‘Good Night, and Good Luck’: THR’s 2005 Review

On November 4, 2005, George Clooney brought the black and white television news drama Good Night, and Good Luck to theaters in wide release. The film, which grossed $54 million globally, went on to be nominated for six Oscars at the 78th Academy Awards, including for best picture. The Hollywood Reporter's original review is below:

George Clooney's deeply felt docudrama Good Night, and Good Luck provides a snapshot of the moment in history in which a major American television personality named Edward R. Murrow took on the malevolent power of a muckraking U.S. senator named Joseph McCarthy and won.

Shot in black and white in a brisk "you are there" 90 minutes, the film, which screened in competition, lovingly re-creates 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 fetched the coffee and the morning papers and every body smoked all the time.

Clooney is the star name (as legendary producer Fred Friendly) in a fine ensemble cast featuring the previously unsung David Strathairn as Murrow, a career-defining role guaranteed to put him in the running for major awards.

Murrow is deservedly the patron saint of broadcast 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 immediacy and forgive the film's tight focus and narrow view. Anyone hoping for an entertaining drama about news men and politics along the lines of All the President's Men will be disappointed.

The film is framed by an excoriating speech given by Murrow in 1958, when he was saluted by the Radio and Television News Directors Assn. Television, he said, was "fat, comfortable and complacent" and was used to "detract, delude, amuse and insulate us." It's a message Clooney and Heslov obviously wish to reiterate.

Murrow had become a star on radio, broadcasting from Czechoslovakia just before World War II and memorably from London during the Blitz. In the '50s, he and his partner Friendly adapted their radio news program Hear It Now to the new medium of television. The result was titled See It Now, an evenhanded public affairs program that ran from 1951-58.

McCarthy had become notorious 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 targeted the military in the same witchhunting manner.

Good Night flashes back to the time when McCarthyism infamously fomented by the House Un-American Activities Committee had put a clamp on freedom of expression and association in the U.S.

When Murrow and Friendly do a story on a military man whose family is falsely accused of being communist sympathizers, McCarthy — seen entirely in newsreel footage — attacks in his usual way. Murrow and Friendly respond by creating one of the most esteemed TV news shows in history, an edition of See It Now on March 9, 1954, in which McCarthy is allowed to hang 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 wonderful job of creating the smoky and tense environment in which Murrow and Friendly operated.

If the film fails to resonate entirely it might be that even when Murrow made his insightful speech in 1958, his observant hectoring had become viewed as pedantic. Not long afterward, he left CBS to run the U.S. Information Agency, a poacher who became a game warden. — Ray Bennett, originally published in the Sept. 2-4, 2005 issue.