Left Field Cinema

Released in 1976 to great acclaim and receiving 8 Oscar nominations, All the President's Men is a genuine modern classic and one of the finest and most significant films American cinema has ever produced. Looking at it again today, its power and potency remain undiminished and its ability to illuminate stronger than ever.

A film of immense scope and ambition told on an intimate scale in a direct, unfussy manner, the film goes for the jugular, targeting the upper echelons of Nixon's White House as experienced by the unrelenting journalists who doggedly pursued the corruption they fought to prove existed in Washington's corridors of power.

On the surface, it's a great detective story, and for many, that's the key to getting into it as it's certainly not the easiest of stories to fully comprehend. There are a multitude of names related by a thread of ties that ultimately wound up in the Oval Office, and it takes some time and effort to get your head around even now. But by making the film personal, the narrative driven by the fire of its lead characters, you're swept along with it, dramatic convention serving to open up what happened and allowing for future understanding. Repeated viewings become hugely rewarding as they provide the chance to draw together the pieces that you can only hope to clutch at first time around. No matter how much or how little you know though, the sense of the magnitude of what was going on is brilliantly conveyed by a group of artists working at the absolute top of their game, and the work by Pakula and his team of craftsmen and actors is what makes the film so essential.

Beginning with the arrests of the five burglars caught in the Watergate Hotel and ending with Nixon's removal from power, the film follows the pursuit of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) who grabbed hold of the story by the scruff of its neck before it even was a story. Sticking to their guns through thick and thin, through denials, threats, paranoia and personal doubts, their story is one that still stirs and provokes. It is a quiet film, but one of building intensity, the blood and sweat pumped into the investigation clammily palpable. The impact of their story was shattering, but the film disregards the obvious opportunities to elicit cheap thrills. Instead, the effect of the film is compellingly didactic; it is at once an inspiring salute to the heroic feat performed by the two journalists and an uncomfortable reminder of the cynical forces that rule our worlds.

William Goldman's screenplay is a brilliantly clear-headed example of telling a story with both economy and accuracy. Note the way characters are gradually developed through their actions and behaviour, with little in the way of backstories or private insights. Everything you need to know about the two reporters can essentially be obtained from a single pan of their respective apartments, the subtlety and guile with which they go about extracting information from potential witnesses or the way they assemble their extensive notes. It's also a perfect demonstration of how sticking to the facts of a story, without recourse to exaggeration or fabrication, is more than dramatic enough by itself. The detail can be exhausting, but it gives the picture an integrity that reflects that of the reporters.

Whilst an example of the naturalism that characterized the cinema of the time, the film is also a fine example of old-fashioned movie star charisma. Redford and Hoffman are legends, and with good reason. They captivate your attention and hold it, their partnership of opposites riveting even when little appears to be happening. It's difficult to pick out individual performances as personal bests, but All the President's Men was unquestionably a high point for both. Redford, stoic and taciturn, and Hoffman, all nervous energy, were note-perfect - Hoffman even looked a little like Bernstein.

And they were very ably supported by some of the finest character actors to ever grace the screen; the senior team of editors at the newspaper played by Jack Warden, Martin Balsam and the great Jason Robards (as Ben Bradlee, the man who really stuck his neck out for Woodward and Bernstein – or 'Woodstein' as he named them). Hal Holbrook's rendition of Deep Throat, the infamously mysterious source who met with Woodward in the shadows, represents the murky waters the reporters wade into and sets a foreboding tone that escalates to outright fear. Jane Alexander also leaves a strong impression as a source scared to death to go on the record but compelled to shed light on the cover-up.

Pakula brings it all together. Every bit as much an auteur as the other 70s giants often celebrated far more than he, All the President's Men is a perfect fusion of his signature style and themes and is far and away his crowning work. Justly heralded for the recently completed Klute (1971) and The Parallax View (1974), Pakula was a master of the conspiracy thriller. With a technique pared down and simple, he was always far more concerned with character and nuance than flash and violence. In fact, his thrillers are probably as light on action as any could be and still be deemed a thriller. His films are so effective because they draw you in slowly, soaking you in atmosphere and never releasing you. And I mean that literally; there is little comfort to be found at the conclusion of any of those films. They stay with you. Resolutions are temporary and hint at larger consequences still out of reach of the characters. Once they get into your mind, you can't help but continue to wonder long afterwards. Pakula's films were mature and complex and he expected his audience to be up to the task. Like many of his contemporaries, he struggled to live up to the standards achieved at that time, and his final films were more in the vein of the glossy fare Hollywood has always been more comfortable with, though they were never without their qualities (Presumed Innocent (1990) featured one of Harrison Ford's best performances and The Pelican Brief (1993) was one of the better John Grisham adaptations). He died in a car accident in 1998, and is sadly missed.

Pakula, and All the President's Men in particular, represents in many ways what makes the 70s the favourite era of modern American filmmaking for so many viewers. It is perhaps something of a cliche at this point to suggest that the 70s represented the last golden age of true director-driven cinema but it was undeniably a time of heavyweight talents producing work of grandness and ambition. Of course, it's easy to just say that looking back in retrospect, forgetting the inferior fare manufactured at the same time as many of these classics, but it was an important time and a lot of the films made then have lasted and tellingly still feel fresh and vital today. Pakula is one of the unsung heroes of the period; a filmmaker who recognized the possibilities opening up at the time to those who wanted to push the medium in new directions. Like a lot of the directors then, his work is distinguished by a personal style, subversive stories that asked more questions than they could hope to answer, and embraced the platform to explore notions of corporate intrigue, human sexuality and the variety of threats posed by the cultures that surround us in a frank and realistic manner. But he has never been afforded the stature enjoyed by Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, Malick, Spielberg, Lucas or even Friedkin, Bogdanovich or Polanski and their work especially has been at least as patchy over the last three decades. A lot of that probably comes down to iconography – Pakula's films never strived for the grandeur of The Godfather (1972), the shock of The Exorcist (1973), the poetry of Badlands (1973) or the punk rock of Taxi Driver (1976). Those are the kind of films a lot of people would think of first when their minds drift back to the 70s and that's fair enough but Pakula's brand of cinema is perhaps of a slightly different nature; one that requires the fullness of time to properly appreciate, where the whole is always more than any of its individual parts, however impressive they may be. For those that believe the decade was only about Popeye Doyle asking if you ever picked you feet in Poughkeepsie or Travis Bickle gunning down junkies, there's a whole other world there waiting, and one just as significant.

The film serves to show how hard the story was to break, how easy it would have been to get lost and miss the truth or simply give up, let alone be driven off by the immense risks they took. The film rightfully puts Woodward and Bernstein forward as modern-day heroes, but it also demonstrates what a free press really stands for. Thirty years later, the film is a timely reminder of how important it is to ask questions and demand those in power be accountable to the people who elect them. It is a call to arms for all people, and especially young people, to challenge what they are told. The film throws into light the deficiencies of our corporately-controlled media institutions and it's impossible not to watch it now and not ponder the nature of the media's coverage of key events over the last decade. Is it really because no platform exists for such investigations to be pursued forcefully enough? Is it because such revelations would be seen to conflict with the interests of those that own the rights to such platforms? It's a different media now, and no doubt if you've thought about such things, you know where you stand. If in 1976 it was the film's intention to provoke people to question their governments, maybe in the present it could also be seen to encourage people to challenge their news providers.

What the film also does is provide an historical document of what was one of the defining moments in American history, and the value of All the President's Men only increases with time. The quality of the filmmaking and the accuracy of the detail ensure the picture's continued life.

This is one of the greats.

Alec Price