Word: whore
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
Christenson comes off as a woman with no scruples, someone who spends the whole film creating ridiculous yet effective shows hoping to produce a "50 share" (a sample of the technocratic lingo that she uses incessantly and incomprehensibly throughout the film). She goes on to team up with whore-number-three, senior vice president Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), the technocrat who battles to the top, conducting a search and destroy mission against integrity...
...then there is the biggest whore of them all, anchorman Howard Beale (Peter Finch), who is supposed to be UBS's Cronkite, the difference being that he is instantly willing to cash in 30 years of journalistic integrity to transform the evening news into the Nuremberg rally of the airwaves...
...simply is false. Like it or not, Chayevsky, people who come out good-on-balance do exist and can triumph, even in networks. This film overlooks the Murrows, the Schorrs, even the Gabe Pressmans--and this oversight makes Network unlifelike and superficial. That the world is full of sellouts, whores and pimps does not mean that everyone is a sellout, whore or pimp...
...effort to show how the patriarchal system has placed a series of contradictory demands on women--viewing them at once as the all-giving earth mother, the chaste, swooning virgin and the corrupting whore--Rich careens into a long historical digression that verges on the paranoic. This is a problem feminist writers have had before, perhaps the unavoidable consequence of the effort to display the extent of women's oppression. But despite her extensive footnoting and bibliography, Rich begins to sound more extreme than most, her enthusiasm leading her to make contradictory and unsatisfying statements. At times, she seems...