February 14, 2021
All the President’s Men (1976) ****
HBO Max
Free
Filmspotting
“Boy, that woman was paranoid! At one point I – I suddenly wondered how high up this thing goes, and her paranoia finally got to me, and I thought what we had was so hot that any minute CBS or NBC were going to come in through the windows and take the story away.”
“You’re both paranoid. She’s afraid of John Mitchell, and you’re afraid of Walter Cronkite.”
Now, the Filmspotting category is supposed to be for Filmspotting Marathons, and also generally the idea is that these are movies I have not seen before. However, they are currently doing a series called 7 From ’76, and they started off last week with All the President’s Men, which reminded me just how much I love this movie.
I don’t know how many times I have seen it, probably between ten and twenty, and it makes sense that I am seeing it on HBO Max, since I’m pretty sure all but the first time I saw it was on HBO in the first place, back when they would just play one movie over and over again, and if you liked it, you’d watch it five times in a single weekend.
I started watching this in the afternoon, but had barely started before I decided to nap, and then didn’t get back to it until 11p. I thought about watching something else, since this film is 2h 15m, but nothing was calling to me, so I thought I’d watch half (the absolute minimum and only if I’m dying to go to sleep).
I then proceeded to watch the whole thing, because you just can’t stop watching All the President’s Men until it’s over, even if you know the plot like the inside of your own mouth, it’s just too gripping.
I was 11 years old when the film came out, and I saw it with my parents, because they would take me to see anything. Not that this is unsuitable for kids (beyond some language), just that you’d think it might be boring. Eleven-year-old me begs to differ! I did not at all understand everything that went on, but I was riveted nonetheless, it’s just that kind of movie.
The performances are entirely natural, and it’s a rogues gallery of great 1970s character actors: Martin Balsam, Jack Warden, Hal Holbrook, Ned Beatty, Jason Robards, any one of which would elevate any movie they were in, but all of them together, it is a tsunami of awesomeness.
Redford and Hoffman give terrific performances and are a great team. Sidebar: recently I heard on some podcast, someone talking about this movie as something they had sort of heard of, and they said that Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford played Woodward and Bernstein, but they didn’t know who was who. Really? You think that Robert Redford might have played someone named Bernstein? Really?
Anyway, if you are reading this and you don’t know who played Woodward and who played Bernstein, live in your ignorance not one moment more, All the President’s Men is a doozy.
365 Films in 365 Days 