Wednesday Minute
No. 169 | September 29, 2010

Late for the Show

Our theme this week
Actors with posthumous nominations for Oscars

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   James Dean (1931-1955):  East of Eden, Giant
Tuesday         —   Spencer Tracy (1900-1967):  Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

Peter Finch (1916-1977):  Network

A British-born Australian, Peter Finch began acting on stage and in film during the 1930s.  Recruited by Laurence Olivier, Finch traveled to England in the ’40s, where he earned critical acclaim for his performances.  He won multiple BAFTA nominations and awards from the ’50s on.  Finch was known as a hell-raiser off screen, but he’ll always be remembered for the hell he raised onscreen as the madman anchorman Howard Beale in the 1976 film Network.

In contrast to Tuesday’s featured film, Network may be more relevant now than when it was made.  The television landscape was far different in 1976—a few networks, no cable as we know it, loads of mindless entertainment but news operations that had a less-warped definition of “fair and balanced.”  Yet along came Paddy Chayefsky who found plenty to parody.  He wrote an over-the-top send-up of the industry, lampooning TV’s obsession with ratings above all else, fueled by his outrage at the state of the world.  It was a biting satire.  The joke was on us, of course, because today we realize the movie wasn’t a satire after all—but a documentary ahead of its time.

Howard Beale is a longtime news anchor who’s dismayed that he’ll be replaced because of poor ratings.  He declares, on the air, that he’ll kill himself on television during the next week.  After he agrees to apologize for his outburst, his bosses allow him on for another show.  It sets up a classic scene, beautifully written, beautifully directed, and beautifully performed.  Beale goes on without a script.  “Everybody knows things are bad….  I’m not going to leave you alone.  I want you to get mad!”  He tells viewers to open their windows and shout along with him.  “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.”  It’s a moment of madness, but one of the great rallying cries in the history of movies.  Beale’s tirade is a sensation, and the network has a hit.

One sad irony, in recent years Beale’s brilliant and scathing rant has been appropriated by messianic messengers who stand counter to the kind of change that Beale was talking about.  Today the object of vitriol is grossly misplaced.  Television, along with the rest of the corporatized media—the great molders of public opinion—have scammed us with a bait-and-switch, willing to get us mad as hell but pointing our attention at the wrong targets, and never at themselves.  Chayefsky is no longer with us, but we could use another like him.

Network was nominated for ten Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director (Sidney Lumet).  Five of the nominations were for acting, and the film is one of only two (the other, A Streetcar Named Desire) to win three acting awards, including a posthumous Best Actor prize for Peter Finch, who had died while on tour to promote the film.

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Network (1976)
Sidney Lumet, director
Paddy Chayefsky, writer
Owen Roizman, cinematographer
“Mad as Hell”

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Network (1976)
“The Howard Beale Show”
Peter Finch

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Quote of note
Max:  Howard, I’m taking you off the air.  I think you’re having a breakdown, require treatment.
Howard:  This is not a psychotic episode.  This is a cleansing moment of clarity.  I’m imbued, Max.  I’m imbued with some special spirit.  It’s not a religious feeling at all.  It’s a shocking eruption of great electrical energy.  I feel vivid and flashing, as if suddenly I’d been plugged into some great electromagnetic field.  I feel connected to all living things.  To flowers, birds, all the animals of the world.  And even to some great, unseen, living force.  What I think the Hindus call prana.  But it’s not a breakdown.  I’ve never felt more orderly in my life.  It is a shattering and beautiful sensation.  It is the exalted flow of the space-time continuum, save that it is spaceless and timeless and…of such loveliness.  I feel on the verge of some great, ultimate truth.  And you will not take me off the air for now or for any other spaceless time!
—Max Schumacher (William Holden), Howard Beale (Peter Finch), Network (1976)

…58…59…60.