Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) go to the phones in ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN
ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (Alan J. Pakula, 1976)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Saturday, July 16, and Sunday, July 17
Series runs July 15 – August 3
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
BAMcinématek follows up the opening film in its “Four More Years: An Election Special” series, John Frankenheimer’s conspiracy noir, The Manchurian Candidate, with a very different kind of political thriller, Alan J. Pakula’s analog conspiracy neo-noir, All the President’s Men. Adapted by William Goldman from the book by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the breathless procedural follows two young reporters who may have stumbled onto a national story with international impact. Woodward (producer Robert Redford) is sent to cover a hearing involving five men who broke into Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate complex and soon finds himself and fellow reporter Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) caught in a cover-up that begins with the Committee to Re-elect the President (appropriately known as CREEP) and may lead all the way to the Oval Office. The wily veteran newspapermen at the Post — editors Harry M. Rosenfeld (Jack Warden) and Howard Simons (Martin Balsam) and executive editor Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards) — keep a close watch on the youngsters to make sure they don’t screw things up, admiring their hunger but worrying about their lack of experience. Woodward and Bernstein, whom Bradlee calls “Woodstein,” are polar opposites; Woodward is a handsome, conservative WASP, Bernstein a somewhat funny-looking liberal Jew perpetually smoking cigarettes, even in an elevator. But they make one of the greatest detective teams in the history of cinema, armed with notebooks and typewriters instead of guns, knocking on doors and making phone calls. But Redford and Hoffman — an urban take on Redford and Paul Newman from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which was also written by Goldman (Marathon Man, The Princess Bride) — turn doorways and landlines into intense objects of suspense. Redford’s hand and eye movements during several calls from his desk are utterly mesmerizing; don’t miss how he shifts dialing from one hand to the other without missing a beat. (Try it on an old rotary phone; it’s nearly impossible.) As the names keep getting bigger — from Hugh Sloan (Stephen Collins) and Maurice Stans to Charles Colson and John Mitchell (voiced by John Randolph) as the White House is implicated — the film gets better and better, building almost unbearable suspense even though we know what’s going to happen. But All the President’s Men is one of those movies you can’t stop watching, can’t switch away from when you chance upon it on television; every aspect of it is that good.
The Washington Post keeps a close eye on a big story in Alan J. Pakula’s breathless procedural
Pakula, master cinematographer Gordon Willis — who had previously collaborated on Klute and The Parallax View, which with All the President’s Men form the director’s unofficial “paranoia trilogy” — and cameraman Michael Chapman (who would go on to become DP for Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Fugitive) carefully craft each shot to deliver important information about the characters and the cover-up as the locations move from the brightly lit Post office to suburban Washington homes to a dark, dank garage where Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook) lurks to the Library of Congress, where Woodstein searches for a needle in a haystack, shot from above to highlight the absurdity of their quest. Redford and Hoffman play off each other with a magnificent naturalism that makes it easy to get behind them, while Warden, Balsam, and Bradlee add just the right amount of gruffness. The all-star cast also features Ned Beatty, Lindsay Crouse, F. Murray Abraham, Meredith Baxter, Dominic Chianese, an Oscar-nominated Jane Alexander (“If you guys could just get John Mitchell . . . that would be beautiful”), Robert Walden, Polly Holliday, and security guard Frank Wills as security guard Frank Wills, who discovered the break-in. The film is very much about words and added such phrases as “follow the money” and “non-denial denial” to the American lexicon. Nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Editing (Robert L. Wolfe), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Goldman) and winning for Best Art Direction, Best Sound, and Best Supporting Actor (Robards), the film pays homage to the way investigative journalism used to be done, with grit, determination, and cleverness rather than computers and cellphones, Twitter and blogs. The early scene in which Woodward and Bernstein run through the office in order to catch Bradlee before he leaves is as exciting as a good high-tech car chase. All the President’s Men is screening July 16 and 17, just before the Republican and Democratic National Conventions get under way; “Four More Years: An Election Special” continues through August 3 with such other gems as Emile De Antonio’s America Is Hard to See, Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate, Warren Beatty’s Bulworth, and Wolfgang Petersen’s In the Line of Fire.