My Favorite Films, Plague Edition (Volume 12): All the President’s Men

All the President’s Men (1976)

Directed by Alan J. Pakula

Starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford

All the President’s Men, the account of how two Washington Post reporters brought down Richard Nixon, is an endlessly gripping film. It is one of those rare birds like Titanic that, even though you know the ending, you get wrapped up in the process and caught up in the tension each time you watch it. It is only the occasional film that can do that, and is a testament to the tense, relentless pace of director Pakula and the performances of the two contrasting stars. We should recall that in 1976 Richard Nixon was still only two years into his unprecedented retirement, Vietnam still was a scar on society, and the Reagan/conservative/business oriented 80’s were still in the future. And I was entering college, missing the revolutionary student era of the 60’s but also the business-monetary fixations of the 80’s. The 70’s was a golden era of US cinema, liberated by 60’s activism but not yet completely in the thrall of the escapist blockbuster mentality of Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). This was the decade of Deliverance, Taxi Driver, The Godfather, Midnight Cowboy, and Raging Bull, all timeless monuments of US film making, and all made in a dark, intense style largely abandoned in the following decades. That a major studio would invest this sort of talent in a political nonfiction account of a divisive president’s fall remains a remarkable thing. Lucky for them (and us) it turned out to be an exciting film.

 All the President’s Men is not so dark as many of the great 70’s films, and is at heart a traditional Who Done It?, even though we know from the start who done it (Nixon). Yet, somehow, it is tense and thrilling throughout. In the classic American film tradition, there are real heroes here--reporters Woodward and Bernstein, who went on to famed, lucrative journalism careers following their reporting on Watergate. The film excitingly shows how they almost single-handedly kept the journalistic pursuit of the story alive, despite the best efforts of the Nixon administration, CIA, and FBI to squash it. The remarkable thing about the film is that we do not ever see the villains, at least not the major ones. Nixon, Haldeman, John Mitchell et. al. are viewed seen on historical TV clips on heard on the phone, but never appear on screen as traditional screen villains. In a way, these miscreants are even more menacing lurking in the shadows of the White House, out of view, just as they were in the mid-70’s. The few Nixon Republicans we meet live seem more hapless pawns of the big guys than threats in and of themselves, but this just shows that every dark plot needs willing stooges to carry it out.

The film plays on lots of dark-light motives—the Washington Post press room is brightly lit (openness, transparency), while the tips from White House insider “Deep Throat” come in a darkened garage, and most of the traffic in and out of the White House is shown in the dead of night, ably depicting the paranoid lack of trust in the Nixon administration. Much like the incessant machinery noise that made the capitalist critique of The Promised Land so effective, here the steady typewriter background creates its own nervous, tense soundtrack that captures the tension of a deadline-charged, macho newsroom. .

Redford and Hoffman are perfect as Woodward and Bernstein. For once Redford’s suburban good looks and lack of dramatic range do not weigh things down, as his pairing with the more nervous volcanic Pacino achieves a superb yin-yang, much as Dustin Hoffman did another calm, pretty blonde, Jon Voigt in Midnight Cowboy a few years earlier. It’s good to remember that Hoffman, Al Pacino, and Robert de Niro were contemporary titans in those early years of their careers, between The Graduate, The Godfather (I and II), Scarface, Serpico, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Straw Dogs, and Kramer vs. Kramer. As edgy as these films are, they represent some of the last of the Hollywood traditional star system, when an actor could sell a film on her/his own. Another big casting plus is that the great Jason Robards dominates the film each time he appears as editor Ben Bradley.

Ultimately, the reason this film is so compelling is that it combines 1970’s political protest, tense mystery elements, and star power in one of those mixes that just works. It could have been a pretty generic film, but Pakula’s directing and a taut script by William Goldman (The Princess Bride, Marathon Man, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) create a relentless film that flies by, despite a 140 minute length. In our era of a different sort of White House disasters, All the President’s Men is in the end one of the great feel-good movies of any era, and a tribute to determined reporters who relentlessly pursue their story, saving us all in the process.