All The President’s Men at 50: one of the finest films about investigative journalism ever made |
Nighttime. A dim and dingy car park. Woefully inadequate fluorescent lights flicker and buzz overhead. Two men stand in half-shadow. One is barely visible, his face almost entirely swallowed by darkness. His voice is low and gravelly:
The list is longer than anyone can imagine. It involves the entire US intelligence community. FBI, CIA, Justice. It’s incredible. The cover-up had little to do with Watergate. It was mainly to protect the covert operations. It leads everywhere. Get out your notebook. There’s more.
The list is longer than anyone can imagine. It involves the entire US intelligence community. FBI, CIA, Justice. It’s incredible. The cover-up had little to do with Watergate. It was mainly to protect the covert operations. It leads everywhere. Get out your notebook. There’s more.
The other man is lost for words. He just stands there, mouth slightly open and eyes wide, trying to make sense of what he’s hearing. The exchange ends with an warning: his life, along with that of his colleague, in is grave and immediate danger.
This is a pivotal moment in Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men, which has just turned 50. The film was based on the 1974 book by journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who investigated the Watergate scandal for the Washington Post.
The man doing the talking in the scene I’ve been describing is Mark Felt (Hal Holbrook), then associate director of the FBI, better known as “Deep Throat”. His interlocutor, temporarily........