Time's Up

Rating: 8/10 (29 May 2002)

Why do networks take a decent movie like this and lop off parts to fit it into a Procrustean bed? So they can include more commercials and make money. Why do contestants cheat on TV quiz shows? Well, yes, to make money too -- but more than that. They want adulation as well as new Caddies. At least Herb Stempel and Charles van Doren do -- brothers under two highly unsimilar-looking skins. This movie, at any rate, was chopped up by WGN, and a shame too. I thought networks had gotten pretty much out of the habit. What was lopped off consisted of small but highly revealing character touches, as is usually the case.
What's missing from the print here, at least what came to my notice, are two relatively short scenes, whose importance as revealers of character I leave to you to judge. (1) Van Doren has been on the show and become a celebrity and has gotten used to being surrounded by envious and gushing young idolators. He arrives a bit early, before one of the campus buildings discharges its horde of students. And instead of alighting immediately from the cab, he pauses, leans down, and begins fiddling with his shoelace -- until the building opens and disgorges its young people, and then he gets out and is quickly engulfed as a bit of nutrient might be engulfed by a brainless amoeba. (2) Dick Goodwin visits the van Dorens and their guests (Bunny Wilson, etc.)at their Connecticut home, where everyone sits around the picnic table playing a kind of Shakespeare trivia contest. Dad starts a quote and challenges Charles to finish it and identify its source, that sort of thing. The erudite byplay of all concerned is enough to convince Goodwin that nobody from a community like this could be guilty of cheating on a stupid quiz show.
The film rolls along with a lot of dash. Redford has a real facility in the use and placement of the camera. After several important exchanges he tends to linger on the face of one of the speakers, usually the one who has just learned something and whose mouth is left slightly open. The score is mostly of contemporary songs and intrudes a bit, seems loud.
Charles van Doren may have envied and perhaps resented his father's fame (the movie hints that it was his desire to become as well-known as Mark that prompted him to cheat) but he's lucky to have had the father he did. Otherwise, master's in astrophysics and doctorate in literature or no, it's unlikely he would have been teaching at Columbia, even as an Instructor. (Talk about unfair advantage!)
What is the movie's point of view? It's not completely spelled out, but it seems to be that it was okay for a nobody like Herb Stempel to cheat but not for someone with Charles van Doren's status. There's a certain reasonableness about this judgment. It's one thing for schmucks like you and me to steal towels from a fancy motel like the Tiki Waterbed Palace in Kansas City, but it means something entirely different if a celebrity does it. It's not part of our job descriptions to be models of rectitude, whereas we feel that famous professors and politicians ought to be. It seems an especially apt observation since in the case of quiz shows nobody gets hurt or deprived of anything. It's not a zero sum game. Under different circumstances, though, that's exactly what it is, and that's when cheating becomes not simply unethical but criminal. An armed robber is depriving another of something of value. Yet, our attitudes towards cheating must be very mixed indeed, to judge from the users' comments under "The Cheaters." If you cheat in an academic decathlon, you're depriving someone else of something of value, although it isn't a material good, but rather a reward whose value is symbolic.
At the end of this story, no one has profited. Stempel, the loudmouth who has been gunning for the blond Aryan, finally brings him down, only to discover that he feels not satisfaction but pity for "the poor guy." Goodwin, who was after television, has torpedoed a comrade instead. The public loses its innocence. One or two network small fry are barbecued. And van Doren of course is ruined.
The only winner is television itself, which will go on to bigger and better things like "World's Wildest Police Videos." Why bother watching someone on TV exercise their brains when you can watch people smash up their cars on a freeway? It's difficult to believe that there was actually a time in our history when people would crowd around their TV sets and watch a contestant struggle to answer a question about the King of Belgium.
Maybe Ray Bradbury put it best: "The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little." Gimme "Survivor" any day, and pass the sugar frosted flakes.