Ethics For Sale

Rating: 9/10 (10 October 2007)

Quiz Show, directed by Robert Redford, is a story of the quiz show scandal of the 50s, an era now seen as nostalgic and a more innocent time. Gullible would be the better description. As television came into more middle class homes of suburban tract house dwellers, the family hour centered around game shows and trivia buffs who wanted to guess my line, play 21, and name that tune. What viewers didn't know was the extensive corporate monies that manipulated who accessed the growing nation's airwaves. Geritol, Encyclopedia Britannica, and cigarette advertisers virtually controlled television and awareness of the public. Advertisers poured millions into television programs like 21, a quiz show that pitted contestants, many with extensive educational backgrounds, against the Joe Schmo underdog, Herbert Stemple. John Turturro plays the irritating, celebrity-obsessed Stemple to a T. When investigated by D.C. congressional snoop, Dick Godwin (Rob Morrow) for questionable practices, the corporate door is slammed. However, when the golden boy Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes), from a family of academic elites, is outed by the envious Stemple, the quiz show hoax becomes a televised national event of disgrace.
Redford's expose is a morality play within a film about television that is a superior story of ethics and capitalism run amok. How the American public was snowed by the medium and corporate manipulation of geek Stemple, a man with "a face for radio" versus the upper-class Van Doren, and Godwin, an ambitious Harvard man who believed in the American justice system is the triangle and grand story.
Redford does not over look the numerous details of an era when Ike and Mamie were chic, the GI-Bill was a means to making a better life for the millions of returned veterans, and Geritol guaranteed freedom from tired blood. It is a tale of the past as corrupt as today, but without the internet, cell phone camera shot, and bloggers to give us an instant condemnation of celebrities with feet of clay. Redford's warning is as valid today as then.