By Erin Free
When it comes to the paranoid thriller genre, the late Alan J. Pakula (who tragically died in a freak road accident in 1998) pretty much laid the seventies blueprint with a series of films (the moody, richly characterised detective thriller Klute; the perverse, borderline-surreal political nightmare of The Parallax View) that gave voice to an era when the American public first began to openly and wildly distrust its government. As John Frankenheimer’s sixties thrillers (The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days In May) did for the early years of The Cold War, so Pakula’s did for the mood of unrest in the seventies.
Pakula’s greatest achievement remains All The President’s Men, his extraordinarily tight and cohesive look at the journalistic investigation that brought down President Richard Nixon. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman – in an intellectual play on the “mismatched buddy movie” riff – are brilliant as wildly differing real-life journos, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who fought government interference, suspicion, and their own rampant (and often justified) paranoia to crack the story of the incendiary break-in at The Watergate Hotel. “I’m fascinated by journalism,” Redford, who also produced the film, told AARP in 2013. “I put a keen eye, not a negative eye, on its role, particularly how it is changed by the times that we’re living in. The big moment for me was making All The President’s Men. It was not about Watergate or President Nixon. I wanted to focus on something that I thought not many people knew about: How do journalists get the story?”
Complex, fast moving and gripping at every turn, All The President’s Men boasts superb performances (Jason Robards won a deserved Oscar as famed newsman, Ben Bradlee), a great script courtesy of William Goldman, and Gordon Willis’s famous dark-hued cinematography. In short, it’s a classic. “I don’t think anybody expected Watergate to get as big as it did,” Redford told AARP in 2013. “The movie followed that trend. It got a lot of attention. Probably too much. People entered journalism school thinking, ‘Hey, maybe a movie could be made about us too!’ What these two reporters did was a moment in time. Can that moment ever come back? I don’t think so.”
