A is for All the President’s Men

All the President’s Men: 1976, dir. Alan J. Pakula. Seen April 22, 2007 on DVD.
All the President’s Men shouldn’t be as interesting a movie as it is. It’s more than two hours long and features a couple of journalists doing a lot of research in service to a story that we already know about ourselves. They spend a lot of time on the phone, and knocking on doors, and digging through stacks of dull paperwork. We don’t see anything about their personal lives, if they even had any at that time; a large chunk of the movie is set in a newsroom. (I’m growing tired of the guy-centric Seventies movies with the token scene or two with some girlfriend or wife, myself, and I was relieved not to see that kind of unnecessary stuff in this movie. I swear, I think those scenes are in certain movies just to show that the male buddies aren’t gay.)
It’s not quite a buddy movie, either. These two guys are working together, and they do get along much better at the end than they do at the beginning, but there aren’t any great bonding moments. They argue over trays of fast food at McDonald’s, or while one is at the typewriter and the other is fussing over notes.
So what makes All the President’s Men work? Good acting — Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The faces are instantly familiar, but it works the other way around, the good way: We imagine Woodward and Bernstein as looking like Redford and Hoffman. Wow, remember when Redford was that young? In one scene, where he’s walking home after a meeting at the garage, he looked eerily like Brad Pitt.

The script by William Goldman won an Oscar and deservedly so; although we know the ultimate outcome of the story we are still held captive by suspense. I tried to dig up Goldman’s book Adventures in the Screen Trade to refresh my memory on what he said about All the President’s Men, but the book has vanished into thin air, out of my bookshelf. I must have lent it. (If you have it, let me know, so I don’t have to buy another one.) All I can remember is the story about how, after Goldman had been working on the script awhile, Bernstein showed up out of the blue with another script written by his then-girlfriend Nora Ephron. The filmmakers ended up going with Goldman’s script — I love Ephron’s book Heartburn to pieces (literally — my copy is rubber-banded together) but I can’t imagine she would have brought the same results to All the President’s Men.
The movie dates very slightly, in the sense that it assumes we really do know all these details about Watergate, because back in 1976, everyone did know. I also remember Goldman saying he wanted to try to include bits of information that weren’t common knowledge, like the earlier, unsuccessful Watergate break-in, although he couldn’t make that work. But for those of us who were wee tots (or not yet born) during Watergate, it’s all stuff we aren’t terribly familiar with. I had to pay very close attention to try to keep track of all the names: Sloan and Sans and Segretti, Colson and Hunt and I don’t know who-all-else, and you know I had to look up most of those names. At least I’m knowledgeable enough to recognize John Mitchell and Bob Haldeman.
But speaking of Haldeman, my cinematic thoughts on Watergate have been colored and prejudiced by the other Watergate movie I saw prior to this one, Dick. I can’t hear Haldeman’s name without thinking of Dave Foley, and a small childish part of me kept hoping Woodward and Bernstein would break out in dumb fights like they did in that movie, where they are played by WIll Ferrell and Bruce McCulloch. All the President’s Men is naturally the better movie, and I enjoyed watching it, but we own the Dick DVD and I must say, given the choice I’d probably prefer the goofy comedy over the serious drama.
I may be slightly prejudiced against All the President’s Men because the quality of the DVD I watched was so very poor. Warner usually does an admirable job these days with transfers of older movies to DVD, but the DVD was released back in 1997 and was one of the old two-sided kind, with widescreen on one side and “standard” (hmpf) on the other. I watched the widescreen version, but the DVD I got from Netflix was so beat up that I had to try two DVD players before I could get it to play. The movie looked very dark, and in the nighttime car scenes, I could barely see the actors’ faces. I see from a quick Amazon check that Warner released a special edition in 2006; it’s a shame that I didn’t watch that version. I’d actually like to see the movie in a theater, although it doesn’t seem to have enough of a following for an Alamo showing — maybe the Paramount will play it one summer.
One final word: I love the movie The Great Muppet Caper, in which Jack Warden plays a gruff newspaper editor who lambasts the reporting team of Kermit and Fozzie for missing a big scoop at the beginning of the film. It was delightful to see Warden in the role that he obviously spoofed for the Muppets later.