Good Night and Good Luck 11/05/05

Edward R. Murrow was a newsman for CBS during the early fifties when a senator named Josephy McCarthy was trying suspected communists for being communists and convicting them with false testimony and hear say evidence. When most reporters ignored the McCarthy hearings for fear of being suspected, Murrow after a while stood up. He was the first, and that is why this first rate movie was made about him. I found the movie to be in a version like the 1975 film "All the President's Men," mostly because it skirted melodrama, and was about men in smoke-filled rooms working and talking seriously for a change. There is a tension in the air, but that is because of the seriousness of the situation. Nothing is exploited for gratuitous value, even McCarthy himself is shown as himself, pasted from Newsreels shown at the time. A movie like this is rare, because most studios today don't think that the American attention span is long enough to focus on something seriously for more than an hour and a half. If this movie becomes popular it will be of much help to us all. It will prove that Americans are willing to pay to hear a serious discussion, and if producers can catch that idea than maybe instead of the shouting debates that we now have on the 24-hour news networks, we may get lengthy and educating debates that actually look into the issues instead of just glancing at them. In a paraphrase of Murrow, this may be wrong, but what harm can it do. In the opinion of this critic, I hope we get more enlightening movies like these made. We as a people can help this by making them profitable to make. That's all. Good Night, and Good Luck.