In Network

I first decided to re-watch the 1976 film, Network, in tribute to the late Robert Duvall. Of course I (like pretty much everyone) had seen the movie when it first came out. This dark satire of the television news industry—written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet—was a major hit in a very good year for movies. When Oscar nominations were revealed, Network was up for nine awards, including best picture. The top winner turned out to be Rocky, but other big films of that year included All the President’s Men, Bound for Glory, and Taxi Driver, so the competition was clearly fierce. Network won for its original screenplay, and also nabbed three of the four acting awards: for Beatrice Straight as a cast-off wife, for Faye Dunaway as a TV exec who’ll do anything to manufacture a hit show, and (most memorably) for Peter Finch. Finch, playing the newscaster whose firing because of low ratings sends him mentally ‘round the bend, was the first star ever to win an Oscar posthumously. He suffered a heart attack in January 1977, just after a TV talk-show appearance to promote the film, and died at age 60.

 Finch’s big line in Network—”I’m as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"—is still with us. And so, of course, is the idea that TV execs (like the one effectively played by Duvall in the film) are more concerned with ratings than with quality content. But in many respects, Network surprised me. First, of course, is the fact that television today is far from what it was in the 1970s. Back then there existed a limited number of major networks: CBS, NBC, ABC. Much of the American public got its news from respected anchors like Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor. The film invents a fourth network, UBS, for dramatic purposes: when its longtime anchorman goes berserk and starts hollering out of windows, a large slice of the nation pays attention. Today, by contrast, our news sources are so widespread and so splintered that it’s hard to imagine public attention being focused on a single individual in quite the same way.

 I was also surprised by the film’s shifting tone. From what I’ve read, this was quite deliberate on the part of Chayefsky and Lumet, with low-key realistic scenes at the start of the film gradually giving way to stylized moments full of manic energy. A beautifully played early scene features Finch, as the newly-fired anchorman, and the great William Holden as his longtime pal who’s now the news division president. Two veteran newsmen, they commiserate with one another about how times have changed, making jokes to cover their mutual dismay.

 But then Faye Dunaway’s Diana Christensen enters the picture, and the whole mood changes. She sees in the crazed on-air pronouncements of Howard Beal (Finch) a new direction for TV news broadcasts, and quickly turns a hard news show into “infotainment,” of a sort that (alas) would not be so surprising today. Moreover, while spinning journalism as a form of public amusement, she also captures the heart of the long-married Holden, with predictable results. Late in the film, as Diana looks for new stars-in-the-making, there are some pointed references to a group of Symbionese Liberation Army-style young radicals who’ll do pretty much anything to be featured on TV. It’s very dark and, sometimes, very funny. Though the Patty Hearst era and the near-shooting of President Ford by Squeaky Fromme seem like ancient history now, Network brings them back to those of us old enough to remember.  

 

Animal Attraction: Dog Day Afternoon

We’re fast approaching the time of year when the Library of Congress announces the new inductees for its National Film Registry, honoring movies with cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance. I’ve just watched a 1975 film that made the list back in 2009. Dog Day Afternoon can be said to have historical significance, because it’s based on an actual true-crime incident that was covered in Life magazine in 1972. But with the great Sidney Lumet at the helm, it’s also an aesthetic marvel.

 Lumet’s long film career began in 1957, with the tightly focused, highly suspenseful jury room drama, Twelve Angry Men. Lunet directed several films based on classic American plays, including A View from the Bridge and Long Day’s Journey into Night (a powerful version of Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical stage production). There were lighter works too (he put on screen The Wiz, the “ghetto” version of The Wizard of Oz that had been a huge Broadway hit), but he was perhaps best known for crime thrillers, like Serpico and his very last project (in 2007), Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.  He was four times nominated for Best Director Oscars, but could never quite eke out a personal win. (He did receive a richly deserved honorary Oscar in 2004, seven years before his death at age 86.) His most honored film was probably Network, a cutting satire of the TV industry that was nominated for major 9 Oscars and won four, though Rocky took home the top prize. I personally have a special love for his late career film, Running on Empty (1988), the poignant story of a counterculture couple whose son (the late River Phoenix) tries to opt out of their nomadic lives as fugitives from the FBI. On that film, as often happened for Lumet, his writer and lead actor got nominated for Oscars even though he himself didn’t.

 Dog Day Afternoon is surely one of Lumet’s mid-career best, made just after Murder on the Orient Express and before Network. It’s the story of a bank robbery, but with a significant difference. In most bank heist films, going back to the very early days of cinema, there’s a lot of money at stake: the bad guys either get it or don’t. If they succeed in robbing the bank, they either get away or (more often) are foiled at the very last minute, thus proving that crime doesn’t pay. But Dog Day Afternoon is much more of a character study: at its center is a loser who’s desperately trying to untangle a messy domestic situation by funding his male lover’s sex change operation. His solution is to rob a Brooklyn bank, one that turns out to have virtually no cash on hand. As the tension and the temperature rise, Sonny tries to achieve his goals by taking a clutch of bank-tellers hostage: their emotions range from fear to anger to perverse amusement. There’s also another gunman on the scene, the eerily silent Sal (John Cazale), who seems violent enough to commit mayhem.

 The Brooklyn neighborhood re-created on film by Lumet becomes part of the action, as counterculture crowds sympathetic to the hapless Sonny gather in the street to heckle the swarming NYPD cops and straight-arrow FBI guys. Though movies are, of necessity, filmed out of sequence, the mood of this one is so well-sustained that we feel we are on the spot, watching it all unfold in real time as the weather gets hotter, Sonny gets sweatier (inside the bank, the air conditioning has been dismantled), and the possibility of bloodshed becomes more and more likely. 

 

Naked Lunch: "Humanoids from the Deep"

The making of Humanoids from the Deep was not Roger Corman’s finest hour. After the film was in the can, Roger decided more nudity was in order. So he sacked director Barbara Peeters, and brought on an underling to shoot additional footage. When I was reminiscing about Corman days with filmmaker John Sayles, he colorfully described for me the end results: “There’s a blonde woman who’s attacked in a tent, and there’s a brunette woman with much larger breasts who runs out of the tent after she’s attacked.” The crude addition caused a major brouhaha, with star Ann Turkel unsuccessfully trying to block the film’s release and the L.A. Times using it as the centerpiece of an article decrying the low status of women in the film industry.

In a way, we can blame Sidney Lumet. Lumet, who died April 9, was a brilliant director known for his unsparing approach to his subject matter. Among his many dramas, I’ll personally remember Twelve Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, and Running on Empty. But he also earned a place in cinema history for making a film that led directly to the demise of the infamous Production Code. Through that code, first established in the 1930s, the Motion Picture Association of America had long tried to protect public morality by way of strict rules about what could and could not be shown on screen.

Lumet’s The Pawnbroker was the first Hollywood studio movie to show bare breasts and still receive the MPAA seal of approval. This 1965 drama, depicting a Holocaust survivor’s struggle to forge a new life in New York, at one point cuts powerfully between an inner-city customer’s attempt to entice the pawnbroker with her naked body and his searing memory of his wife’s humiliation at the hands of her Nazi captors. Because this pivotal sequence violated the Production Code’s longstanding ban on the display of private parts, the film was at first denied its seal. But the MPAA, recognizing The Pawnbroker’s seriousness of purpose, belatedly issued an exemption.

One year later, when Jack Valenti took over as MPAA president, he had to dicker over the raw language in Mike Nichols’ film version of the Edward Albee stage hit, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The next issue to surface involved the flashes of nudity in Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Because Valenti—a blunt, pragmatic Texan—hated the need for legalistic wrangling about matters of taste, he ended up tossing out the old code. It was replaced with a new ratings system meant to keep youngsters away from grown-up fare while allowing adults freedom of choice.

So Sidney Lumet should be remembered as the guy who started Roger Corman on the path to T&A glory. Without him, Stripped to Kill II would never have looked the same.