Alan J Pakula (1976)
The film of the ‘Woodstein’ Watergate book, with a screenplay by William Goldman, is dominated by memories of the real thing. It’s hard to make such recent headline events suspenseful but this straightforward dramatisation is absorbing, nevertheless. When the excitement of the journalists’ investigation itself starts to run down, Alan J Pakula squeezes plenty out of the Washington Post management’s dilemma: whether or not to run Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s stories. Robert Redford as Woodward and especially Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein adapt smoothly to Pakula’s low-key narrative. The two stars’ very different acting styles blend well and capture the contrasts between the pair in terms of class, confidence and ambition. Goldman’s penchant for maverick blood brotherhood, although muted here, is still sufficiently in evidence to add a little spice to the otherwise cautious script. Redford and Hoffman may be too naturally charismatic to play ‘ordinary’ newshounds but that at least cancels out a patronising everyday-heroes treatment of Woodward and Bernstein.
As a celebration of the investigative scope afforded by the freedom of the American press, All the President’s Men is undercut somewhat by the repeated near-breakdowns in the protagonists’ pursuit of the truth, and by the fortuities that enable them to resume. The persistent soundtrack of telephones and disembodied voices speaking on them, doorbells and typewriters supplies a tense rhythm to scenes that often need it. As all roads lead increasingly clearly to the Oval Office, the film, like the original investigation, survives more and more on dogged attention to detail. Jason Robards is the Washington Post editor, Ben Bradlee; Jane Alexander is Judy Hoback, a main source for the information collected by Woodward and Bernstein; Hal Holbrook is Deep Throat. Ronald Ziegler, Spiro Agnew and Nixon himself make guest appearances from a television screen. The voice of the egregious John Mitchell is impersonated in a phone conversation.
[1970s]
