One of the best in the genre

Rating: 9/10 (10 April 2013)

1976 was a magical year for cinema: Scorsese's Taxi Driver, Bertolucci's Novecento, Bergman's Face to Face, Polanski's The Tenant, Zurlini's The Desert of the Tartars, Bozzetto's Allegro non Troppo. No doubt many other masterpieces came out that year, but although I can't remember or know them all, there's one I'm not likely ever to forget: All The President's Men.
The seventies were being a good decade for Alan J. Pakula: he had already made two excellent movie, first the crime drama Klute (1971), for which Jane Fonda got her first Oscar, and then the paranoid extravaganza The Parallax View (1974), still very entertaining, and gorgeous to look at thanks to Gordon Willis' cinematography. The Parallax View starred a journalist (a brash performance by Warren Beatty) trying to untangle a vast governmental/corporate conspiracy that involved brain-washed assassins. His next movie, as a way of conclude this loose trilogy, was also a story about journalists uncovering a conspiracy on the higher echelons of government – what makes it infinitely more disturbing is that it is all true.
No one should have to live in a world where it's perfectly reasonable to write that this movie is about two journalists thwarting the sinister machinations of corrupt American President Richard Nixon, but we're not to blame if truth more often than not looks like a rejected Jamed Bond plot. Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford give extraordinary performances (Redford especially; Hoffman is undoubtedly a greater actor, so it's more exciting when Redford admiringly holds his ground against him) playing Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, two journalists for The Washington Post who investigate the Watergate break-in and slowly unravel a presidential conspiracy that, in time, would lead to Nixon himself. Around them is a cast of some of the best actors from America's past and some still going strong nowadays: Jack Warden, Hal Holbrook, Jason Robards, Ned Beatty, Jane Alexander. The movie was written by William Goldman, and many of the crewmembers were regular Pakula collaborators: David Shire on the music, bringing adding his chilling and minimalist style to the atmosphere of the movie, and DP Gordon Willis lighting and framing each frame with the usual artistry that he displayed in The Godfather trilogy.
All The President's Men is an intelligent, slow-paced but tense political thriller that honours the best done in the genre – this may well be America's response to Costa-Gavras' superb Z (1969) – and that has left a mark too on all that followed – think of The Insider and State of Play, for instance. This movie pretty much helped codify the language and tropes of things we expect to see in movies of this type – journalists fearing for their lives, a non-cooperative government, night conversations in dark garages, leaked documents, the inner workings of newspapers. There's nothing clichéd here, though, each scene and trope still has vitality not only for inventing them in the first place but for setting such a high standard for imitators.