Sidney Lumet Movies: Network

After he died earlier this year, TCM devoted a night to showing Sidney Lumet movies, and so I used the opportunity to catch two of his movies that I hadn't seen all the way through before: Network and Dog Day Afternoon.

Network (1976)
***1/2

Two old newsmen, Max Schumacher and Howard Beale are out drinking. Depressed and drunk out of his mind, Howard Beale declares to Max that he's going to kill himself. Trying to diffuse the tension of the situation, Max jokes that Howard should kill himself on the air. It would be great for ratings. The next night, Howard is doing his nightly newscast for fictional station UBS and declares that he's being replaced due to low ratings and that he's going to kill himself on the air for his last show. Uh oh. This is how Sidney Lumet's well-acted and weirdly prophetic Network begins. Beale manages to convince his superiors to let him on the air again and apologize, only to break into a diatribe about how his real problem was that he "ran out of bullshit" to say every night. Initially the network is going to do the sensible thing, and get Beale off the air and hopefully let him get some help, but suddenly in comes Diana Christensen (Faye Dunnaway), the young upstart who's been charge of programming for the network, who sees potential in the freak show quality of Beale's on-air rantings. And so, with the blessing of network exec Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), Diana develops the idea to retool the network news, and turn Howard Beale into a "mad prophet."

UBS knows they have a hit on their hands when Beale shows up on the set a fidgety, sweaty mess and delivers the now famous "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" speech and viewers around the country actually open up their windows and start yelling along with him. They give him a brand new set with a live studio audience for him to speak his crazy babble to directly. Max is genuinely concerned that his friend really is every bit as insane as he's presenting himself on the air, and tries to say as much, but he doesn't hold much sway at the station anymore. In his dealings with Diana around the station, however, he becomes entranced with her, even though he pretty much has nothing but disdain for what she's done to his beloved news department. Diana says she used to have something of a girlhood crush on Max in his younger days, and so they enter into an affair (Max is very much married) together. Max actually confronts his devastated wife about Diana--in a brief part that won Beatrice Straight a Best Supporting Actress Oscar--and is really to abandon his marriage for her. It's somewhere around the time that Diana manages to continue talking about ratings points and the 18-54 demographic while they're in the middle of having sex that Max realizes that Diana is pretty much a hollow shell of a person whose job is her life and realizes he's made a huge mistake.

Meanwhile, Howard Beale runs afoul of the higher-ups when he devotes one of his mad prophet rants to a not yet publicly announced deal to sell UBS to a conglomerate of Saudi Arabians. Even though the crowd can't possibly care that much, they're completely sold on the whole Howard Beale schtick at this point, and so when he tells them to mail letters to the White House en masse opposing the deal that's exactly what they do. The big wigs are not pleased. Beale gets marched in front of the network president, played by long time character actor Ned Beatty, in a cool scene that takes place in a darkened boardroom that has kind of a surreal quality. The president seems to genuinely put the fear of God into Beale as he tells him to take back what he says (why will they listen to him? "Because you're on television, dummy!"). And so, Beale makes amends and can keep his show, but when his ratings start declining, his superiors begin to devise different plans for him, leading into the last act of the movie.

The biggest praise I can give Network is that it's almost terrifying in how predictive it is. The greying of the line between news and entertainment is something that can be seen on any of the 24 hour cable stations today. I have to admit that there's a lot of Glenn Beck to be seen in Howard Beale, even though Beale is a sympathetic figure and, conversely, I want to kick Glenn Beck repeatedly in the nuts every time I see a clip from his show. In the case of each of them, though, they represent people (one fictitious, one real) who got famous because they gave a voice to the fear and feeling of helplessness of the disillusioned populace of their era. You can argue that the policies Glenn Beck advocates aren't actually at all good for anybody except the moneyed interests that his show is supposed to run counter to, but that's a topic for a different blog post. The show successfully predicted the end of the era where everything that came out of the mouths of anchors like Walter Cronkite could be considered the God's truth, and the beginning of an era when news began to feel exploitative and when you couldn't really tell where fact ended and opinion began. In 1976, the filmmakers never could have known that one day Nancy Grace would be sitting behind what's ostensibly an anchor desk spending an hour yelling about how every high profile defendant is history's greatest monster regardless of the facts of the case. And yet, Howard Beale's retooled show in Network is pretty much cut from the same cloth.

Peter Finch, who won a posthumous Oscar, is excellent as Beale, and manages to make his anti-establishment rants something you want to cheer along with, while still establishing that he has well and truly lost it. William Holden is very good as Max, playing him as an Edward R. Murrow sort of figure (they actually mention that his character used to work with Murrow at CBS) in a world where Murrow's brand of journalism is no longer coveted. Faye Dunnaway successful makes her character alluring despite her unwavering single-mindedness for business. Robert Duvall does a solid job as well, playing basically what Tom Hagen from Godfather would be if he were a TV executive instead of a mob lawyer. Apparently Lumet and the screenwriter both had experience in television and it shows. It's a very intelligently written movie, and the accurate portrayal of the industry helps sell what's a pretty high-concept premise.

The movie isn't perfect. After the affair subplot plays out, Max seems to fade into the background a bit, which I don't think does justice to a character that is introduces alongside Beale at the top of the movie. There's a subplot where Diana convinces a group of left-wing revolutionaries to star in a sort of docu-drama that breaks up the flow of the rest of the movie and just isn't really that interesting. Towards the movie's conclusion, its initial plausibility kind of gets strained, as all of the network execs sit around and casually discuss the merits of killing a guy on the air. Granted, the whole point is that the network has pretty much fully abandoned all pretenses of dignity and good taste and are fully consumed by the quest for ratings, but it was a bridge too far for me. Speaking as someone who's pretty damn cynical, I wasn't quite prepared for the level of cynicism that the coldly abrupt ending is dripping with. It's a well directed movie from Sidney Lumet, although I think Dog Day Afternoon, which I'll review next is better.