Good Night and Good Luck

The passion of Mel Gibson leaves behind a poor imitation of art.

by Junius

Good Night and Good Luck is not the sharp-edge film it is made out to be. A smoke-filled room doesn’t necessarily mean that people are thinking.

The framework is a banquet speech by Edward R Murrow on how TV was even then in the fifties tending toward pulp and trash. But who was the first newscaster to present himself as an entertainer? Not that Murrow ever cracked a joke; not that he ever cracked a smile; but he played news stories for the ratings (maybe even the Joe McCarthy program could be looked at that way); and in his weekly armchair “Person to Person” he visited celebrities in their homes. We are shown him interviewing Liberace, asking him with a straight face when he was going to get a bride to share his Beverley Hills palace.

I had the occasion recently to see another example of this sort of smarminess, the real Edward R Murrow, interviewing a young Castro. The clip included Estella Bravo’s fine documentary Fidel. And if Morrow doesn’t go coy and get Castro to talk about his beard! “Isn’t it true that your mother couldn’t recognize you when you came down from the Sierra Madre with your new beard?”—or some such corn. And when, continuing this forced folksiness, he asked Castro if he was now going to shave it off, Castro said, without missing a beat, that he had vowed not to shave his beard until the Revolution was secure. At that, Murrow ended the conversation so quickly that we in the cinema audience couldn’t help but laugh.

Good Night and Good Luck tries to make sure we don’t laugh. The centerpiece of the film is the “heroic” Murrow taking on Senator Joe McCarthy at the height of his sinister powers. However, they have to fake it a bit because Murrow actually waited through four years of red-baiting until even Eisenhower lost patience and sent word down. So Murrow was stepping in at the beginning of the end. And he bent over backwards to give McCarthy valuable airtime for rebuttal. George Clooney, as director and actor both, did no see it coming: McCarthy has few redeeming features except he is more attractive on television than Edward R Murrow. It apparently wasn’t anticipated that if they put real video footage of a live McCarthy up against a grim actor smoking like Murrow it would only emphasize this unfortunate contrast.

Of course, if you were not around during the age of rampant TV cigarette commercials, there’s a sample in this film, a doozie that will open your eyes, along with a slice of twentieth century history you may have missed. But the film shows everything through a cigarette haze. Those ads really worked. Apparently everybody at CBS smoked. Except boss Paley, who is, by the way, the only person of dramatic interest in this low-powered picture.

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