All The President’s Men – 1976
On the surface, this film might seem like a political drama. It deals with the Watergate Scandal that took place in 1971. However, it is not about the actual break-in at the infamous hotel, but the shady aftermath of the crime which grew and grew, culminating in the resignation of the President of the United States. The story, as it is presented, is almost like a detective story, except that the investigators are newspaper journalists.
Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman star as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Woodward is a young, green reporter, and Bernstein is an experienced newspaper writer. The two men are assigned to work together investigating the scandal, and the information they gather consistently leads to more questions than answers. They become obsessed with following the conspiracy to its end, talking to everyone they can, asking all the questions that people are afraid to ask, and using any resource available, reputable or not, to put all the pieces together. It was interesting how the two reporters were able to get people to talk, despite the extremely sensitive nature of the questions.
Obviously the plot of the film is a fictionalized telling of true events. But as with all films based on real stories, I have to do a little research and try to determine how accurate the film was able to be. In this case, the script was based on the first half of the book that was the source material, written by the two reporters. They were interviewed by William Goldman, the man hired to write the screenplay. I found nothing saying that the events weren’t true to life. Apparently, Woodward was very helpful to Goldman, but Bernstein was not.
The movie ends with the two reporters making a mistake which lets the man they are after get away, the White House Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman. Their executive editor at the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, played by Jason Robards, has put his own neck out on the line to trust them, and their blunder brings him under negative attention. But then, the movie just ends with Woodward and Bernstein in the dog house.
Then a few seconds are allotted to show a teletype headline montage which tells the viewers what happened next. For those of us who do not know the story, we are told that Haldeman and several other suspects implicated in the Watergate cover-up are arrested, none of whom spend as much time in prison as I would have thought. The brief montage ends by telling us that Nixon has resigned and Gerald Ford has been inaugurated as the President.
The plot was a little confusing for me to follow simply because I was not familiar with the characters. And speaking of the characters, it was interesting to note that the names of the characters were not changed for the film. In most movies based on true events, “the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” But not here. The only name that was never really given in the film was the name of the mysterious informant, Deep Throat, played by Hal Holbrook. But I have learned that the name of that informant was kept secret until 2005, when, after his death, it was revealed that he was Mark Felt, the man who had been the Associate Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the time of the scandal.
There were a few other notable actors in the cast such as Martin Balsam, Ned Beatty, and Stephen Collins. Everyone did a fine job, but if I had to pick some stand-outs, they would be Jack Warden as Harry Rosenfeld, the editor in charge of local news at the Washington Post who backed Woodward and Bernstein in their investigations, and Jane Alexander, a reluctant informant who is clearly afraid for her safety when being interviewed.
The movie was alright, but it was a little confusing at times. There were so many names being thrown around that I sometimes found the plot hard to follow. But that being said, I don’t know how else they could have done it. They couldn’t take out any characters or combine any, as movies often do, especially since the real scandal was only a few years old and most people would have known the real story, and it was nothing if not topical for its time. I’d even say that it holds up well for a modern viewer, if you are interested in learning about the Watergate scandal.