Network

Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976)

For the first hour or so of Network, I didn't really understand what all the fuss was about. Yes, Lumet and Chayefsky have turned out to be prophetic, and that may explain the movie's continuing status, but not the contemporary praise (it was nominated for ten Oscars, and won four). The first hour is a decent movie, watchable if slow. But then, somehow, Lumet gets under your skin, and the more things go over the top, the more believable they become. It's a tricky line to walk, but Lumet (who was coming off the equally absurd, and even better, Dog Day Afternoon) does it with aplomb. The movie has flaws, no doubt about it, but Lumet takes the stew he's cooked up in the first hour and dishes it up rather nicely.

The center of the story is Howard Beale (Peter Finch, awarded the first posthumous Oscar in history for Best Actor here), an old anchorman who's about to be pulled off the air for bad ratings. The movie opens with him announcing that he's going to kill himself on the air the next evening to get some ratings. Max Schumacher (William Holden), his handler, is partially responsible; the two had held a booze-fueled session the night before when the idea was kicked around. I guess Max didn't figure Howard was taking him seriously. In any case, Max now has to run interference between Howard and Max's own boss, Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), who wants to can the entire news crowd; the whole department is bleeding money. Enter Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), a dramatic-series type who thinks she's got the solution both to Howard's insanity and Frank's problems with the ratings; she turns the nightly news show into a spectacle, with Howard as its centerpiece, billing him as the Mad Genius and letting him rant in front of a live studio audience. Meanwhile, she's put in charge of the news department, and when Diana starts an affair with Max, the whole thing has the feeling of a consolation prize. While we're at it, you can add in a whole slew of cameos (Ned Beatty famously said "never turn down a role; I worked one day on Network and got an Oscar nomination for it!" Indeed).

The part of this that works the best is the relationship between Max and Diana, with added bits of Max's wife (Beatrice Straight, who won an Oscar as well) as she finds out about the relationship and gives a stirring speech about how she's not going to give her husband up without a fight. (It might have worked better delivered to Diana, certainly, but it works well enough as is to have gotten her the gold). Once we get into the Mad Genius bit, that part of the story also really takes off, but it fragments soon after as we start to see some of Diana's other projects (it all ties in later, but feels almost like an afterthought). Still, it's fun, and watched today, almost eerie in its accuracy. Also worth noting for an early, uncredited performance by Lance Henriksen and the first (also uncredited) screen appearance of Tim Robbins. ***
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