All the President’s Men

Watching Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men (1976) in 2007 you notice first the changes in technology. One of the central symbols in the film is the typewriter. The first image in the film is the explosive impact of a typewriter key on a sheet of paper. Clattering typewriters echo throughout the film. In a final scene, the increasingly loud typing of Woodward and Bernstein competes with the 21 gun salute commemorating President Nixon's inauguration to a second term in office. The press room bereft of computers and full of brightly colored furniture and typewriters and fluorescent lighting seems from some alternative universe, or reminds you of a Kubrick vision of the future, now anachronistically false and quaint.

Rotary phones—Woodward and Bernstein use them throughout the film to talk with one another and with sources, to gather information. When they're out on the street and need to communicate, they use pay phone booths. Cell phones are absent. The technology clearly places this film in its time. How strange that this dramatization of an event that I witnessed now seems a period piece.

The plot of this film gradually accumulates, accretes, one bit of information at a time, exactly as Woodward and Bernstein gathered information about the Watergate break-in and began linking apparently disparate bits of data together. Dramatic irony plays a major role: we in the audience, especially those of us who lived through the 1970s, read the Washington Post accounts of the break-in and cover up, and watched the Watergate hearings on television, we know the plot and the historical reality of the story being told. The building excitement and tension are palpable in the film.

The entirety of the film occurs between the June 17, 1972, break in at the National Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel and Nixon's second inauguration on January 20, 1973. In a matter of thirty seconds at the end of the film, clattering teletype images of words clattering on to a page reveal the successive indictments and convictions of the president's men for their involvement in various aspects of the conspiracy. The last release is, of course, the announcement of Nixon's resignation.

I don't know of a better film about journalism and newspapers, especially a better film that links the fate of democracy and the nation with freedom of the press and the press itself.

Hoffman and Redford are excellent as Bernstein and Woodward. Redford was never better in a film, as the hard-working, straight-laced counterpart to Hoffman's shaggy-headed Bernstein, a better writer than Woodward but not as industrious. Bernstein's brash intrusiveness as he literally inserts his foot in the door of potential source after source is both humorous and slightly off-putting, yet without it the story wouldn't have come out in the way it did.

This is an important film to watch in 2007, given the sorry state of affairs in the U. S. government. There are many differences between the 1970s and the present decade, but there are distinct and disturbing parallels.