Ralph a blonde?

Rating: 7/10 (13 September 1998)

Even though it's based on a true story (which usually includes the so-called 'unusable reality') I thought this film was fun to watch, despite Ralph's blonde hair (how COULD he?) which made him look like an escaped maniac, and also despite the righteousness of Charles van Doren, at first refusing to get the questions beforehand & then deliberately failing at the end (this is what I mean by unusable reality - if this indeed happened then it should 've been cut from the story & changed into something else).
I forget the names of the rest of the cast, but Herb Stempel was great, but the guy who investigated the thing/wrote the book (what WAS his name?)... another case of unusable reality. I would have preferred to see everybody being the bad guy, and all of them after money, not Fox Mulder-esque 'truth' or any such nonsense.
Still, despite these shortcomings the film managed to entertain me simply because it has a story which follows from A to C via B, something which in many (especially recent) films has been totally ignored. That alone makes it deserve a '7', add to that the cast of Charles & Herb and you've got one of the 250 best films of this half of the 20th century.