Word: holden
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Several levels of dishonesty become apparent in Network. The film hits its deceitful best in its with which to identify. We have an Edward R. Murrow character in whore-number-one, Max Shumacher (William Holden), head of the news division. But unlike Murrow (who was virtuous both on and off the screen) Shumacher leaves his wife of 25 years and shacks up with whore-number-two, vice president for programming Diana Christenson (Faye Dunaway...
...Edgar Holden Ministry to Divorced Catholics Archdiocese of Newark...
...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...