On November 4, 2005, George Clooney released the black-and-white television news drama Good Night, and Good Luck into wide theaters. The film, which grossed $54 million worldwide, was nominated for six Oscars at the 78th Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The original review from The Hollywood Reporter can be found below:
George Clooney’s deeply felt docudrama Good night and good luck provides a snapshot of the moment in history when a major American television personality named Edward R. Murrow took on the evil power of a sleazy U.S. Senator named Joseph McCarthy and won.
Shot in black and white in a lively “you are there” 90 minutes, the film was shown in competition and lovingly recreates the studios and backrooms of 1950s New York journalism at the CBS television network, where the men wore white shirts and dark suits, the women got the coffee and the morning paper and everyone smoked all the time.
Clooney is the star name (as legendary producer Fred Friendly) in a fine ensemble cast that includes the previously unsung David Strathairn as Murrow, a career-defining role guaranteed to put him in contention for major awards.
Murrow is rightly the patron saint of journalism, and it’s clear that Clooney and producer and co-writer Grant Heslov share that veneration. Moviegoers who know their American political history will respond to the film’s directness and forgive the film’s tight focus and narrow view. Anyone hoping for an entertaining drama about journalists and politics along the lines of All the president’s men will be disappointed.
The film is framed by an excoriating speech by Murrow in 1958, when he was greeted by the Radio and Television News Directors Assn. Television, he said, was “thick, comfortable and complacent” and was used to “distract, mislead, entertain and isolate us.” It’s a message that Clooney and Heslov obviously want to reiterate.
Murrow had become a star on radio, broadcasting from Czechoslovakia just before the Second World War and memorably from London during the Blitz. In the 1950s, he and his partner Friendly adapted their radio news program Hear it now to the new medium of television. The result was given the title See it nowa balanced public affairs program that ran from 1951-58.
McCarthy had become infamous in 1950 for a speech in which he falsely claimed to have a list of people working for the State Department who were known to be members of the Communist Party. Later, as chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, McCarthy focused on the same witch hunt against the military.
Good night flashes back to the days when McCarthyism, infamously fueled by the House Un-American Activities Committee, curtailed freedom of speech and association in the US
When Murrow and Friendly write a story about a soldier whose family is falsely accused of being communist sympathizers, McCarthy – on full display in news footage – attacks in his usual fashion. Murrow and Friendly respond by creating one of the most highly regarded TV news programs in history, an edition of See it now on March 9, 1954, in which McCarthy hangs himself with his own words.
Clooney and Heslov, with expert help from production designer Jim Bissel, cinematographer Robert Elswit, and editor Stephen Mirrione, do a fantastic job of creating the smoky and tense environment in which Murrow and Friendly operated.
If the film doesn’t quite resonate, it may be that even when Murrow gave his insightful speech in 1958, his observant hectorism was seen as pedantic. Not long after, he left CBS to run the US Information Agency, a poacher turned game warden. — Ray Bennett, originally published in the September 2-4, 2005 issue.