Ed Murrow Comes From 'Out of the Past'

Rating: 7/10 (12 December 2005)

At the 1960 conventions on CBS, Murrow, Erik Sevaraid, Charles Collingwood and others would gather in a dark room off the convention floor and analyze events. Wreaths of smoke curled overhead, half blinding the audience. Everyone smoked during those post-convention sessions.
Good Night and Good Luck has Ed Murrow smoking during the famous Joe McCarthy documentary on See It Now. The real Ed may have used a cigarette as a prop interviewing Marilyn Monroe but never on See It Now, his serious show.
George Clooney co-wrote, directed and appears as Murrow's producer Fred Friendly. I've read twelve books about Murrow, McCarthy and McCarthy Counsel Roy Cohn, but I thought Jeff Daniels was playing CBS President Frank Stanton, not CBS News President Sig Mickelson, until the credits rolled.
Straithern must have dieted seriously for Good Night and Good Luck. He is seriously thin in the movie. Murrow's gauntness emphasizes the stress he endures and foreshadows the cancer he will die of eleven years later. David Strathairn has never looked as old and frail in a film as he does here.
Strathairn's performance is difficult to accept for those of us who remember Murrow. Strathairn doesn't want to do a straight imitation, he wants to act the part. When he says good night and good luck he turns away as he says good luck. Ed would never have done that. Strathairn is being pinched by the many constraints of the role.
In the film Murrow smokes incessantly. Murrow to Fred Friendly: "Freddie, every time you light my cigarette, I know you're lying to me."
The movie opens with the Murrow staff at CBS in Manhattan preparing to canonize an Air Force Sergeant who has been tossed out of the Service because his father reads subversive magazines.
Already CBS Chairman Bill Paley is feeling stomach pains and Friendly and Murrow haven't mentioned the McCarthy show.
The audience needs to stretch its legs in this one, but Clooney keeps the action mostly confined to the studio.
Robert Downey Junior has little to do here as a member of the Murrow Documentary team. Patricia Clarkson plays his wife and colleague at CBS. Clarkson registers as a bright spot among the shadowy, Noirish filmmakers. She lifts the energy of Murrow's Raiders each time she appears. The film brightens too.
Jeff Daniels is cynical as Mickelson the news chief, Paley's henchman overseeing the Murrow crew. But Frank Langella's CBS Chairman Bill Paley is more chilling than the Dracula Langella played twenty years ago.
Clooney is average as Murrow Producer Fred Friendly, though he must have put on 60 pounds to play the part.
Clarkson, Daniels and Langella have to make way for Ray Wise, who plays WCBS anchorman Don Hollenbeck. Hollenbeck comes under siege from newspaper columnist Jack O'Brien. Wise, who has mostly played showy characters in low budget films, manages a brilliant performance with little screen time.
There are fabulous ironies buried in the film. Murrow is smoking himself to death while one of his sponsors shows a spot on his program saying Kent cigarettes have filters on them that make them safe. I saw that commercial when I was an impressionable nine. I finally was able to stop nine years ago.
Alcoa sponsors See It Now. Its cornball commercials run unremarked upon by Murrow and his men. Liberace is interviewed on the popular but lightweight Person to Person Ed hosts to balance the books at CBS for losses on See It Now. He asks a youngish Liberace when he is likely to get married, another irony since everyone knows now the flamboyant piano player was gay.
The film uses the real McCarthy from film clips, and the real Liberace. Only once did I hear the real Ed's voice on the track. Assistant Defense Counsel Bobby Kennedy could be seen in clips along with Arkansas Senator John McClellan and Missouri Senator Stuart Symington. Archive film integrates smoothly with acted material.
Murrow colleague Eric Sevaraid said that Ed was late going after McCarthy. Clooney uses a less dramatic part of Army Counsel Joseph Welch's attack on McCarthy to make it appear it was Murrow who slew Joe and not Welch at the McCarthy Hearings.
But it was neither Murrow nor Welch who finished Joe. McCarthy Committee Chief Counsel Roy Cohn and Private David Schine earlier toured Embassies and US Information Agency stations in Europe with the press in tow. The two censored and replaced books like a couple of disciples of Joseph Goebbels. The Press had a field day mocking them. McCarthy backed up Schine and Cohn with an investigation of the Army after it balked at letting Schine be relieved from duty to serve on Joe's staff. It would have been the moral equivalent of the Army assigning PFC Elvis Presley to serve as assistant to Sun Records Producer Sam Phillips.
One day during the three months of the McCarthy hearing Welch needled Cohn and McCarthy with an absurd conversation about 'pixies,' a sly attempt at unmasking Cohn's homosexuality to hip viewers, while subtly informing McCarthy that Welch had sharks teeth too.
Welch's dramatic condemnation of Joe for revealing Welch colleague Fred Fisher as a member of a Communist Party Front was left on Clooney's cutting room floor. That missing footage was powerful enough to get Welch a role as Judge in the film Anatomy of a Murder.
McCarthy was censured by the Senate and died three years later of acute cirrhosis. A decade later Poet Alan Ginsberg came to Appleton, Wisconsin for a poetry reading and afterward danced on Joe's grave.
Good Night and Good Luck is a movie for cynics. A film for people who lived during the era and cracked wise. Even the New York Times couldn't resist a wise guy tout for the film: "SEE IT NOW!"