George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. is about Edward R. Murrow's 9 March 1954 episode of the CBS news-magazine program See It Now, "A Report on Joseph R. McCarthy." (Click here to read the transcript of the broadcast.) In that program, host Murrow challenged McCarthy simply by introducing clips of the junior Senator from Wisconsin and letting them play. Murrow then ended the program with commentary, but the basic idea was to use the Senator's own words against him, implicitly. McCarthy was then allowed a rebuttal on the 6 April 1954 episode of See It Now.
Good Night, and Good Luck. shows the CBS newsroom as altogether a tense place because of the political climate supposedly created by McCarthy. Staffmembers have been asked to sign loyalty oaths (one person amusingly asks if that means loyalty to CBS), and no one is allowed to work on the McCarthy story who has had even a glancing connection to a Communist organization. Murrow (David Strathairn) and his producer Fred W. Friendly (George Clooney) have to sell the subject matter and approach to CBS head William S. Paley (Frank Langella), who isn't impressed by the urgency that Murrow and Friendly see in the situation. Paley believes that business has to come first; Murrow and Friendly believe that news should come before business, and that journalistic neutrality is no longer appropriate. Their 20 October 1953 episode of See It Now, which questioned the cashiering of Lt. Milo Radulovich from the Air Force Reserve because of his father's and sister's alleged radical beliefs, had got Radulovich reinstated. Murrow and Friendly would like their broadcast on McCarthy to be equally effective.
All of which makes Good Night, and Good Luck. the most sedentary chivalric romance in movie history. Murrow is shown to take McCarthy down simply by letting the man speak for himself, while Murrow looks on, chain-smoking. Murrow is also among the weariest of knights. The movie takes its title from Murrow's sign-off to his broadcasts, and the way Strathairn delivers it, it's like the last gasp of air escaping from a balloon. The crusade against McCarthy itself is weary-making for the CBS newsroom, in part because it seems so obvious to them that they're right. They shouldn't have to fight their bosses, risk losing their jobs, and who knows what other persecution, just to make people aware of what anyone can see by watching and listening.
In essence the movie is all a lead-up to the moral and intellectual tourney between a white knight and a black knight. It's not more substantial than the average heroic romance because its attitude toward McCarthy is no more than what you'd expect out of Hollywood—the standard misconstruction. Clooney, who directed from a script he co-wrote with Grant Heslov, makes the mistake here of accepting McCarthy's assertion of his own significance. In the first place, as historian John Earl Haynes points out in "An Essay on Historical Writing on Domestic Communism and Anti-Communism":
[In] McCarthy's hands, anticommunism was a partisan weapon used to implicate the New Deal, liberals, and the Democratic Party in treason. Using evidence that was exaggerated, distorted, and in some cases utterly false, [McCarthy] accused hundreds of individuals of Communist activity, recklessly mixing the innocent with the assuredly guilty when it served his political purposes.
McCarthy's weapon was anti-communism, but his target was the Democratic Party, entrenched in power since the New Deal.
Article comments
1 - Michael J. West
Wow. It's extremely rare to find a criticism of Good Night, and Good Luck. that takes it to task for taking McCarthy TOO seriously and not treating him like ENOUGH of a buffoon (even while it points out that there were indeed Communist spies in the government). Nicely done.
However, for a movie review it's awfully long. I know the film has severely historical subject matter, but there still seem to be too many academic examples. And, um, personal opinion aside, you're treading on dangerous ground when you compare the movie to the novel The Grapes of Wrath in that the novel is "great" only if you judge it by dubious standards. The jury's still out on Good Night, and Good Luck., but The Grapes of Wrath's high reputation is pretty well established and not in much danger of being overthrown.
2 - Alan Dale
Hey Michael,
Thanks for the comment and the compliment. Yes, the review did get kind of long, but McCarthy is a subject that people have such definite ideas about and yet about which they're so uninformed that I wanted to make the review sort of a dossier. There's a lot of material available online and there's even more material in print. I hope people can use the cites in the review to get better information than something like Good Night, and Good Luck. can provide them with.
As for The Grapes of Wrath, to say it's a great novel is simply to prove what Warshow was complaining about, i.e., the debasing of aesthetic standards. When critics like Mary McCarthy, Robert Warshow, and Pauline Kael, for instance, panned the work of John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, and Leonard Bernstein, it wasn't solely b/c they thought that these fellow travelers fell short in talent, though they did think that, or solely b/c
they were fellow travelers, but b/c of the way the two worked in combination. Their works present actual problems in crudely melodramatic, sentimental, and didactic forms for political reasons that they never acknowledge. Their works are "progressive" in some undefined way and the resultant manipulation is subtle: if you don't think The Grapes of Wrath is a great book you can end up wondering if you're insensitive to the plight of migrant workers.
I think you'd have a better case if you did base your comment about The Grapes of Wrath on personal opinion--I wouldn't try to argue you out of a personal liking for the book. But to the extent there can be a non-personal basis for an opinion, I can say that in my years in academic literary departments on both coasts I never knew of anyone who took Steinbeck seriously. I think he survives b/c he's popular, same with Death of a Salesman and the Bernstein of West Side Story. Their critics never said these works weren't effective. Hellman hasn't fared as well, and if you read The Children's Hour or The Little Foxes it's not hard to see why. She's an icon--for political naifs like Jane Fonda.
3 - brad gillam
good article,,,,,,but, you lost most ppl that lack an education,,,which is George Clooney's audience. Think succinct and salient. Please.
4 - Alan Dale
Hey Brad,
Thanks for the comment. The review is as long as it is b/c most people think they know more about the "McCarthy era" than they actually do, and so I included a lot of sources for those people who might be interested in looking beyond the cliches. Not for everyone, I understand, but then people are free to skim it, or skip it altogether. It's a review not an assignment. And I disagree that the audience for Good Night, and Good Luck. is not an educated audience. Ocean's Eleven cost $85 million to make, Ocean's Twelve $110 million. Clooney risked all of $7 million on Good Night, and Good Luck., which suggests to me he expected a much smaller audience than he usually attracts. And who, besides an educated audience, would be interested in Edward R. Murrow's "heroic" battle against McCarthy in a movie that begins and ends with a lecture?
5 - Karin
All I have to say is shooting it in Black & White was incredibly pretentious. Ineffective too. The real TV footage melted into the movie. The person I went with at one point thought the full screen real TV footage were actors. Ignorant, yes. But I wonder how many other people got confused. And from the beginning of the movie you keep wondering when the movie is going "enlighten" and become full blown color...you know, at some important point.
6 - RogerMDillon
"But do we want a history lesson from a man who claims that in the late '70s people thought cocaine couldn't hurt you?"
That seems like a foolish question since a majority of voters in two separate elections don't have a problem with a President who thought cocaine couldn't hurt you in the '70s.
Karin, your ideas about black & white film are ridiculous. Where's the prentension? The film stock fits the times and certainly helped with the budget. The only way most people have seen Murrow is in B&W, so it's natural to continue that trend. This wasn't "The Wizard of Oz" or "Pleasantville," so why on earth were you waiting for color to change?
The TV images should have melted into the film because some of the scenes were live events. Unless they were high, I don't see how anyone paying attention could get confused.
Lastly, when are you and your friend going to become full blown color?
7 - Alan Dale
"That seems like a foolish question since a majority of voters in two separate elections don't have a problem with a President who thought cocaine couldn't hurt you in the '70s."
Thanks for the comment, but your logic escapes me. In the first place, mine was a rhetorical question. In the second place, the answer is, No, regardless of how many voters didn't have a problem with etc. Unless they voted for him because they wanted a history lesson from him because he thought at the time of the elections that people in the '70s thought cocaine couldn't hurt you, I don't see the relevance of your reply.
8 - Karin
Most films, except very few, are filmed in color these days. That is what mainstream audiences are accustomed. To shoot this in B&W Clooney had to assume the film was so fascinating and enticing the audience would not care and would be drawn in regardless. Or he didn't care and it was a film made for an elite few, journalists mainly, maybe. Pretentious if it doesn't work, genius if it does. In mind the B&W was distracting. For me it didn't work. But for many pretentious elite it did and they hail it as genius.
9 - Emil Gnesin
This review discusses mostly relations between McCarthy and his enemies. But less the movie itself. It is true that influence of McCarthy to American people was exaggerated, especially in Soviet Union. But the movie from my point of view is very impressive, nevertheless that it does not reflect that some members of Communist Party really were against USA or even a real spies.
10 - Alan Dale
Thanks for the comment. I don't believe, however, anyone has been praising GN&GL as moviemaking (apart from the handsome cinematography). It's not like Potemkin or The Battle of Algiers or Z or The Conformist, movies which are so thrillingly directed they get credit for being more politically sophisticated and intelligent than they are. They were so technically innovative they influenced moviemakers working on all kinds of subject matter. GN&GL's old-Hollywood didacticism is awfully square by comparison to these movies. Clooney begins and ends it with his hero telling us what to think, and in between he gives us a little heroic dragon-slaying to exemplify the lesson. The subject matter is so far forward that objections to how it's handled are far more decisive than objections to the subject matter of Potemkin, for instance. That is, you don't agree or disagree with the Odessa Steps sequence--its power is beyond that level of discussion.
11 - Nicole
I agree that a thinking person should not seek out a television personality for a valid political opinion, but aren't journalists supposed to be a source of unbiased information? I think this is at the crux of Clooney's thesis, however tenuous, that there was a time in which the 'intrepid journalist' had more clout, and more integrity.
I think that striking down journalists as mere personalities incapable of valuable political insight does a disservice to the idea of Free Speech in general, and to the role of the journalist in a deliberative democracy. Not to mention, it glosses over one of the main points of the film and one of the most salient problems plaguing the present day broadcast industry and journalism at large.
12 - bliffle
Apparently, this rather stupid and uninformed article has resurfaced again two years after it's original publication.
It could easily be dissected from top to bottom, but I don't have time to waste on that exercise, so I'll just pick a few things randomly.
"But do we want a history lesson from a man who claims that in the late '70s people thought cocaine couldn't hurt you?" How funny. Exactly that contention was made to me by several of the college-educated YUPPIES I knew in the mid 70s. That cocaine was the perfect drug, non-addictive, temporarily enhancing one, and with absolutely no side-effects.
The revisionist history of McCarthy, "tail gunner Joe", famous for firing his tail gun in all directions while his airplane was sitting idle on the ground, an action of witless and useless waste and excess that presaged his political career, was begun by WF Buckley in NR, to his discredit. And none of those fine conservatives saw fit to denounce McCarthy and excise him from conservative ranks at the time, which gives the lie to any contention that Joe was not a member of the conservatives and did not represent them. They were, one and all, willing to stand aside and silently cheer while Joe did nothing but beatup hapless liberals and democrats.
And if you want to lambast Hollywood for it's political excesses, why not start with those two worthies John Wayne and R Reagan? Who repeatedly and routinely were used for rightwing propaganda. And neither served in WW2, preferring to advance their own careers while better men were absent from Hollywood and actually fighting. They had Better Things To Do, starting a trend among super patriots that has become distressingly common in the modern Conservative Elite.