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Cinema - Good Night
and Good Luck
Senator Joe McCarthy was a US lawyer who used the anti-communist
hysteria engendered by the Korean War in the USA in the early
fifties to manipulate a smear campaign against left-wingers,
claiming hundreds of journalists, writers, actors and politicians
were communist traitors. The political climate became akin to
a medieval epidemic of witch-hunting. Hundreds of intellectuals
and entertainers were blacklisted; many fled to Europe where
they could speak, write and think freely. Goodnight and
Good Luck examines the part that a TV broadcaster Edward
Murrow plays in McCarthy’s downfall in 1954. “We
will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason,” said
Murrow in his show, See it Now. “If we dig deep
into our own history and our doctrine and remember that we are
not descended from fearful men, not men who feared to write,
to speak, to associate, and to defend causes which were for
the moment unpopular.”
While the film exaggerates the role the show played in McCarthy’s
downfall, it is a well-acted, well-shot and bravely rule-breaking
movie, filmed in black and white, largely in smoky rooms, with
little physical action. It is also very timely. After you have
watched it you wonder whether or not we are living in an age
in which the government is stirring up a state of hysteria as
a smokescreen to help it achieve its own ends. You wonder whether
there is a figure like Joe McCarthy down the line. And you sincerely
hope there isn’t. DL |
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Witch-hunt saboteur - Edward
Murrow stopped Joe McCarthy
in his tracks |
