Robert Redford’s Quiz Show is an elegant historical drama filled with a nostalgic love for a bygone era of television and of American culture. Though Quiz Show may not cover the most glamorous material imagined (it tells the story of a TV quiz-show-rigging scandal that eventually gets uncovered and revealed by the government), the clear love for the material helps this to become a highly effective drama.
I’ve written about a few post-Watergate thrillers recently (Klute, All the President’s Men) that have notable themes of conspiracy and paranoia throughout, and it’s hard not to make a connection between the Watergate scandal and this shift in the popular culture. Americans were really woken up to the realization that the government, and big institutions with a lot of influence and power, can be corrupt and insidious, can threaten traditional American values and beliefs.
Continue reading “2017 Movie #23: Three Days of the Condor (1975)”
Watching All the President’s Men is a pretty eerie experience right now, in February of 2017, with our own presidential scandal unfolding in front of us. It’s also a pretty educational experience, as someone unfamiliar with the process of investigative journalism, to see a behind-the-scenes look at the legwork, the self doubt, the paranoia, that goes into the kind of investigations that are unfolding at key journalistic outlets across the country right now.
Continue reading “2017 Movie #21: All the President’s Men (1976)”
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