though feels slightly rushed – we have Graham cowering in a boardroom meeting and struggling with paperwork, next thing we know she hesitantly makes the call to publish and is facing down her chief opponent (Bradley Whitford, rolling out another of his arrogant men of privilege). It’s all a bit rushed, perfunctory and all as expected – and Streep can clearly play this sort of role standing on her head.

But then the whole film has this slight comfort job feeling about it – everyone clearly invested in the story and the importance of the film’s points, but clearly without being challenged by the content. By the end of the film we’re are awash with clichés, from newspaper print rolling through old machines, to Graham walking through a crowd of admiring women outside the Supreme Court. The interesting and well assembled cast don’t get enough to do, with many of them feeling slightly wasted, not least Sarah Paulson in a thankless role as “the wife”.

The Post wants to be a big, world-changing film that talks about our modern age. Instead it’s a very middle brow, middle of the road history lesson that flatters to deceive, entertaining enough just about, but immediately forgettable.

The China Syndrome (1979)

Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon struggle against Big Business interests in the Nuclear Industry in The China Syndrome

Director: James Bridges

Cast: Jane Fonda (Kimberly Wells), Jack Lemmon (Jack Godell), Michael Douglas (Richard Adams), Scott Brady (Herman DeYoung), Wilford Brimley (Ted Spindler), James Hampton (Bill Gibson), Peter Donat (Dan Jacovich), Richard Herd (Evan McCormack), Daniel Valdez (Hector Salas)

Do we really trust nuclear power? There is something about the dangerous possibilities of splitting the atom that alarms people even today. For all that burning coal wrecks our atmosphere, people would still rather that than live downwind of a station powered on substances that could obliterate everything within a five mile radius if something went wrong. The China Syndrome is about exactly that, an accident at nuclear power plant that could spell disaster for California.

Kimberly Wells (Jane Fonda) is a roving reporter for a Californian news channel, who (thanks to her sexist bosses) is constantly relegated to ludicrous puff pieces (“Today a hot air balloon landed in downtown LA!”). Sent to a nuclear power plant, she stumbles upon the real news story she has waited her whole career for when she and camera-man Richard Adams (Michael Douglas) secretly film a near catastrophic incident. Investigations try to brush the event under the carpet, but shift supervisor Jack Godell (Jack Lemmon) knows corner-cutting and cost-saving is putting the whole of LA at risk – and, much against his inclination, he needs to speak out. 

The China Syndrome comes very much from that burst of 1970s conspiracy thriller films where shady big-business types are willing to throw almost anything under the bus in order to make a big bonus. It’s a film that takes a pop not only at the heartless bastards running a shoddy nuclear power plant (who couldn’t care less if the reactor is poorly welded together, so long as the money keeps rolling in) but also the hypocritical cowards running the media. The heads of the news channel kowtow swiftly to big business and are staggering in their sexism and race-to-the-bottom news coverage.

This film is as much about this brainless conformism as it is the dangers of nuclear power. The film is full of people who don’t want to rock the boat: half the people working at the plant would rather turn a blind eye to problems than pay the personal price of exposing them – even Jack Lemmon’s manager is the most reluctant whistleblower you’ll see in the movies. Fonda’s journalist may not be happy with her role as airhead eye-candy, but she will play the game in order to get ahead in the industry the role – and many of her media comrades seem almost totally lacking in any journalistic instincts. The film is bookended by inane TV coverage and advertising, a condemnation of an America that doesn’t ask questions and is sleepwalking towards catastrophe.

This catastrophe is, of course, extremely close – the power plant nearly goes into meltdown because a single dial gets stuck on a high reading, leading the control room to believe the nuclear rods are about to get flooded rather than nearly being exposed. Bridges mines a heck of a lot of tension from this crisis – told entirely from the perspective of the control room – as workers react with both stressed fear and a practised professionalism to a crisis that could become a disaster. Its part of a film where regular joes are generally professional and good at their jobs, but are let down and betrayed by the culture encouraged by the higher-ups.

Some of these themes, however, get a bit muddied in the film’s middle third, which gets bogged down way too much in nuclear theory, committee meetings, slow explanations of different types of weld, and dry lectures on the functioning of nuclear energy. While it is admirable that the film has no score, you can’t help but feel that a little music here to add some drama to Lemmon looking at x-rays or Fonda staring at diagrams could have helped pump up the tension. 

But it all gets paid off by the sudden (and surprising) shift to action and drama in the film’s final third, kickstarted by a surprisingly gripping car chase between Jack Lemmon’s quiet station manager and some shady goons hired by the company. Suddenly the film is powering through a tense series of set pieces that both feel like a different movie, while still a natural progression of the stakes.

Bridges directs the film very well. Each scene is calmly and coolly assembled, and he has a great eye and ear for technology and the noises and motions of machinery, which dominate the film – even if the film is rather in love with these background sounds, which risk taking over the soundtrack. It’s all part of stressing the cold mechanicalism and lack of humanity throughout both these industries. Sometimes the foot comes off the gas a little too much – you could probably trim at least 15 minutes – but when it comes to the moments of tension he directs with sharp snappiness.

The acting is also sublime. Jane Fonda is extremely good as Kimberly Wells. Initially she seems as light and superficial as the stories she is forced to cover, but Fonda paints a clever picture of a woman squeezed into playing a role, but yearning for (and capable of) so much more, who when she finds her moment shows levels of determination and cunning you would never have expected. For all her desire to become a ‘proper’ journalist though, Wells is savvy enough to make sure she is being filmed from her good side… Fonda makes her a careerist who uncovers a sense of moral purpose. She also manages to bring real emotion to the role, making Kimberly Wells a character we swiftly connect with.

The movie however is stolen away by Jack Lemmon, brilliantly low-key and everyday as the shift manager who becomes an overwhelmingly reluctant whistleblower. Lemmon’s performance is a perfect study in smallness, of a quiet dignity. He’s got no desire to rock the boat, quietly stating that the “plant is his whole life” – but when stirred, his professional pride transforms into determination to do the right thing, even while his lack of magnetism makes him unpersuasive and hard to take seriously. It’s a terrific performance of low-key tragedy, with Lemmon building the tension with small flashes of resentment, fear, determination and disillusionment flashing across his face. It’s a great reminder of what a marvellous dramatic actor Lemmon was.

Expertly produced by Michael Douglas (who does sterling work in the third-banana role as the camera man overflowing with conviction), The China Syndrome may at times be dry, but it makes up for that with its moments of high drama and moral conviction. By and large it avoids hectoring and lecturing the audience (when not teaching us about nuclear power), and lets its points be soft-sold rather than banged home. With some terrific performances, it’s a film that still feels relevant today, and is a great example of the 1970s conspiracy thriller genre.

Sweet Smell of Success (1957)


Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster have no scruples and no morals in the dark exploration of American culture, Sweet Smell of Success

Director: Alexander Mackendrick

Cast: Burt Lancaster (JJ Hunsecker), Tony Curtis (Sidney Falco), Susan Harrison (Susan Hunsucker), Martin Milner (Steve Dallas), Sam Levene (Frank D’Angelo), Barbara Nichols (Rita), David White (Elwell), Jeff Donnell (Sally), Joe Frisco (Herbie Temple), Emilie Meyer (Lt Harry Kello)

Is there a more cynical film in all the world than Sweet Smell of Success? Is it any wonder that the preview audiences, settling down to watch what they expected to be a Tony Curtis light comedy, went crazy? But Sweet Smell of Success is a film that captures the sweaty desperation of show-business, and the cut-throat ambitions of Manhattan. It’s a brutal, sharp, vicious black comedy, in which all our heroes are vile and everything can be bought and sold.

JJ Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) is a newspaper columnist, so influential that the slightest mention in his column can make or break careers. He rules the New York politics and arts scene with a ruthless fist – and press agents like Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) will do anything to get even the slightest sniff of a mention in the column. Hunsucker has a job for Falco: Hunsecker’s sister Susan (Susan Harrison) wants to marry jazz musician Steve Dallas (Martin Milner), and Hunsecker doesn’t approve – he wants the relationship finished. Falco may feel some qualms – but they don’t last long, and he’ll do anything he can to wreck the couple’s happiness.

Sweet Smell of Successis all about the grimy effort and lack of morals that sit under the surface of getting to that success. Because to achieve it in the big time you need to be as sinister, controlling and bullying as Hunsecker – and to try and get up there you need to be as conniving and weaselly as Falco. Both these characters are, in their own ways, almost totally reprehensible – and the film makes no attempt whatsoever to mitigate this. The film is appallingly ruthless and cynical, and its two lead characters are, to put it bluntly, complete shits and total bastards.

It’s a film that says the American Dream doesn’t even remotely exist in the way we like to think it can – that there is as much class and control in America as there ever was in the old world. And being decent and honest doesn’t get you anywhere – and sometimes even being conniving and doing whatever you’re told to do doesn’t either. It totally captures the bitter, cruel and imposing mood of New York high society at the time – unwelcoming, unfriendly, judgemental and brutal. For all its glamourous New York location, who on earth would look at this and say “I fancy a piece of that” – it’s the exact opposite of what American films often try to do.

This was Alexander Mackendrick’s first American film, and it’s perhaps his outsider’s eye that really helps the film to really go for it. Mackendrick’s Ealing films weren’t afraid to pull their punches – from the commentary on the corruption of big business in The Man in the White Suit to the dark comedy of The Ladykillers – and (working with genius cinematographer James Wong Howe) he creates one of the darkest (in every sense) film noirs ever. His camera prowls along the streets and he wonderfully captures both the bustle of New York clubs, and the menace of New York behind the glamour. He also shoots both Curtis and Lancaster in a way they never had been shot before – and both of them rise to the richness of the material to give possibly their finest performances.

Burt Lancaster’s Hunsecker is a total monster: a bully and a sadist, vicious and aloof. Lancaster’s stillness here really sells the part – he doesn’t move, everyone else does – and the film brilliantly uses his slightly patrician voice. Hunsecker’s cold, dead-eyed stare pierces through character and desperation, and the contempt he feels for Falco (and every other character) is there in every moment, from looks to subtle physical put-downs (even lighting a cigarette is a power play, laced with an almost sexual sense of control). He “loves this city” because he owns the place, lock stock and barrel. Hunsecker only has one weak point – his clearly incestuous love for his sister – but even that is just the excuse for more controlling, domineering behaviour in which people are only objects for his manipulation.

And no-one is more willing to be manipulated than Tony Curtis’ brilliantly sycophantic Sidney Falco. Hunsecker is vile, but Falco might be worse. Is there a less likeable lead in a movie? Falco has no principles, no morals, no conscious – he’s the worst sort of follower, the sort of kid who stands behind the bully and laughs loudest at every joke. On top of that, Curtis is incompetent and untrusted – the scene where he attempts to blackmail another columnist and is firmly smacked down is wonderful for its discomfort. Curtis is twitchy, desperate, always on the move and will do anything – from lying to planting evidence to openly pimping his secretary. Far from the “young man working his way up” that you might expect, he’s a ruthless, unprincipled opportunist, perhaps the best inverted presentation of American can-do ambition you’ll see on screen.

That’s where the film really works: the scenes between Hunsecker and Falco are simply marvellous: Hunsecker savouring every verbal blow and smooth smackdown – and Falco sitting, edgy and jittery, on the edge, laughing loudly to try and make sure he doesn’t become the target. The marvellous restaurant scenes – with Hunsecker barely able to bring himself to acknowledge Falco’s existence – are the film’s heartbeat: brutal battles where Hunsecker wins everything and lives are destroyed. “A man has just been sentenced to death” Falco gleefully points out – “You’re dead son. Get yourself buried” is Hunsecker’s smoother version.

Ah yes that dialogue. Written by Clifford Odets at incredibly short notice (pages were literally taken straight from the typewriter to the actors’ hands in front of the camera), this might be one of the sharpest, waspiest films ever written. So many quotable lines, with Curtis and Lancaster relishing every dynamic and scintillating one-liner that the script gives them (and there are many). “I’d hate to take a bite out of you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic” – who wouldn’t want dialogue like that? It’s a sensationally written film, and every scene offers a new delight.

It’s not perfect of course. Milton and Harrison are as lightweight and forgettable as Lancaster and Curtis are sensational, too strait-laced and conventional to really seize the interest. The second half of the movie is weaker than the first: the pay-off doesn’t quite match the build-up. Really a film that just followed Hunsecker and Falco about as they went about their daily work, without the sister plotline, might have been even more effective. But it’s probably a quibble on a film that works every time – and has such dense, wonderful dialogue you’ll want to wind back most of the scenes to watch them again. And those two lead performances: simply perfect.

Ace in the Hole (1951)


Kirk Douglas surveys the horrors he has willingly unleashed in Billy Wilder’s bitter beyond belief media satire

Director: Billy Wilder

Cast: Kirk Douglas (Chuck Tatum), Jan Sterling (Lorraine Minosa), Robert Arthur (Herbie Cook), Porter Hall (Jacob Q. Booth), Frank Cady (Mr Federber), Richard Benedict (Leo Minosa), Ray Teal (Sheriff Kretzer), Robert Arthur (Herbie Cook)

Ace in the Hole was Wilder’s first big flop as a director. It’s not surprising that the media savaged it and claimed it was ridiculous. This is a film way, way, way ahead of its time, a stinging indictment of the ruthless obsession of the media with selling stories rather than reporting them, of spinning out crises to sell newspapers. It’s Fake News decades ahead of its time, a gutter journalism film released at a time when the media was totally trusted. Is it any wonder contemporary critics claimed they couldn’t recognise their trade here? Now it’s practically the way every journalist on film is portrayed.

Charles Tatum (Kirk Douglas) is a big-city reporter fired by a host of newspapers for offences ranging from alcoholism to libel to sleeping with the boss’s wife. Arriving in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he wangles a job on the local paper aimed to eventually encounter a story he can spin into a national media sensation, a crisis with a “human interest story”. A year later, he stumbles upon a cave-in that has trapped a man, Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), below the surface. Believing this is the story that he can get him back his seat at the high table, Tatum seizes control of the rescue operation, insisting a quick and easy plan is dropped in favour of a week long public drilling operation. Tatum’s reporting of the event becomes a media sensation and in days the abandoned town is full of reporters and rubberneckers.

What’s astonishing here is that this is one of the few films I can think of that is totally devoid of sentiment or hope. It’s ruthlessly cynical where virtually every character is irredeemable, and no suggestion of redemption exists. The only major character who seems normal is Leo himself, although that is largely because his bland non-descriptness (well portrayed by Richard Benedict) and childlike, homespun dependency on those around him make him a near blank anyone can project feelings onto. Wilder’s hard-bitten cycnicsm, bordering on anger with the media and their audience, pulls no punches without descending into polemic – ironically it keeps the human interest, while never compromising the dark satire.

It’s a savage attack not just on journalism and the mass media, but human nature itself. The media stirs up a storm of excitement and drama around one man’s fate solely to make money – and Tatum himself is the worst form of manipulative gutter press, with no interest in truth, investigation or even journalism, only a shark-like love of the main event. But Wilder shows that the people just lap up this exploitative press storm – the growing crush of on-lookers, the bated breath as each update comes in, the literal carnival set up on the site, specially chartered trains – everyone wants to feel part of this story, to vicariously feel the emotions of those the event is actually happening to. It’s virtually a prediction of Twitter.

At the heart of this is Tatum, played with maximum forcefulness and dark charisma by Kirk Douglas in surely one of his finest performances. What Douglas does here that is so skilful is to never make Tatum an out-and-out villain. He plays it with a subtle suggestion of self-loathing: the quietly suggested need for alcohol, the revulsion he feels for those around him whom he sees as reflections of his own moral emptiness. At the same time, if Tatum has morals he long since stopped listening to them. Every time it looks like Tatum has realised what he has done, he reverts back to keeping the story going. Douglas’s dynamism also brings Tatum’s relentless drive and determination to life with real power. Tatum is easily able to cow, bully and bribe those around him into making him the funnel of the story. Never once do you question why all around Tatum bow to his will – his force of personality is so great you have no choice. Despite the hints of self-loathing, Douglas isn’t afraid to play Tatum as a reprehensible man – not bad or evil, just totally self-serving and selfish.

Jan Sterling I was less sure of at first, but actually this is another incredibly brave performance of uncompromising hardness. Lorraine is trapped in a marriage with a man she does not love, in the middle of nowhere, having believed she was marrying into something very different. But even with those provisos, her lack of interest in her husband’s safety and her focus on getting as much cash out of the tourists as possible (to finance her departure to the city) is astonishingly ruthless. Out of all the characters, she is the one who is immediately aware of what game Tatum is playing, and (with his advice) she is the most capable of exploiting the public excitement for her own gain. While she has elements of a femme fatale, Sterling’s performance seems more bitterly cynical than manipulatively feminine.

Wilder’s cynical and hard-nosed film is a brilliantly written deconstruction of the American dream, packed with wonderful lines and sharply drawn characters. It scrapes away at the surface of its characters to reveal the rot underneath – even Tatum’s photographer Herbie degrades from idealist to acolyte – and then blames us all for the mess. It shows us the disgusting ease with which our feelings can be manipulated to sell anything, then shows how gleefully we want to be feel part of an event: shots are filled with details like spectators carrying candy-floss while praying for Leo’s safety.

And then there is a complete lack of redemption – or even suggestion of it. Decent characters are peripheral, and far outnumbered by Tatum and his like. The resolution of the crisis does not go according to Tatum’s plan. It’s almost astonishing in its bleakness and in Tatum’s confused reaction to it and his lack of clear-cut guilt. Again, it’s Douglas’ skill and Wilder’s uncompromising direction: I actually had to watch it twice to catch the shading Douglas and Wilder give Tatum’s reactions to events finally going out of his control – and I still don’t know to what extent self-loathing trumps frustration and disappointment.

This is a masterful media satire and a wonderful, thought-provoking film, surely one of Wilder’s finest. It should be a lot better known than it actually is. I haven’t stopped thinking about it in days and I’m already looking forward to seeing it again. And, if anything, it is getting more relevant every single day.