All the President's Men

Rating:
Summary: Very faithful to "Woodstein's" book.
Review:
Having been born several months after the resignation of President Nixon, it's difficult sometimes to grasp the significance of the events preceding Nixon's disgrace - namely, the break-in at the national headquarters of the Democratic Party and the trials, hearings, and reportage that followed. Woodward and Berstein's stories in the Post - without queston among the most important journalism of the last century - became an important aspect of the story itself, and this film gracefully and suspensefully details the lengths to which they went to make sure they had their i's dotted and t's crossed.

For those with a keen interest in the Watergate affair and the Nixon presidency, I also recommend "Watergate Plus Thirty - Shadow of History", a two hour documentary produced for PBS and available on DVD.

Rating:
Summary: Re-birth of a Nation
Review: "All the President's Men" is the well-made movie about the political fiasco known as "Watergate". Watergate remains the biggest political mess in American history and it led to the resignation of president Richard "I am not a crook" Nixon.

The movie has big stars, including Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford as the two Washington Post reporters who begin to unearth the story about the break-in at the Watergate hotel and subsequently piece together the details that implicate a long list of top politicians.

The intriguing story is helped by supporting actors Jason Robards, Jack Warden, Martin Balsam, and Hal Holbrook who plays "Deep Throat", the still-unidentified informant who guided Woodward and Bernstein along the trail of information.

The DVD includes text-based cast/crew info, casting notes, location info, a bit about "Deep Thoat", a chronology of the Watergate activity, and a list of awards which include 4 oscars.

If you don't know much about the circumstances surrounding Watergate, this is a good place to start.

Rating:
Summary: "A third-rate burglary attempt"
Review: - that was how presidential Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler referred to the attempted June 17, 1972 break-in at the Washington, D.C. Watergate building in his initial comments on the event. Not worthy of further notice, although "certain elements" might try to "stretch this beyond what it is." Ziegler would come to eat his words several times over when, as a result of the Pulitzer Prize-winning reports by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, one senior government official after the other lost his post to the prospect of exchanging suit and tie for prison garbs, until at last even President Nixon himself was compelled to resign from the office which, as he'd declared only shortly before, he had "no intention whatever of ever walking away from."

Based on Woodward and Bernstein's bestselling book and released only two years after Nixon's resignation, "All the President's Men" chronicles the two reporters' investigation of the infamous money trail leading from the burglars' court arraignment and notations in two of their notebooks to White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman and to a conspiracy which, as the reporters would discover, went far beyond a simple attempt to plant bugs at the national Democratic headquarters, and was chiefly engineered through the Republican Committee to Re-Elect the President (appropriately acronymed "CReeP"). While the events are somewhat streamlined and not all of the individuals actually involved in the conspiracy are mentioned - wisely so, as even the information that *is* given takes either several viewings of the film or a close reference to the underlying book to be fully digested - the movie faithfully depicts the events as they are described in the two reporters' account.

Woodward and Bernstein were an unlikely match; both regarding their personalities and their respective backgrounds: Woodward an Illinois native, Yale graduate and former naval officer with upper-crust ties, only nine months with the Post when the Watergate story broke; Bernstein a D.C. native and college dropout with liberal leanings, who had worked his way up in the business from age sixteen onwards. Yet, over time they not only came to be friends but actually worked together so closely that their colleagues took to addressing them collectively as "Woodstein." Equally unlikely was their staffing on the Watergate story, as neither of them was a senior journalist with the Washington Post, nor were they on steady assignment with its national desk. Yet, largely due to patronage by the paper's Metro Editor, as well as eventually Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, they were able to pursue their investigation to its very end.

Starring as Bernstein and Woodward are Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford (who had purchased the film rights to the story shortly after the book's publication and is also one of the movie's co-producers). Both actors performed a tremendous amount of research for their roles, which enabled them not only to perfectly portray the two lead characters - and this although Redford in particular has virtually no physical resemblance to Woodward - but also to convey their tenacity in pursuing a story that even their own colleagues at first didn't want to believe, and in whose development they were hampered at every corner. Similarly, Jason Robards, who won a "Best Supporting Actor" Oscar and several other awards for his role as Ben Bradlee, convincingly nails the famous newsman's mix of New England pedigree and tough talk; and Jack Warden, Martin Balsam and Hal Holbrook are equally compelling as Metro Editor Harry Rosenfeld, Managing Editor Howard Simons and Woodward's still-unidentified source "Deep Throat." Outstanding in a cast featuring dozens of actors are further Jane Alexander as bookkeeper and reluctant source Judy Hoback, Ned Beatty as Florida prosecutor Martin Dardis, Stephen Collins as former Haldeman aide and CReeP treasurer Hugh Sloan, Robert Walden as California attorney and "ratf*cking" organizer Donald Segretti and Penny Fuller as Woodward's and Bernstein's colleague Sally Aiken, who uses her personal contacts to provide crucial CReeP insider information. (Plus, watch out for F. Murray Abraham's brief appearance as one of the arresting officers at the Watergate.)

What makes "All the President's Men" so compelling are, of course, first and foremost the true facts of the underlying story; the sheer enormity of a conspiracy constituting nothing less than a full-fledged attack on the electoral process and on the very foundations of the American democracy, and involving the entire U.S. intelligence community and almost all of the Republican establishment, up to and including former President Nixon. Appropriately, the movie is styled in the way of a documentary, resisting all temptations to hype the events and relying entirely on its stellar cast and on the authenticity provided by its D.C. location shots, by the recreation of the Washington Post's newsroom (with numerous props supplied by the paper itself), and by actual TV footage from the era. And although David Shire is credited for his soundtrack contribution, the film's most memorable sounds are not those of his almost non-audible score but the hammering of the reporters' typewriters, of the news ticker announcing the story's final developments, and of the gunshot- and whiplash-enforced pounding of the opening caption. Not surprisingly, the movie also won the Academy Award for Best Sound, in addition to Robards's and those for Best Writing (William Goldman, with input from Carl Bernstein and his former wife Nora Ephron) and Best Art Direction. Why it didn't also win the "Best Movie" award, I will never understand. (Rocky who?!)

"Nothing's riding on this except the First Amendment of the Constitution, the freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country," Ben Bradlee tells Woodward and Bernstein after their investigation has almost faltered over a misunderstanding with two sources regarding Haldeman's involvement, and he adds: "Not that any of that matters. But if you guys f*ck up again, I'm going to get mad ..." They didn't give him reason to. And the rest, as the saying goes, is history - hopefully never to be repeated, anywhere in the world.