Sidney Lumet (1976)

When a film has an original screenplay it’s unusual for the screenplay’s author to be considered the film’s auteur.  Network is an exception.  It’s often referred to, and very understandably, as a Paddy Chayefsky picture rather than a Sidney Lumet picture – despite Lumet’s high profile, particularly as a director of movies set in New York City, where Network chiefly takes place.  Chayefsky made his name in the early 1950s as a writer of teleplays, most notably Marty, which aired in 1953 and which Chayefsky adapted for the big screen two years later.  Following the huge success of Delbert Mann’s movie, Chayefsky stopped writing for TV, concentrating instead on film and theatre.  In Network he bites, and bites again, the hand that first fed him.  Yet he’s also vaguely nostalgic for a vanished golden age of television.

Howard Beale (Peter Finch), a distinguished veteran of TV journalism, is the evening news anchor on the Union Broadcasting System (UBS) channel.  The show’s ratings are in decline.  Beale is told by his old friend, Max Schumacher (William Holden), head of the UBS news department, that he’s to be fired.  In response, Beale announces on air that he’ll commit suicide, also on air, in a few days’ time.  The channel tries to get rid of Beale immediately; Max, who wants him to have a farewell befitting his honourable career, persuades UBS bosses to change their mind and his colleague to apologise.  In the event, Beale is the opposite of contrite and goes off script to tell viewers that, for example, ‘Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living.  If we can’t think up reasons of our own, we have the God bullshit’.  His extraordinary pronouncements boost UBS evening news ratings.  The channel’s bosses decide to exploit this but viewing figures soon plateau.  Ambitious Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), from entertainment programming, offers to develop Howard Beale’s off-the-wall potential.  Diana’s boss, Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), bullies the UBS executive to move news into the entertainment division, and to get rid of Schumacher instead of Beale.

‘The Howard Beale Show’, transmitted live and starring ‘the mad prophet of the airwaves’, is soon UBS’s most-watched programme.  When Beale learns that UBS’s parent company, the Communications Company of America (CCA), is to be bought out by a Saudi Arabian conglomerate, he urges the White House to quash the takeover, causing panic in the UBS boardroom.  In an urgent one-to-one with Beale, CCA chairman Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty) explains that multinational corporate hegemony is the future and convinces him to change his tune, which Beale does.  His revised message depresses ratings but Jensen won’t fire him.  Christensen, Hackett and others decide to kill two birds with one stone:  they arrange for Beale to be assassinated on air, thereby giving impetus to the new series of another Christensen brainchild, ‘The Mao-Tse Tung Hour’, a docudrama featuring exclusive footage of the terrorist activities of a group calling themselves the Ecumenical Liberation Army.  Beale is shot dead on live TV.  The film’s voiceover narrator (Lee Richardson) concludes, ‘This was the story of Howard Beale: the first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings’.

Network’s default mode of speech is prolix rant.  This isn’t just the way in which Howard Beale and Max Schumacher express themselves.  Even those on screen for only a few minutes – Jensen, Max’s wife Louise (Beatrice Straight) – spend much of that time declaiming.  No one ever gets told to shut up by the person on the receiving end of a rant, however long it goes on for, however high-intensity the characters’ confrontation is meant to be.  When Max tells his wife of twenty-five years that he’s having an affair with Diana Christensen, Louise gives him what for, especially when he says that he loves Diana.  Then, in answer to his wife’s question does Diana love him, Max replies:

‘I’m not sure she’s capable of any real feelings.  She’s television generation.  She learned life from Bugs Bunny.  The only reality she knows comes to her from over the TV set.  She’s carefully devised a number of scenarios for all of us to play, like the movie of the week.  My God, look at us, Louise.  Here we are, going through the obligatory middle of act two, the “scorned wife throws peccant husband out” scene.  But don’t worry, I’ll come back to you in the end.  All her plot outlines have me leaving her and coming back to you, because the audience won’t buy a rejection of the happy American family …’

Throughout all that – and the quote isn’t nearly the whole of Max’s response – his wife suspends her fury and listens.

The autocracy of words is even better illustrated when Max and Diana have sex.  She’s chattering away about TV schedules when she suddenly orgasms and cries out.  It’s the briefest of interruptions:  she then resumes her monologue.  Chayefsky no doubt intends this to make fun of Diana’s wrong-headed order of priorities but he’s in no position to lampoon verbosity.  Everyone in Network speaks in the same voice – Paddy Chayefsky’s.  Frank Hackett, supposedly a philistine, corporate hard nut, describes Arthur Jensen’s insistence that Beale stay on air as ‘inflexible’ though expressed ‘with a certain sinister silkiness’.  A few lines later, someone asks Hackett to confirm that Jensen’s position is ‘inflexible’ and Hackett replies, ‘Inflexible, intractable and adamantine’.  Chayefsky wants us to hear not just the words he opted for but the words he could have used – to admire, as well as his rhetorical flair, his vocabulary.

Some things in the script feel predetermined.  When Max first tells Howard he’s getting the push, the two old friends get drunk together:  in their cups, they joke sarcastically about death as an attention-grabber on live TV – how about a suicide-of-the-week show, an execution-of-the-week show?  Beale duly threatens suicide on air, is duly executed on air.  After telling Louise that he doubts Diana is capable of real feelings, Max, preparing to walk out on Diana, informs her that ‘I’m your last contact with human reality … the only thing between you and the shrieking nothingness you live the rest of the day’.  The film repeatedly tells us how things are before confirming how things are – as if that were a shock revelation.

A bigger problem in Network is the disconnection of its ‘realistic’ and fantastical aspects.  The relentless speechifying, though not believable, is clearly meant to be.  The tyranny of TV show ratings that triggers Howard Beale’s one-man-stand is deplorably ‘true’.  Yet the context and style of Beale’s performances are deliberately OTT.  He’s top of the bill on a news show whose supporting cast includes a psychic (‘Sybil the Soothsayer’) and so on.  Imparting messianic words of wisdom, he regularly swoons and falls to the ground on camera.  Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet appear to think wild exaggeration means anything goes – but Beale as a character makes no sense.  In the early scenes between him and Max, and in the TV newsroom, Beale is as supposedly real as everyone else.  It’s a given that he’s mentally ill – in order for us to be appalled by UBS’s exploitation of his mental illness – but the film, once Beale embarks on his evangelism, loses interest in who he is, and what’s going on in his life, when he’s not performing.

When Beale first disparages Hackett and the CCA on live TV it has no consequences – never mind you’d expect these vested interests to draw the line at such negative publicity.  The second time, when he inveighs more expansively against corporate skulduggery, it’s suddenly a crisis.  It’s not at all clear why Beale obeys Jensen’s instructions – except that Chayefsky needs him to.  Late on in the film, there’s mention of the terms of UBS’s contract with ‘the Beale Corporation’.  The company has presumably been set up on the back of Beale’s subversive TV appearances but we get no idea of his personal involvement in it or if it’s run virtually independently by another group of his exploiters.  Beale’s ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!’ becomes a popular mantra.  Lumet shows windows opening in a high-rise building, residents leaning out and yelling the phrase, which Beale also uses to rabble-rouse the TV studio audience.  Is the public fired up by what he says or merely, mindlessly lapping it up as entertainment?  Since their apparent ardour doesn’t go anywhere, you guess it must be the latter but Chayefsky’s scattershot invective is more unfocused than Beale’s.

Diana Christensen’s ruthless drive to self-advancement impels her to come up with ideas more outlandish than ‘The Howard Beale Show’ like ‘The Mao Tse-Tung Hour’.  The Ecumenical Liberation Army (ELA) is presumably based on the Symbionese Liberation Army, the small, militant, far-left outfit that actually operated in the US at the time Chayefsky wrote Network and is best remembered for their kidnapping of Patty Hearst.  Unlike their real-life inspiration, the ELA leadership signs a contract with a mainstream TV channel to promote their activities – so does Laureen Hobbs (Marlene Warfield), an Angela Davis-type radical:  in one sequence, she and her Black Panther-like colleagues, their agents and UBS lawyers vigorously negotiate syndication rights.  The scene is an off-the-wall highlight of Network but the thinking behind it is bizarre.  Chayefsky comes on like a barmy conspiracy theorist about the iniquity of television:  Diana, the ELA, Black revolutionaries, Saudi conglomerates – THEY’RE ALL IN IT TOGETHER …

Yet the Hobbs faction, the ELA etc are a subplot, ancillary both to the Beale story and to the soap-opera part of Network.  Soap, a form of TV that Chayefsky no doubt despised, is what Max Schumacher’s love life amounts to, for all the purple writing of it.  The scene between Max and his wife is especially incongruent with the energetic, flailing satire of Network; Max’s exchanges with his mistress are less out of place only because Chayefsky portrays Diana as the malign quintessence of TV.  Max is the closest the film gets to a man of conscience – he’s a man of guilty conscience, at least – but Chayefsky seems to want him to be more than that, to embody the medium’s lost innocence/idealism.  We’re told that, twenty-five years ago, Max and Howard both worked with Ed Murrow, whose name is enough to conjure up an era of heroism in TV journalism.  It happens to be the same era, of course, during which Chayefsky earned a living in television.

In 1977, Network became only the second film to win three of the four acting Oscars.  That feat, first achieved by A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), has only been achieved once since, by Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022).  It’s true the performances in Network look brilliant beside the ones in that latest hat-trick scorer but there’s not a lot to say about them, even so:  this is acting-your-socks-off acting that gets noticed but isn’t very interesting.  None of the trio of Oscar winners – Peter Finch (Best Actor), Faye Dunaway (Best Actress) and Beatrice Straight (Best Supporting Actress) – deserved to win (up against Robert De Niro (Taxi Driver), Liv Ullmann (Face to Face) and Jodie Foster (Taxi Driver)).  Watching Network again now, for the first time since I saw it on its original release, I was nevertheless surprised to find Dunaway’s performance the best in the film.  Back in the 1970s, I thought it obvious; I now think that was a comment more on Chayefsky’s conception of Diana than on Dunaway’s playing of her.  Lumet makes clever use of Dunaway’s high-strung, neurotic quality – and of her ability to come over sexy and icy at almost the same time.  Plenty of what she’s given to say is too blatant:  when Max first takes her out and asks if she has a favourite restaurant, voracious Diana replies, ‘I eat anything’.  But Dunaway has one advantage:  Diana, because she’s such a calculating, slippery customer, rarely rants.  Faye Dunaway’s vocal nuance makes a welcome change from the male shouting going on around her.  In a keen competition, Robert Duvall is the worst offender.  Network is in the Academy Awards records books for other reasons, too.  Peter Finch was the first actor (man or woman) to be awarded an Oscar posthumously.  (The circumstances of Finch’s sudden death in January 1977 make Howard Beale’s repeated on-air collapses more unhappy viewing than they should be.)  Beatrice Straight, appearing for a total of five minutes and two seconds, and Ned Beatty, on screen for just six minutes, broke the records for shortest winning performance and shortest nominated performance by a male actor, respectively.

Needless to say, Chayefsky also won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar.  In the Best Picture and Best Director categories, Network and Sidney Lumet lost out to Rocky and its director, John G Avildsen.  Some Lumet admirers think he was robbed and it’s a pity he never won a competitive Oscar – but it would have been a pity, too, for him to win for work well below his best.  Although Network may technically be a New York City picture, much of the action happens not just indoors but in anonymous settings – TV studios, meeting rooms.  Lumet has no scope for doing what he had done in Dog Day Afternoon just the previous year.  The nervous energy he created in that authentic NYC film is channelled here into making his actors pummel the audience with Chayefsky’s verbiage.  The screenplay was adapted for the stage by Lee Hall in 2017 and the result was another award-winner on both sides of the Atlantic.  Network is today considered by BFI ‘a prescient portrait of the media and entertainment world’s push for profit over quality, presaging the rise of reality television and a world in which anything is up for grabs’.  This dignifies the film’s noisy confusion, which doesn’t tell us much more than that Paddy Chayefsky is mad as hell.

3 July 2024