All the President's Men

Easily the best of the '70s anti-government thrillers, All the President's Men (1976) is a gripping take on the Watergate scandal and the reporters who helped bring it to light. Drawing on Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's explosive best-seller, it provides a chilling account of government malfeasance, and a glowing portrait of investigative journalism.

June 1972. Five men are caught burglarizing the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) do a routine investigation, only to find things not adding up: the burglars have their own attorney, and possible ties to the CIA and Richard Nixon's re-election campaign, and interviewees seem to be clamming up. Despite government pressure, skeptical managers and uncooperative witnesses, Woodward and Bernstein receive the blessing of editor Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards) to pursue the story, which threatens to implicate not only Nixon's advisors but the President himself.

All the President's Men unquestionably launched a thousand journalism careers, revising Hollywood stereotypes about reporters. Our heroes are vaguely anti-Establishment as embodied by Redford and Hoffman, but come off as hard-working, honest and dedicated to "getting it right," a counter to the cynical scribes of The Front Page and His Girl Friday. Bradlee lays out the importance of their effort, not to scoop the other guys but to get the truth: the stakes are free press and the rule of law. This may come off as naive and self-important in the era of Fox News, MSNBC and the blogosphere, but it's hard to deny Woodward and Bernstein their place in history.

As bleak as Watergate's messy fall-out was, the Woodward and Bernstein story provided something positive: the "fourth estate" doing its job of checking government excess. With President Nixon rotten to the core, and the subversives and protestors providing little more than incoherent noise, Americans needed somebody to trust. The post-Watergate compulsion for newspapers to uncover major scandals has had mixed reprecussions, but All the President's Men shows that an obsequieous press can be far worse.

Alan J. Pakula previously directed the ultimate paranoid conspiracy thriller, The Parallax View (1974), a lurid, feverish fairy tale that now plays like a bad X-Files episode. His telling of the Watergate story, however, sticks very close to the facts, with William Goldman getting the right mixture of subtle characterization, and telling details. Nixon's low-level thuggery, intimidation and surveillance is more chilling than an improbably-omnipotent conspiracy, as the truth generally is. Pakula provides relatively restrained direction, aside from a few stylish elements: the famous overhead zoom-out in the Library of Congress, the shadowy meetings with Deep Throat, deep-focus use of TV cameras contrasting Nixon with his antagonists, Robert Wolfe's rousing montage of cannons booming while typewriters spell out Nixon's doom.

Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman are pitch-perfect, giving low-key but compelling performances. They're backed up by an equally good supporting cast: Jason Robards (Once Upon a Time in the West) won an Oscar for his portrayal of the crusty Ben Bradlee, Hal Holbrook (Magnum Force) walks away with his scenes as the inscrutable Deep Throat, and dependable hands Martin Balsam (Hombre) and Jack Warden (12 Angry Men) are equally fine.

All the President's Men has stood the test of time, easily besting most of its peers. This isn't a deranged radical fantasy but a very real, gripping testiment to government corruption and the need for a vigilant press.