WC: All The President's Men

Just saw All the President's Men for the first time. (I missed many movies in the '70s. First I was in college, then I was doing theatre, and then I was--finally!--getting laid.) It's a fascinating movie, well made, but it relies on the viewer bringing a certain amount of knowledge to the table, which makes me wonder how long people will actually be watching it. But even without knowledge of Watergate, the viewer would still get to see many interesting things, such as these two:

• How much work everything was pre-Internet. To try to find someone, Woodward goes through phone book after phone book. Every article is painstakingly typed and then painstakingly input into, what?, a linotype machine maybe? No interviews are recorded--notes are taken by hand. The lack of cell phones slows down communication immensely.
  

• How much work is involved in investigating reporting. Yes, there's less grunt work now, but it's still a labor-intensive 24/7 project requiring imagination, communication skills, a willingness to manipulate, the ability to figure out a puzzle without having all the pieces, and incredible stamina. I hope it doesn't become a lost art.

The film features a wonderful array of actors in supporting and bit parts. I caught, for example, Steven Collins, Lindsay Crouse, Nicolas Coster, and Meredith Baxter but failed to identify Polly Holiday and Penny Fuller. (Victoria Clark and Alice Ripley were not in it, but I'm mentioning them so that my sister and my best bud will get Google alerts on this review. Hi Holly. Hi Susan.)

I thought Robert Redford was wonderful (I'm not usually a fan), as was Dustin Hoffman (I am usually a fan). Jason Robards, who I always think of as relying on his gravelly voice too much, and also mumbling too much, relies on his gravelly voice too much and mumbles too much. At one point, I put on the closed captions to see what he was saying, but they hadn't understood him either, and the screen remained blank while he spoke.

On a serious level, the big take-away for me is the reminder that the current despicable dishonesty of the Republican Party is nothing new. Sometimes I wonder how low they can possibly go, but this movie reminds me how low they have already gone. As David Byrne and Brian Eno wrote, "Same as it ever was, same as it ever was."