Film Chronicle
2021; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/thr.2021.0052
ISSN1939-9774
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoFilm Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) Film Chronicle. All the President’s Men, directed by Alan J. Pakula (streaming on Amazon Prime); L’Argent, directed by Marcel L’Herbier (Flicker Alley DVD, 2019); The Counterfeiters, directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky (streaming on Amazon Prime); Logan Lucky, directed by Steven Soderbergh (streaming on Amazon Prime); A Taxing Woman, directed by Juzo Itami (streaming on the Criterion Channel); Gold Diggers of 1933, directed by Mervyn Le Roy (streaming on Amazon Prime); Goldfinger, directed by Guy Hamilton (streaming on Amazon Prime); Lust for Gold, directed by S. Sylvan Simon (streaming on Amazon Prime); Le Million, directed by René Clair (streaming on the Criterion Channel). A note on film sources. Besides Amazon Prime, the Criterion Channel, and Netflix, many newer services—Vudu, Roku TV, HBO Max, IMDb TV, Disney Plus, Acorn, Google Play, Kanopy, Kino, plus others—have entered the watch-at-home market. Some of these services provide films for free, whereas others charge fees; some, like the Criterion Channel, operate by subscription; some show films only with commercials. Availabilities change all the time, but a reasonably reliable guide to which services are currently streaming a particular film or television program is JustWatch (www.justwatch.com). Meanwhile it’s important to note that DVDs of significant films can still be requested from Netflix, purchased, or borrowed from a library. As it happens, all of the films discussed in this Chronicle except for L’Argent are available as DVDs in my local public library, and they might be in yours as well. The DVD will remain a useful resource for film viewers for some time to come. “Follow the money,” advises the figure barely visible in the murk of a deserted Washington, DC parking garage. His words furnish a crucial lead for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they trace the Watergate burglary through layers of secret funding back to the White House and the morally corrupt, soon-to-be-forced-from-office president at its center. I suspect that many Americans have recently been thinking about a Republican president’s departure from the Oval Office. Perhaps by the time this chronicle appears, filmmakers will be planning how to depict the rise and fall of Donald Trump. Until their works appear, we could do worse than stick with the fall of Richard Nixon in Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men, from 1976—a film which, politics aside, rewards watching or rewatching for purely cinematic reasons. Think of the low-key, restrained, sometimes barely audible delivery of lines in that garage scene. Robert Redford as Woodward and Hal Holbrook as the shadow-seeking, ultra-cautious informant [End Page 296] Deep Throat—identified decades later as the Associate Director of the FBI, Mark Felt—knew exactly how to exchange complex information while maintaining the suspense, the mysteriousness, of their clandestine encounter. Or think of the scenes set in The Washington Post newsroom, its fluorescent lights harshly illuminating the chaos of an office where stories have to be reported, written up, and sent to the presses on deadline. It’s said that the designers of All the President’s Men put real trash from the Post into the set’s wastebaskets, invisible though that trash would be to a cinema audience; such was their commitment to historical accuracy. The cleverest of the newsroom scenes shows, in the foreground, television coverage of the Republican National Convention which has just nominated Richard Nixon for a second term, while in the background, Bob Woodward begins writing the news story destined to destroy Nixon’s presidency. In other words, a close-up on stage-managed hoopla shares the screen with a long shot of truth. This is a cleverly ironic composition in depth, and it is matched by an equally clever soundtrack mixing Nixon’s speechifying with the clattering keys of the machinery which will set the nascent Watergate story into type. Even finer than this, I think, is the episode showing Bernstein and Woodward at work inside the grand rotunda of the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress, where they hope to trace evidence in the form of suspicious book-borrowings by the White House. The film’s...
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