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Network [1976] (REGION 1) (NTSC)
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Editorial
Amazon.co.uk Review
Media madness reigns supreme in screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky's scathing satire about the uses and abuses of network television. But while Chayefsky's and director Sidney Lumet's take on television may seem quaint in the age of "reality TV" and Jerry Springer's talk-show fisticuffs, Network is every bit as potent now as it was when the film was released in 1976. And because Chayefsky was one of the greatest of all dramatists, his Oscar-winning script about the ratings frenzy at the cost of cultural integrity is a showcase for powerhouse acting by Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway and Beatrice Straight (who each won Oscars), and Oscar nominee William Holden in one of his finest roles. Finch plays a veteran network anchorman who's been fired because of low ratings. His character's response is to announce he'll kill himself on live television two weeks hence. What follows, along with skyrocketing ratings, is the anchorman's descent into insanity, during which he fervently rages against the medium that made him a celebrity. Dunaway plays the frigid, ratings-obsessed producer who pursues success with cold-blooded zeal; Holden is the married executive who tries to thaw her out during his own seething midlife crisis. Through it all, Chayefsky (via Finch) urges the viewer to repeat the now-famous mantra "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" to reclaim our humanity from the medium that threatens to steal it away. --Jeff Shannon
The ending is not up to the film's argument
Review date: 2008-11-02 Rating: 8 out of 10
It could have been a great film. It had all it needed to be a masterpiece. It debunked the old traditional boring television of our great grand parents, that television that was speaking all the time in order to bring us the truth, to teach us the true truth, to make us believe every word they said was absolutely inspiring and we had to be thankful and grateful for this new medium to be so effective in teaching us, in lifting us out of our ignorance. They treated television as a super book, an encyclopedia and they had not understood the slightest smallest element of what this medium was. They had not read Marshall McLuhan and when they had heard of him they thought he was trite, insignificant and purely ranting and raving. And they were going to learn the power of this medium the hard way. One day, by accident, due to the neurotic caprice of one of the team, they discover the tremendous power it has on the imagination and on the behavior of people. People believed the antic as if it were true, absolutely true because it was live and unexpected, hence true since un-programmed. And the newer generation ran into the opening and they invented that television that immerse you into live reality through purely virtual and fake images, even when they are really live, because the camera is a processor, an intermediary eye that gives you what they want you to see and the objective is to make you feel happy, serene, or even angry but with the serenity of the certitude that you are not alone and that everyone is as angry as you are, and that you cannot stand reality any more and that this is absolutely justified since millions of people are feeling the same way as you at the very same moment. Television is not supposed to make you think but only to make you feel part of a vaster reality, of a large vital movement. And that's where the film becomes bad because it seems to follow the idea the older generation is airing at the younger one that this television is shutting everyone onto themselves, separating them from all others, individualizing them into absolute isolation. False, false, false again and again. This new television is soaking you individually into the images of the reality the way this TV wants you to see it, but that is only part of the business. You accept this experience of being dipped and at times thrown or drowned into the boiling maelstrom of violence, war, crime, horror, etc, because you know you are not alone, because it gives you the sense of belonging to a vast mass of people and the possibility to share that common experience with them all tomorrow morning without even having to tell about it. One word will be enough to bring that never directly experienced community back to the subconscious mind of the millions of people who have watched the same show. News is not about truth or about teaching. News is show business, news is emotional and even psycho-dramatic sensations, an experience in surrogate horror, both liberating (cathartic the older ones would have said) and enslaving the proud isolated individual you do feel you are becoming with all that television to the crowd of viewers. And all that is of a commercial nature. The ratings are supposed to bring in advertising and money and when the sensation that started it all does not work anymore because the man, the guru, the anchorman, the preacher does not understand that he cannot start telling people they are living in a dictatorship, even and especially if it is true, you have to get rid of him. The end is quite simple-minded: kill him with guns and bullets. Television can kill someone in so many other ways that are symbolical, mediatic, bloodless but just as effective, efficacious and even cruelly efficient. And the producer of the film knew from scratch all that truth indeed since this producer, Ted Turner, had been refused by the CBS and was in the process of creating the CNN, the acme of reality news and reality television only dealing with the real world and bringing the millions of people of its globalized audience a predigested vision that was only targeting at homogenizing the mediatic mind-formatting experience and consciousness of the world. Virtual reality is the true reality, and that is the very power of this medium that we cannot deny nor reduce to something else, even if teaching real ideas and arguments. Television is an all-sensorial experience building device for individuals who want to belong to a consensual mass.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
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Reviews
4.5 stars
Review date: 2008-08-31 Rating: 8 out of 10
A rollercoaster ride of a movie. Not a lot of physical action but an awful lot of talking, to put it very mildly. But then multiple Oscar winner Paddy Chayefsky wrote it, so there would be. This guy is one of the most prized screenwriters of all time, and you just know instantly if you are watching one of his movies or not. I say his, because although he never directed, each film he did has his stamp all over it. I won't waste time in praising him or doing him down, but this is very much a Paddy Chayefsky movie. Others have reviewed the movie, the plot and the theme. I'm just going to tell you this is a Paddy Chayefsky movie. Don't be too tired but do have your dictionary to hand if you are folks because this is a Paddy Cheyefsky movie. Get it? You will after watching this Paddy Chayefsky movie. Who the hell is Sidney Lumet anyway?
Decades Ahead of its time
Review date: 2008-04-25 Rating: 10 out of 10
A few years ago, the writer Charlie Brooker became famous for his satirical, scathing `TVGOHOME' website, a fortnightly TV listing in the same style and font as the Radio Times. It was mostly concerned with the voyeuristic, nihilistic, gaping moral hole in the centre of the modern media. Charlie Brooker gave up doing the columns shortly after the turn of the millennium, because he said that though what he was writing had been satire, he began to realise that TV production companies were actually producing identical copies of his satirical programmes, most infamously in the case of `Touch the Truck'.
Network is in many ways, Charlie Brooker about 30 years ahead of his time. As a consequence of a newsreader (Peter Finch) announcing that he is going to kill himself on air the next day, the network decide that rather than do the decent thing and have the newsreader hospitalised, that they should make use of this sensational asset to boost ratings. When network executive Faye Dunaway starts to get her way, she brings in a whole host of new programming to replace things like the news and designed purely to up ratings: a show for the news anchor to rant and rave all he wants; a weekly programme following violent revolutionaries commit actual robberies and raids ("The Mao-Tse Tung hour"); a homosexual soap opera; news predicted by fortune teller.
In the short term, ratings go through the roof. But after a few weeks, they begin to drop off as people crave the new, the more sensational. Consider the development of Big Brother, starting from a vaguely experimental standpoint, to realising the sensationalist potential of putting thin-skinned people in deliberately volatile situations. No-one ever got killed in Big Brother, but when the recent racist behaviour erupted on-screen, few were mistaken in believing it to be anyone else except the producer's own fault. And yet hundreds of people would still turn up to watch the live evictions. Perhaps we get the TV we deserve.
And it's the attitude of the viewers that the writer gets absolutely spot-on. When Peter Finch asks people to get "mad as hell", people go for it, when he lambasts on air the whole television industry night after nigh, they listen. But then they also tune into the Mao-Tse Tung hour without skipping a beat. The viewers, and therefore society at large is shown to be largely amoral - whatever holds out attention will do, never mind the ethics. Perhaps this is best demonstrated by William Holden's character, a veteran of news production. He leaves his wife to be with Faye Dunaway's executive, his wife representing the dull, self-sacrificing, honest and reliable nature of old TV, of old America. Faye Dunaway represents the rise of a different side of TV, imaginative, restless, irresponsible, rootless, energetic, thoughtless. The reluctance shows as William Holden is swept along with the current, powerless to resist. Much like the rest of us.
It all seems so obvious to us now, the sensationalism, the amorality, the cheapness, the dumbing down, the deliberate aim for the lowest common denominator. What is surprising is that it was seen all those many years ago, so accurate and in such detail.
PROPHETIC!
Review date: 2008-03-02 Rating: 10 out of 10
I barely watch television anymore. Modern televisual entertainment is a sewer filled with floating solid waste called reality TV and weekly serials that are nothing than lame rehashes of old ideas padded out with endless commercials and promos. NETWORK predicted all of this. This film made in 1976 was probably considered and intended to be an over the top parody of contemporary television. However, as fate would have it, after 31 years it has become a prophecy fulfilled. Watch it and see.
Bizarre ending
Review date: 2008-02-18 Rating: 10 out of 10
"I want you to get up right now and go to the window, stick your head out and yell `I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore.'!"
Many in 1976 decried Lumet's masterful satire of the media as ludicrous. In my opinion, this movie now seems visionary and understated.
News commentator (Howard Beale) begins to ripple the TV airwaves by radically saying what he really thinks, and threatening suicide. His bosses are horrified, until they realise he is becoming a messiah figure to the viewers. Ratings are rocketing.
The brilliant William Holden tells cold hearted Faye Dunaway, "You're television incarnate - indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy".
Genius. My only problem with this classic is the obscure ending.
Product Details/Specifications
Actor(s):
Faye Dunaway
Robert Duvall
Wesley Addy
William Holden
Peter Finch
Creators:
Faye Dunaway (Primary Contributor)
William Holden (Primary Contributor)
Owen Roizman (Cinematographer)
Alan Heim (Editor)
Fred C. Caruso (Producer)
Howard Gottfried (Producer)
Paddy Chayefsky (Writer)
Director(s):
Recording label: Warner Home Video
Manufacturer: Warner Home Video
EAN: 0012569692428
Binding: DVD
Number of items: 2
Format: Closed-captioned, Colour, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Original recording remastered, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC,
Release date: 2006-02-28
Universal product code (UPC): 012569692428
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Region code: 1
Running time: 121 minutes
Theatrical release date: 1976
Language: English (Original Language)
Language: English (Subtitled)
Language: Spanish (Subtitled)
Language: French (Subtitled)
Language: French (Dubbed)