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'Good Night, and Good Luck'

BY GENE SEYMOUR | STAFF WRITER

October 7, 2005

"Good Night, and Good Luck" takes its audience back to a time remembered for its hysteria. Yet the movie is calm and self-contained as it goes about its business recounting what, for television news, was High Noon with cigarettes and microphones instead of six-guns and horses.

At one end of this OK Corral of the American body politic was the blustery Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, splattering the "Communist" or "fellow traveler" label over anyone even dimly perceived as a threat to his bully pulpit. Facing McCarthy at the other end: the brooding Edward R. Murrow, who by the early 1950s was settling into the nation's living rooms as both the nice man who visited celebrities on "Person to Person" and the incisive anchor for the groundbreaking "See It Now" news program.

The story of the Murrow-McCarthy showdown, climaxing with a "See It Now" dissection of the senator's methods in March 1954, is the stuff of legend. And George Clooney, in this polished, intelligent follow-up to his quirky, undervalued 2002 directorial debut, "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," is smart enough to re-enact this event without unnecessary embellishment or drumbeating for free speech and due process. He knows the story is rousing and emphatic enough to make those points on its own.

Another smart thing Clooney and his co-producer-writer Grant Heslov do is make the movie entirely in black and white, the better to allow "Good Night's" vintage film clips of the real McCarthy in action speak for themselves - precisely the same let-his-own-words-hang-him method used for that epochal '54 broadcast.

Most of the drama takes place in the corridors and studios of CBS, reconstructed here with conscientious attention to period detail. The movie evokes the emotional and political atmosphere in broad, yet telling brush strokes. You sense the creeping paranoia in the whispers between secretly married producers Joseph and Shirley Wershba (Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson) about loyalty oaths and invasion of privacy. You see it in the anguish of newscaster Don Hollenbeck (Ray Wise) as he's barely holding himself together under McCarthy-esque smears by a newspaper columnist.

Amid such ominous pressures, a zone of quiet purpose is established between the redoubtable Murrow (David Strathairn) and his producer Fred Friendly (Clooney, deliberately underplaying the real Friendly's dynamism). Watching this pair leading the Wershbas and others in the "See It Now" team carries the riveting charge of a police procedural.

Strathairn's Murrow is poised at the center of this quiet whirlwind and this "actor's actor" deftly weaves many aspects of the broadcaster's mercurial personality within the movie's tight time frame. At times, the film risks making Murrow seem almost too iconic; the canny wit he was known to display in real-life barely leaks onto the screen. Nevertheless, Strathairn's magnetism is one of the movie's biggest assets.

The other major asset is the radiant flow of Murrow's keen, elegant on-camera diction, immaculately rendered by Strathairn. Who on TV now could ever match the following: "If we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak to associate and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular...."

In interviews, Clooney says the hair on the back of his head tingles from such words. So will yours.