Word: pakula
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...principals?Robards, Jack Warden, who played Metro-editor Harry Rosenfeld, and Martin Balsam, who played Managing Editor Howard Simons?had to be present on the set every day because Pakula had decided to shoot the city room sequences in "deep focus." This meant that even when these players did not have any lines, they were visible in the background of most scenes. They coped as cheerfully as they could with the situation. Robards would often simply retire to "his"?that is, Bradlee's?office and read the books that had presumably helped shape the character...
...note of newspaper humor and camaraderie. The journalistic world is one where power asserts itself in human terms?with a joke or an epithet. It is also one where the troops can express their mildly mutinous feelings in a similarly easy manner. It seems to invite the visual treatment Pakula employed in the newsroom sequences, which is bright, open, healthy. That, in turn, makes even more vivid the sequences in which Pakula exercises his special gift for suggesting menace through indirect visual statement. When the reporters leave their oasis of light to pursue their investigations, Washington?that city of broad...
...compensation, Pakula has developed a series of incisive actors' moments that to a degree belie Hoffman's contention that this is not "an actor's film." Hal Holbrook is brilliant as Deep Throat, giving him an arrogance and condescension that make that famous nonperson's behavior explicable. So is Jane Alexander as the edgy mouse of a bookkeeper whom Bernstein persuades to talk about the slush fund at the Committee for the Re-Election of the President. Penny Fuller and Lindsay Anne Grouse appear as newspaperwomen who help out with leads at key moments?the former dizzily, the latter with...
...Pakula is not unwilling to take credit. He observes that he had "constant hassles with actors who were awed by the subject of the film and thought in an ideological frenzy they had to give it all they had. I've never seen so many experienced professionals overacting in my life." Redford is probably entitled to credit for submerging his actor's ego beneath his producer's needs and playing, as does Dustin Hoffman, as part of an ensemble...
...film as Redford; partly because he plays the more interesting character, his performance may well be more vividly remembered. At 38, Hoffman is the best character lead in the business; it seems impossible to imagine anyone else as Carl Bernstein. On the set Hoffman is a tough, uncompromising craftsman. Pakula's crablike approach to film making, which so unnerved Redford, was just fine with Hoffman, who thrives on improvisation. "I fight like hell with my directors," he says, "but this was a relatively pleasant experience...