Good Luck to the modern media

Rating: 6/10 (13 March 2006)

This is a dull yet watchable film about the final days of the Senator McCarthy communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. David Straithairn is outstanding as the dour, chain-smoking manic depressive TV presenter Edward R Murrow, a legendary journalist who had reported from London during the early days of World War II and who became the famous 'anchor' on CBS television.
Murrow finally decides he's had enough of McCarthy and his paranoid crusade against non-existent enemies within  given added impetus by the sacking by the Air Force of a private  and goes on the offensive. It is a make-or-break, career defining moment for him.
The archive shots of McCarthy in the Senate are uncannily reminiscent of the Stalinist show-trials of the 1930s  innocent people like the black cloakroom attendant hounded and persecuted by the fanatical McCarthy.
Good Night and Good Luck is surely the only film that is shot entirely indoors. The claustrophobia is unrelenting, enhanced by the black and white film and the film studio setting, a place of darkness and quiet. It is like a TV station version of Downfall, the film about Hitler's final days in the bunker, with Murrow a vampire of the microphone, shrouded by cigarette fumes. He is a nocturnal agitator, a ghost of some faded liberal, pre-Cold War past who is about to hit McCarthy.
It is the mission of these TV station journalists to confront the over-whelming force of McCarthyite censorship, from their defiant bunker, to rejuvenate American journalism. That is the theme of the film - the challenge of free speech over fear.
Murrow is not above reproach, of course, specialising in fake interviews and product placement. He cashes in on his obsessive smoking, kowtowing to the Kent cigarette company.
The film features various editorial meetings, with Fred Friendly (George Clooney), Sig Mickelson (the ever-reliable Jeff Daniels) and Joe Wershba (Robert Downey Jnr) deliberating over the magnitude of their quest. However, for me, it lacks the gravity and dramatic impact of similar scenes in All the Presidents Men.
Of course, the film is also a clear warning on the situation today in America. There is now a docile, compliant and corporate-controlled media which blindly and slavishly peddles Bush's line on the phoney War on Terror, etc., thereby aiding the war machine that is American industry. There is no real journalism left, certainly not on TV.
Murrow's massive, over-powering speech at the beginning and end, bookmarks and encapsulates the entire theme of the film: the conflict between entertainment and ideas; the commercial imperatives of running a corporate-funded TV station; and the responsibility the TV journalist has towards his audience. It is a true 'Iron Curtain' speech  like the famous Winston Churchill speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946 when he prophecies the Cold War.
Murrow considers the conflict between journalistic integrity and the commercial dynamics of a TV station  the corporate advertisers who avoid controversy like the plague. And the extreme political pressure from government and military sources that is inevitably brought to bear on the people that run such an awesomely powerful medium.