All the President's Men (1976) - Movie Review
All the President's Men (1976) - Movie Review
By: Nathan Peter-Grzeszczak Buhr
The movie All the President’s Men (1976), featuring Robert Redford as Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein, is a captivating look at good ol’ investigative journalism at its best. The two young reporters are hot on the trail of what eventually came to be known as the Watergate scandal. The movie opens with five men in the act of breaking into the Democratic National Committee head quarters in Washington, DC. The men are apprehended by police (on the historical date of June 17, 1972), and are eventually brought before of a judge in a court of law. It is in this setting that Redford launches his investigation and begins assembling pieces of a story and forming theories about who could possibly be behind the illegal activities. While he may have a hunch of “whodunnit”, the man needs cold hard facts in order to build a story fit to print. As Redford sets out to uncover the facts, the governing Nixon administration is actively busy muddying the waters and attempting to distance themselves from the event, in hopes that the American public will never know of their role in the political shenanigans.
Redford, a relatively new addition to the Washington Post and untried, is paired with the seasoned Dustin Hoffman by the higher ups to create a journalistic force not to be fooled with. The two set to work making and receiving phone calls, visiting sources at home and at work, and even traveling to other states (Hoffman travels to Florida to follow a lead). The two use every journalistic trick that they know including rummaging through library records, consulting a secret informant code-named “deep throat” and playing the information gained from one source off others. No one seems to want to talk, but the two alluring and engaging reporters warm their sources and the story begins to reveal itself. SPOILER ALERT: Eventually the two come up with a repot that cuts the mustard and the scandal is splashed across the headlines for all to see.
Any contemporary youth who watches this film will no doubt be taken aback by the plethora of cigarettes smoked in the newsroom, Redford eating a nutritious breakfast consisting of a Twinkie, and the defining clacking of all the typewriters in the newsroom. According to the trivia section on IMBD, “the furious volley of typewriter keys striking paper in the opening scenes was created by layering the sounds of gunshots and whip-lashes over the actual sounds of a typewriter, accentuating the film's theme of words as weapons. This is also why the closing scene has a teletypewriter printing headlines with the sound of cannon fire from a 21-gun salute in the background.” While no shots are literally fired in the movie, a rarity in this day and age, the plot line manages to entertain and moves along at a pace befitting of the average attention span of a person residing in the 1970’s.
There is a scene in the movie featuring a grey car driving through and pull out of a car garage that on first viewing appeared to have been used twice in the movie. Upon further inspection they are actually two shots from the same angle with very subtle variation. The director, Alan J. Pakula, must have figured that spacing the two shots nearly an hour apart would allow the audience to enjoy this shot a second time round. The clip times are 01:04:18 and 02:02:56 on my version. I recommend this move to anyone who has an interest in Redford or Hoffman (youthful and saucy), American history or the business of investigative journalism.
The budget of All the President’s Men was an estimated $8,500,000 according to IMDB.
One last movie trivia tidbit, “Frank Wills, the security guard who discovered the break-in at the Watergate complex (in real life), plays himself (in the movie).”
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