Network Blu-ray offers solid video and audio in this excellent Blu-ray release
Newscaster Howard Beale has a message for those who package reports of cute puppies, movie premieres and fender benders as hard news: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” Sidney Lumet directs Paddy Chayefsky’s satire (an Academy Award-winning screenplay) about the things people do for love…and ratings.
My wife was a news anchor in several major markets nationwide until she had the good sense to get out of broadcasting and find some honest work. Yes, that's a joke, but just barely. Having visited a working newsroom on several occasions, I can say without much fear of being contradicted that news people are hard working (sometimes hard drinking), often fearless, folk, and they also do not suffer fools gladly. They also have about the blackest senses of humor imaginable, perhaps a defense mechanism built up to help them cope with the many tragedies their careers force them to cover. But even the best sense of humor can't protect longtime news reporters and anchors from one stark reality: they have seen their workplaces change, in sometimes epochal ways, over the past quarter of a century or so, as duopoly rules meant fewer employees working for more stations (simultaneously in many instances), and perhaps even more importantly, with the slow but steady accretion of that new genre, infotainment, where news and entertainment content became miraculously merged into one amorphous, slightly slimy, gel.
It's all the more remarkable, then, that Paddy Chayefsky's marvelous script for Network is so frighteningly prescient. After all, in 1976, when the film was released, the evening news was still a nightly tradition for most adult Americans, and the three broadcast networks ruled the airwaves with iconic anchors like Cronkite, Smith, Chancellor and Brinkley. It would be four to five more years until shows like Entertainment Tonight started cropping up in syndication, slowly blurring the line between news and entertainment, and 24 hour news networks like CNN appeared on the horizon, needing, well, 24 hours of content to fill their broadcasting day, thereby creating a whole new market for shows which blended elements of news and entertainment. It seemed to happen almost overnight, seen now from the distance of that quarter century, but Chayefsky obviously saw it coming well before it dawned on the rest of us, and Network was his brilliantly acerbic warning shot across the bow. Unfortunately, too few of us heard, refusing to believe that things could get as bad as Network portrayed them, however satirically. How terribly, terribly wrong we were.
He's mad as hell, if by "mad" you mean "crazy."
How prophetic was Network? Almost incalculably. An Evening News beset by tumbling ratings which "tarts up" its presentation to attract new viewers. An anchor encouraged to spew vehement rants in order to attract new viewers. An entertainment division exploiting terrorism in the guise of news programming in order to attract new viewers. Whether the catchphrase is O brave new world! That has such people in it! or Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, it's obvious we've already arrived at the place Chayefsky predicted, albeit hyperbolically, so many years ago. In fact Chayefsky's scrying goes beyond even that short laundry list above, especially in the film's final act, when Network's UBS turns out to be part of a conglomerate that is being snatched up by Saudi Arabia. As The Daily Show has so perfectly parodied, the almost always xenophobic Fox News frequently forgets to mention how its owner Rupert Murdoch is business partners with several Saudi businessmen, including one of the leaders behind the infamous, so-called "Ground Zero Mosque." In fact UBS seems in many ways to be the model on which Fox News may have based itself, intentionally or not. Flashy graphics, vitriolic anchors, no real separation between news and opinion; it's all there. Of course, Fox is not the only cable "news" network to engage in this kind of activity, as any viewer of the left leaning MSNBC can attest. It's just that Fox was there first with many of these techniques and has been the most successful by far.
What's so incredibly bracing about Network and makes it perhaps more relevant than it was even in 1976 is Chayefsky's deliberately skewed sense of humor. Chayefsky came up through the ranks of live television in the 1950's and saw the medium change rather drastically with the advent of the 1960's, as in fact the entirety of American culture did. But what sets so much of Chayefsky's writing apart is not just how literate it is, but how wonderfully black the humor is. Chayefsky's scripts are often populated with world class cynics who are not just frighteningly articulate, they seem to embody the "best" aspects of world-weariness that many of us experience but aren't able to properly put into words. That aspect is brilliantly personified in Network by producer Max Schumacher (William Holden), the man forced to deal with his unbalanced longtime anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch in his posthumously Oscar winning performance).
For those of you who haven't yet seen Network, it would be really unfair to spoil much of the joy, shock and awe which await you as you enter into the convoluted world that Chayefsky constructs. Suffice it to say that news "mandarin" Howard Beale, a Cronkite-like fixture of the news arena, suffers what appears to be an on-air nervous breakdown after he's informed by the network that he's being canned due to low ratings. Of course that very nervous breakdown makes Beale's nightly news broadcast "must see television" of the highest order, and soon the network is actually encouraging Beale to spout off, the loonier, the better. What no one seems to realize (or at least care about) is that Beale is indeed becoming mentally unhinged, soon believing he's receiving personal messages from God. Or perhaps he really is—that ambiguity is part and parcel of Chayefsky's genius. Into this maelstrom marches Faye Dunaway's entertainment producer, who feels Beale's newscast is due for a makeover, extremely extreme edition. You'll simply be amazed at how much of Chayefsky's then-ridiculous postulations have since become de rigeur for today's broadcasts, at least on cable.
As much as Beale is the putative "star" character of the movie, a more objective look at Network really reveals that the film is actually Max's story. He is the more or less rational relative outsider, watching the insanity unfold before his very eyes. He obviously is ensnared in it himself, chiefly through his romantic dalliance with entertainment producer Diana Christensen (Dunaway in her Academy Award winning performance), but the film's real emotional resonance comes from Max's step back from the brink, something which affects not just his professional life, but perhaps more importantly, his personal one with his wife (Beatrice Straight in her Academy Award winning performance, the shortest screen time ever to win a supporting Oscar). This is a film which almost perfectly balances a circus-like atmosphere with actual, honest to goodness human emotion, another hallmark of Chayefsky's impeccable writing prowess.
Anyone who has watched, whether willingly or drawn, train wreck style, to the likes of Olbermann, O'Reilly, Maddow, Beck, Hannity and their kin will have no problem understanding just how brilliant Chayefsky was to foresee a time when the news became a "show," frequently with blustering anchors seemingly one small step away from actual insanity (your personal political persuasion will allow you to pick your own candidate from the above list). What Network manages to do so effortlessly under Sidney Lumet's inspired direction is to make it all so funny, even when the film is at its core very, very disturbing and unsettling. The humor helps the message to go down without seeming like a screed, and that is about the only thing that sets Network apart from the current landscape of television "news."
Network beams onto Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p image in 1.78:1. I saw this film several times theatrically and can attest to the fact it never featured the sharpest looking image, something that director Lumet actually seems to favor, at least in his "big city" urban mode. The overall image here is therefore slightly on the soft side, though that is representative of what the film originally looked like. Too many younger viewers come to these mid-1970's films without appreciating them within the context of their times; from the early 1970's to around a decade later, films by and large were much, much softer looking than they are today, and Network fits that pattern to a tee. There's a noticeable uptick in color and saturation here, with good to very good fine detail. Note for example the funny-crazy patterned news set for Beale, which in previous home video releases never popped the way it does on BD. In the most brightly and naturally lit scenes, fine detail is quite good; in the main scene with Holden and Straight, with some lingering close-ups, it's exceptional. Black levels are really good, especially in the many dark control booth sequences, where the mixers' dark hair never crushes into the background shadows. Grain is intact and gives the film a suitably natural look.
Network debuts on Blu-ray with a generally fine, if obviously very narrow, DTS-HD Master Audio mono mix. Some of the film suffers from a bit of boxiness, but generally dialogue and effects are delivered with robust fidelity. This is actually a film which could have benefited quite well from a repurposed 5.1 track, especially in some of the multi-network simultaneous feed sequences, where everything pumping out of one channel can make the track sound muddled and too busy. Generally, though, this is a clean and damage free track. It may not be very exciting or modern day cinema-like, but it gets the job done with a minimum of fuss and bother.
Feature Commentary by Director Sidney Lumet is perhaps a bit too quiet and sporadic for some, but it's thoughtful and provocative, just like the director.
Behind the Story (SD; 1:25:28) is an engrossing feature length documentary split into several separately playable chapters. This piece offers a really excellent background piece on Chayefsky which is invaluable in helping to understand just how formidable the writer's accomplishments were.
March 2, 1977 Dinah! with Paddy Chayefsky (SD; 14:02) is a fun snippet from Dinah Shore's old daytime gabfest. Shore proves to be a surprisingly good and well informed interviewer, as well as very, very low key.
Private Screenings with Sidney Lumet (SD; 54:34) Lumet sits down for an in-depth interview with Robert Osborne, culled from the TCM archives.
Network gave the world the inimitable catchphrase "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take this anymore!" Very few times in film history has a film delivered such a blistering critique of modern culture while at the same time being so frighteningly prophetic. What's most amazing about Network, however, is how deeply, darkly funny it is. Highly recommended.
Warner Home Video has announced two Oscar-winning media-themed films from the 1970s for Blu-ray release on February 15, 2011: All the President's Men, a retelling of the Watergate burglary investigation that ultimately brought down Richard Nixon's administration; ...
