Movie Review: Good Night, and Good Luck

Katie and I were up at my parents' house Friday night and, after watching UConn hold off Washington in the Sweet Sixteen, we popped in Good Night, and Good Luck. All I knew about it was that George Clooney directed it and had received a nomination for Best Director. I was pleasantly surprised, as the movie began, to find out that it was about Edward R. Murrow and how he took on Senator McCarthy when no one else dared. I had studied bits about the McCarthy era and his Senate hearings before--in law school and in an American Literature class (while studying The Crucible (a play inspired by the McCarthy hearings))--and I had heard a kind of tribute to Murrow on NPR that talked about how he had challenged McCarthy. So I already knew a little about the subject. But beyond the fascinating subject matter, the film is really well done.

The history of this movie really interests me. I think it's a fascinating time in American history. The movie takes place in the 50's, right when the Cold War was really beginning to heat up. McCarthy went after anyone in a military or governmental position that had had any affiliation (or whose family had had any affiliation) with communism or socialism. As the movie shows, quite a few people had had some sort of an affiliation with the communist party. You will notice that most references to a connection with communism came "20 years ago," or in the 1930s. That's so because socialism and communism actually became moderately popular in America in the '30s. We were in the middle of the Great Depression. Capitalism, it seemed, had failed. And on the other side of the world, Russia, which had been communist for almost 15 years, was putting out what turned out to be propaganda about how their economy was thriving under a communist system. That climate lead a lot of people in the US and all over the world to explore communist or socialist ideas. They would attend a meeting or a rally or sign up to receive a communist brochure or publication. That was all it took, and, 20 years later, McCarthy labeled them communists and ruin their lives and the lives of their families.

Really, the movie is about publicity (not as in publicizing a movie, a book, or a celebrity but as in keeping things open to the public). There are obvious warnings about the dangers of news outlets not being free to report the news as it is (either as a result of pressure from sponsors, fear, or a desire to please a certain demographic/political philosophy). The public, essentially, only knows what it does from what it gets from the media, and if the media isn't free to report the facts as they are, then that's a problem. In a similar vein, one major problem with McCarthy's methods were that they were secret. The hearings themselves were public, but neither the accused communists nor the public were allowed to see the "evidence" McCarthy had against them.

Besides the interesting history and themes, I thought the movie itself was well done. The acting was convincing, and the directing was excellent. The movie used actual footage from the McCarthy hearings and from Murrow's news stories, which I really liked. It made the movie seem so authentic. And since the whole movie was done in black and white, the archival footage blended right into the movie. Unlike Forrest Gump, where the archival footage was more of a novelty, this historical footage was used to make the movie really feel like you were seeing something authentic. Sometimes you couldn't tell what was actual footage and what was not.

Anyway, I highly recommend the movie. I hope you like it.


* Interesting tidbit: In one of the first few scenes of the movie, it shows the group of news reporters around a table discussing the news. You can hear a distinct reference to "Benson." They say Benson said something or did something (I don't remember exactly what they said he did or said, but you hear a clear reference to "Benson"). They are referring to the then-Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson. He was a member of the Quorum of the Twelve already, but he was permitted to serve as Eisenhower's Sec. of Agriculture.