Got smoke?

Rating: Null/10 (31 October 2005)

The brilliance of George Clooney's "Good Night and Good Luck" lies in it's very tight (almost claustrophobia-inducing) evocation of an early 1950's news studio with all those clean-cut button-down white guys (the few women on hand tend to get sent on errands) with their horn-rimmed glasses and their bottles of Scotch and their ubiquitous cigarettes. There is so much smoke wafting around that it becomes the element in which these guys function, like the water in a fish tank. Clooney didn't need to pound the point home by showing the ad for Kent cigarettes but I did get a chuckle out of it. The heady mixture of nicotine and testosterone palpably drives the news crew toward their fateful piece on Sen. Joe McCarthy which, for all they know in advance, may be the cliff over which their lives and careers plunge. Clooney has impressed me hugely with his ability to keep this great ensemble cast (including himself, not as the "star") on pace. I avoided his "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" (having had my fill of that "Gong Show" guy back in the Seventies) but I look forward to his future directorial efforts. D. Strathairn is quietly masterful as Edward R. Murrow; I look forward to being disappointed when the Academy snubs him for an Oscar nomination. The comparison between the anti-communism crusade then and the anti-terrorism crusade now is merely made available to be observed, not trumpeted to the heavens. The line "Dissent is not disloyalty" sums it up pithily.
Given what "Night" does so well, it seems almost churlish on my part to mention some things it doesn't do and probably couldn't have done without disrupting it's artistic confines. I personally would have liked a sense of how the "Red scare" permeated the populace as a whole; I would recommend Cedric Belfrage's book "The American Inquisition" which includes annual "fever charts" detailing that in 1953 the town of Moscow, Idaho demanded that the capital of the Soviet Union change it's name, or when citizens in Wisconsin were asked "What is a Communist" responses included "A crook, I suppose" or "A person who wants war." In 1954 a woman legally changed her name from Allred to Allgood and a high school in Idaho expunged the word "comrade" from the school song. Sound a little silly? Does anyone remember "freedom fries" recently? It also would've been a big mouthful to chew if "Night" had made the point that "Tailgunner Joe" was essentially a figurehead. He himself had little interest in communism until it became a ticket to fame; he got most of his headline-grabbing tidbits from the American Reichsfuehrer J. Edgar Hoover (McCarthy was a frequent guest in Hoover's private box at the local racetrack) and he was tolerated by General Eisenhower until he "went too far" and denounced the army as "pinko." ("Night" mentions several real persons whose names were besmirched but not Major Irving Peress, the "pink dentist," whose family received threatening letters and phone calls and rocks thrown through their windows. "Night" just barely hints at the anti-Semitic undercurrent of the phobia, culminating in the "public burning" of the Rosenbergs for "giving away the Bomb" based on evidence that would get laughed out of most courts today.) After McCarthy was allowed to "twist in the wind" and drink himself to death, Hoover continued his police-state activities with other allies, but we never heard about any of this until "Watergate." Read "The Boss" by Athan Theoharis and John S. Cox for the whole sordid story.
By all means see "Night" which deserves a ton of credit for getting people thinking about this again if nothing else. By the way, beware of revisionists like Ann Coulter claiming that McCarthy was validated by the "Venona Project," the secret program to intercept and decode Soviet diplomatic telegrams. Only a fraction of the cables were decrypted (some only partly) and their meaning is still debated by scholars. (The Soviets apparently did have two sources within the Manhattan Project, "Quantum" and "Pers," who are still unidentified.) To assert, like Coulter, that "hundreds of agents of an enemy foreign power were working for the U.S. government" is the kind of logical leap much favored by the Far Right .never mind where that lands.
I wish that "Night" had ended with a brief text mentioning that Murrow, a true American hero, died of lung cancer, thus completing the cigarette motif. I'm sure he would have ruefully allowed that there too, "the fault lies not within our stars but within ourselves"