Graham Cracker

Rating: 7/10 (25 September 2016)

One of the problems about making films about major real events - the assassination of JFK for example - is that everyone goes to see them on their release which, by definition, is as soon after the incident in question as possible, and then they become curiously 'dated'; presumably once the audience who were alive at the time begin to die out these films will have a new historical value so that around now any film made in the aftermath of the shooting in Sarajevo would acquire a new interest/audience. So, to watch this film, made in 1976, a couple of years after Watergate, is not such compulsive viewing as it would have been on release. I'm a great admirer of both the Goldman brothers (Bill and James) both as novelists and screenwriters and neither has ever let me down in either capacity - I do, in fact, wish that someone would get out a DVD of Soldier In The Rain, an early Bill Goldman novel filmed in the early sixties with Jackie Gleason and Steve McQueen) so this was a must for me as a Goldman completist. I loved the 'in-joke' of casting Robert Walden in a minor role. Walden played Joe Rossi, the star 'investigative' reporter in the Lou Grant TV series. The proprietor, Mrs. Pynchon,, of the fictional LA Newspaper where Lou Grant was City Editor, was based on Kathleen Graham, the wife/widow of the owner of the Washington Post, which for me constituted a great tie-in. Overall, the film had a fine, gritty 'feel' and is well worth seeing.