Summary
The cast is superb: There's Patricia Clarkson, Robert Downey Jr., Jeff Daniels, Frank Langella (as CBS monarch Bill Paley), Ray Wise (as a newsman who commits suicide when his Communist past surfaces), and [George Clooney] himself as Fred Friendly, [Edward R. Murrow]'s producer. [David Strathairn], who virtually channels his character's crisp steely diction, was born to play Murrow in the way Robin Williams was born to play Popeye. Clooney uses footage of the real McCarthy rather than hiring an actor, creating a sort of Forrest Gump in reverse. The technique works because his film concerns itself only with its central characters' public lives.
Clooney's direction is tight and strong, although we could do without the cliche of frenzied TV-newsroom production. All we needed to see was how Friendly cued Murrow to speak: with the tap of a pen on his knee. It's the film's most intimate moment, and a fascinating piece of early broadcast history if it's true. There's no soundtrack music, only a few period songs performed on camera by a jazz vocalist (Dianne Reeves). The movie's title is Murrow's famous sign-off, which now sounds much too ham-handed for a man who wrote such articulate news copy (which we hear copiously in the film).See the full content of this document
Extract
Good Night, and Good Luck; That Was Then
SEN. JOSEPH MCCARTHY HAD MANY CO-CONSPIRATORS in carrying on his Communist witchhunts of the 1950s in a frightened country that forgot what it stood for. It may not even be fair to call them witch-hunts: Witches never really existed in America, but Communists did. The question w...
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