All the President’s Men
It is said that democracy dies in darkness, that the light of scrutiny is needed to see the truth which might otherwise be concealed, and it was in darkness that the five men arrested at the Watergate complex hoped to operate, found by a security guard performing routine late night checks within the Democratic National Committee headquarters and their trial covered as a matter of course by reporter Bob Woodward.
What Woodward saw was strange; a powerful lawyer, far beyond the means of the suspects, who has links to the CIA, as do the accused, though that is not disclosed in proceedings, the evasion of direct answers leading him to look closer, a trail which leads to money donated as contributions to the campaign to re-elect Richard Nixon paid to the burglars, evidence which, if proven, points to the White House orchestrating illegal activity.
Based on the published account of the same name by the Washington Post reporters who investigated and broke the story, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, fighting through layers of denials and obfuscation and witnesses who were afraid to speak out on record even when they did cooperate rather than refuse, more doors slammed than opened, All the President’s Men was released in 1976, just four years after the earliest events depicted took place.
Directed by The Parallax View’s Alan J Pakula and adapted by The Princess Bride’s William Goldman, with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein and Jason Robards as their editor Ben Bradlee, believing in the story but demanding a burden of proof before they go to print, the film taking some minor liberties with the timeline and some of the names of those involved but essentially telling the true story of how a president was brought down and exposed, Nixon eventually resigning in August 1974.
A procedural rather than a thriller, though there are aspects of such, the lengths to which those implicated will go to remain in power unknown and the growing paranoia real as the scope of the conspiracy becomes apparent, All the President’s Men is of a time when paper records were held, when telephone calls could be made without deflection by gatekeepers, before digital manipulations and erasures and deepfakes, when the media could be trusted, seemingly a golden age when lies were called out rather than repeated.
Nominated for eight Academy Awards and winning four, All the President’s Men is a warning from history, an influential reminder that power must always be questioned and challenged, Chris Carter borrowing the name of the informant “Deep Throat” (played by The Fog’s Hal Holbrook and later self-identified as Mark Felt, Deputy Director of the FBI, as confirmed by his contacts) and his underground parking garage assignations, one of the many subjects which are addressed in the plethora of features on the newly restored edition.
All the President’s Men is available on 4K UHD from Warner Bros now
