Here are two more reviews of old films that are worth seeing.

Network (1976)

This film is a brutal satire on the TV news business and, sad as it is to say and even harder to believe, the kinds of attitudes it satirized in 1976 has only gotten far worse in the subsequent three decades.

Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky uses the story of Howard Beale, a network news anchor who has a mental breakdown when he is told that he is being fired because of his low ratings, to show what really drives TV news. When Beale starts saying the truth on air about how things really work in the news world and the contempt that the people in TV have for the intelligence of their viewers, he starts getting audience attention and his ratings start going up again. He starts to pick up steam by voicing the frustration and sense of powerlessness that people feel.

The people in the entertainment division of the network see the chance to gain huge ratings by converting the news into a kind of entertainment, complete with segments involving soothsayers and the like, the whole thing showcased by Beale, now nicknamed ‘the mad prophet of the airwaves’, ranting on some topic, as can be seen in this clip, where he denounces the dangerous control that TV has on the minds of the public.

(Nowadays, nowhere is this film’s critique of how ‘news’ has become trivialized more apparent than in the ridiculous amount of coverage given to Paris Hilton. The best commentary on the media frenzy about the non-event that was her recent jailing was that given by Tommy Chong in an interview with Stephen Colbert.)
The film is immensely helped by the performances of two wonderful actors (William Holden and Peter Finch) in the twilight of their careers, aided by two other fine actors Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall who were at their peak. Finch won an Academy Award for his performance but died before he could accept it.

Although Chayevsky a tendency has sometimes to give his characters (especially the one played by Holden) set-piece speeches on life and love and death that give the film a somewhat stagey-look, his writing is so good that he gets away with it. There are some interesting side-plots involving urban guerrilla chic and radical black activists of that time. The film shows how, in the end, everyone is corrupted by the allure of fame and money that TV exposure brings, and are willing to be manipulated by the TV executives to achieve that goal.

Network is one of those films that I saw when it first came out and is still good after all these years. It is a film that has become a cultural touchstone, with the line “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore” familiar to people who may not know from where it originated.

Matewan (1987)

Matewan is another fine film by independent filmmaker John Sayles. It is based on the true story of the struggle of coal miners in the West Virginia town of Matewan to obtain better condition by forming a union, and the fierce attempts by the mine owners and their thugs and goons to prevent it. Seeing films like this makes me appreciate so much more the efforts of the early efforts at unionization, fought by workers and their families at great cost and danger to themselves, which now give us the kinds of working conditions and safety that we take for granted.

Sayles’s first film was The Return of the Secausus Seven (1980), the story of a group of high school friends who reunite for a vacation ten years after graduation. It was shot on a low budget with an unknown and almost amateur cast. The much better-known The Big Chill (1983), which has almost the same story, looks like an unacknowledged remake of Sayles’s film.

Sayles has since gone on to make more commercially successful films (you can see a list of the films he as made here) and has been able to attract better known actors along the way, with some of them, such as Chris Cooper and David Strathairn, appearing repeatedly.

Sayles epitomizes the true independent. Many filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh who began as independents went the big budget Hollywood route after they achieved commercial success. Sayles refuses to do so. Even after he has shown himself to be a critical and commercially successful filmmaker, he refuses to seek funding from the big studios because they would require him to relinquish control over the final product. He says:

I want to direct films that no one else is going to make. I know if I don’t make them, I’m never going to see them. Of course, I hope some people will want to see my movies as well, but I won’t pander to the public. I won’t try to second guess what a Hollywood studio would like to see in a low-budget film, so that they will hire me the next time around. I know I will always do better work if I do projects in which I really believe. And if I never get to direct again, I will have made some movies I can feel proud of.

Sayles is very good at capturing the mood of a time and an event, and does not shrink away from showing the politics of race and class. For him, what a film says is more important than how it looks. As he said, “I’m interested in the stuff I do being seen as widely as possible but I’m not interested enough to lie. . .[A movie] may not look the way we’d like it to look or sound the way we’d like it to sound or get seen by as many people as we’d like to have see it but at least it will say the stuff we want it to say.”