Word: woodwards
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Your article on All the President's Men affords a renewed view of the mentality of Mr. Nixon. The dangerous moods that he portrayed in his last days as President show Americans how thankful we should be for people like Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee. As bad as the press might appear at times, its vigilance is a blessing...
Save for this pale ghost, Woodward (Robert Redford) and Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) have no competition in this film. Perhaps that made the director over-confident. No attempt is made to dip beneath the surface of these men or their relationship, and, perhaps, there is nothing beneath the surface. But we never really know how much these men are driven by personal ambition, how much by moral vigor, how much by pure thrill of the chase. Do they even like each other? They never discuss the wider significance of the case or their handling of it, only tactics and never strategy...
...these men as crusty old newsmen in the Front Page tradition, driving their cub reporters hard but backing them to the hilt in a confrontation with outsiders. Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards) bears the brunt of these cliches. He puts Bernstein and Woodward under the most pressure--one of the best scenes in the movie comes when, the morning after a story linking Haldeman to the break-in has been denied by every conceivable source, he screams out "Woodstein!" across the newsroom and, for once in the film, the room becomes deadly quiet. Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda might have been...
...investigation documented here--the convictions of Hunt and Liddy, the sentencing of Segretti, and the resignation of Nixon. Somehow the effect is something like the announcements of the sentences that used to be read out at the end of Dragnet. It is good to be reminded where Woodward and Bernstein led the nation, good to be reminded that these men werehumbled. But in a sense that was an entirely different story. It is perhaps naive for the film to imply that all that was needed to bring the President down were newspaper articles, however hard-hitting...
...even, to some, the System itself. Now we are being told about the Inner Mysteries of Watergate--though I imagine there are at least six more veils to go. The new heroes are the men on the inside, who had little to do with the public spectacle--pre-eminently Woodward and Bernstein...