Word: bruck
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...JERRY BRUCK'S hour-long documentary I.F. Stone's Weekly carries on in the spirit of the publication after which it is named: brief, to the point, black and white, without frills, honest, clear, and filled with Stone's energy and courage. Like Stone, Bruck uses a traditional narrative voice effectively, relying on the importance of his subject and an honest presentation to engage his audience...
...Bruck's film portrays the attitudes and devotion Stone brought to bear on his enterprise. "Every government is run by liars," Stone says. "Establishment reporters know a lot of things I don't know, but a lot of what they know isn't true." The film shows Stone in his small office, interrupting a piece to take a telephone subscription order, and shows Esther Stone, his wife and the Weekly's circulation manager, sorting bills on their living room table. Unfortunately, one thing the film never shows is a printed edition of the Weekly. Bruck missed an obvious opportunity...
...Stone's Weekly is crammed with devices of simultaneity simply because there are so many dimensions to the journalist's style and achievement. But the force of personality in Jerry Bruck's crisp, clear documentary is very simple: Stone is a kind of fanatic, a crazyman--squinting out at the world from behind thick glasses, he is dogged in his commitment to investigative reporting. In Washington, where lying is the local dialect, Stone has to be eccentric, avoiding the cocktail circuit and the large, compromised publications, working like mad to interpret volumes of rhetoric. He's a unique and admirable...
...Bruck seems nearly to adopt the tone and format of Stone's paper. The movie is compressed, ironic, a little crude in style, but vigorous and cutting in its anger. Stone used to box off conflicting quotations or incidental insights for ironic illustrative effect in the news letter, and Bruck does something similar here. He shows Stone making a general point about the dangers of newsmen getting chummy with their sources, then cuts away to a scene of Ron Ziegler playing tennis with an ABC correspondent, while Tricia Nixon looks on. He shows Stone elaborating on the general slipperiness...
...Stone's colleagues, including his wife Esther, circulation manager of the newsletter. I.F. Stone's Weekly would have been better if it had been longer, with more footage devoted to Stone's apprenticeship and the time, admittedly slight, that he spends away from work. But throughout, Bruck catches the same animating qualities that the artist David Levine did in his famous caricature of Stone lifting up the Capitol Dome-what Stone himself calls "that combination of maniacal zest and idiot zeal...