Film: Good Night, and Good Luck
Good Night, and Good
Luck is the story about the conflict between
anti-communist crusader Sen. Joe McCarthy and the famous CBS newsman Edward R.
Murrow and about how McCarthy's attack on Murrow helped the public understand
what an irrational fanatic McCarthy was.
Good Night, and Good
Luck is about TV newsman Edward R. Murrow
taking on Sen. Joe McCarthy in 1953. The film is in black and white, as
was TV back then, and includes McCarthy only through old news footage. But
it's not just a film about McCarthy's downfall. It's very much about his
use of fear to erode civil liberties and about the role of the news media in
defending them. There are significant segments of the film that sound like
appropriate responses to what the Bush administration has been doing for the
past five years—using fear of terrorism to erode civil liberties. It
also speaks about the conflict between truthful journalism and the fact that the
news media are big corporate
businesses.
The
Advocate reported that the majority of test
audiences didn't know who Edward R. Murrow was and a significant percent didn't
know who Joe McCarthy was. A lot of people didn't realize that the TV
footage of McCarthy was real and thought it was done by a bad ham actor.
What I don't understand is why The
Advocate put Director George Clooney on the
cover of the latest issue for doing this film. There is a gay story in how
McCarthy was brought down, but that story is not told in this film. Any
hints it might contain are not going to be picked up by the audiences that see
it.
Posted: Saturday - November 26, 2005 at 10:27 PM