Edward R. Murrow:
THE McCARTHY
YEARS is one of four dvds in a boxset,
The Edward R. Murrow Collection, that rounds up just a few of that no-nonsense reporter's finest half-hours. The McCARTHY disc focuses on Murrow's televised take-downs of the Michigan senator Joe McCarthy, then riding the wave of an anti-communist crusade that peaked in the
HUAC hearings. The programs mark the escalating skirmishes between the two savvy media-players, resolved only when McCarthy himself was censured by his own colleagues in 1954. The shows are compelling, not just for the two diametrically opposed antagonists, they also commemorate Murrow's out-of-left-field broadcasting persona. Sitting at an angle from the camera and only occasionally glancing up to acknowledge his audience, the veteran
CBS reporter gives us a startling lesson in poker-faced punditry. Murrow's reductive studio style should be mandatory study for today's more excitable journalists: his perpetual monotone indicates an unwavering resolve, his unchanging expression transmits implacable dignity.
Senator McCarthy, however, is
really something else... staring down the targets of his wrath perched safely behind his senate table, he is by turns pompously taciturn and brazenly theatrical. Pointing an unshaven jaw at his parade of victims while croaking out smears and accusations, he presents a finely-tuned portrait of a professional demagogue. But there is other material, footage of stump-speeches and whistle-stops, where McCarthy's attempts at jovial joke-telling send him into bizarrely schoolgirlish giggle-fits, making him appear, for lack of a better word, nuts.
In the set's most remarkable episode, Murrow invites McCarthy onto his program for an uninterrupted rebuttal of Murrow's reporting. McCarthy's bellicose appearance and paranoid accusations on that evening's broadcast (he accuses Murrow himself of being a communist dupe) brought his room-clearing personality right into the family dens of appalled viewers who were left to cringe behind their TV trays.
Other dvds included in
THE EDWARD R. MURROW COLLECTION (which can also be bought separately) are
THIS REPORTER,
HARVEST OF SHAME and
THE BEST OF SEE IT NOW. Introduced by Walter Cronkite (pushing the Venerable Statesman act a mite), these no-frills dvds are the perfect embodiment of Murrow's style, a bracing example of what is now an almost forgotten television art: straight-ahead reporting with only the facts as a special effect.
- IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG (B&W, 103 Minutes)
Merciless in his search for the truth, Emilio de Antonio (1919-1989) adopted the scorched earth policies of the very government he challenged in his unyielding documentary, IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG. The film, a ruthless prosecution of America's presence in Vietnam, seemed, in 1969, like the provocative act of a fringe dweller. Now, with the curtains having fallen away from the countless lies and deceptions surrounding that war, the film looks like the calmly reasoned statement of a small town professor.
De Antonio's technique borrows from Murrow but he works on a much broader canvas. Using existing footage of presidents and generals as well as newly filmed interviews (including early Vietnam critic David Halberstam), De Antonio lays out his case by charting the history of Southeast Asia and the eventual ascension of Ho Chi Minh as the leader of North Vietnam. His groundwork in place, de Antonio weaves in his interviews and found footage, stepping through a minefield of obfuscation and bald-faced lies to illuminate the facts. The film is unnarrated but de Antonio's anger comes through loud and clear.
The dvd provides a director's commentary of sorts... de Antonio is heard on second audio from pieced together archival footage. The disc also contains an in-studio interview with de Antonio that wrapped around an early eighties PBS broadcast of the film.
