Word: holden
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...movie's message is simple enough: Howard Beale (Peter Finch), the once popular anchorman of a national newscast, falls victim to the twin evils of booze and declining ratings, and Max Schumacher (William Holden), the head of UBS News, tells him he has to go. Suffering a momentary nervous breakdown, Beale goes on air to announce that in a week's time he will shoot himself on-camera. He has, he says, run out of the "bullshit" that kept him going...
...future and pretended it was a projection of what might happen if certain current trends go unchecked? All of that is true enough, but the real problem is that Chayefsky has betrayed his own truest instinct about the medium. At one point he has William Holden, the news executive who functions as the movie's superego, inform Faye Dunaway, the ratings-mad exec who is its id, that the trouble with TV is that it reduces everything to banality. That may well be true. But at every turn Chayefsky's plot invests television with a sinister power...
...having said all this, one must make a final admission about Network. There is a lunatic energy about it. Every once in a while, Chayefsky abandons the struggle to dramatize his ideas and has somebody, usually Holden, just turn to the camera and spout off. In those moments, his concern - and sometimes his mother wit - comes blazing through and the picture takes on a life not found in safe, sane, well-calculated movies...
...rest of the cast is just about as proficient. Mark Szpak as Hero, Pseudolus's master who falls in love with a woman from the House of Lycus who is to be sold as a courtesan, plays the part well as a Roman Holden Caulfield, rolling and tumbling all over himself in first love. Yet there's another side to him too, cajoling Pseudolus into risking his relatively safe position--for freedom to be sure--but also for Hero. The song "Free" is a real high-point, spotlighting the two best male singers n the cast. Pseudolus has convinced himself...
...charges against the mercenaries ranged from specific atrocities (murder, assault, arson, sabotage, rape and robbery) to vague accusations of "meeting with the traitor Holden Roberto" (head of the defeated National Front for the Liberation of Angola−F.N.L.A.). The "crime" of being a mercenary, charged against all 13 defendants, is not denned in Angolan law, but most foreign observers were impressed by at least the surface fairness of the proceedings...