Good Night and Good Luck

Caught David Strathairn's performance in George Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck tonight and was very impressed. I am old enough to remember Edward R. Murrow, but not quite old enough to remember the events of the movie, and I found it very gripping. There is a powerful resonance in events where bullies and liars attacked the institutions at the heart of our constitutional liberties, but a huge difference from today in that courageous TV reporters then dared to take on the powerful rather than just cheer on the lynch mobs.

One regret for me was that most of the audience seemed to be people even older than myself. For me, the movie, shot in black and white to match the black and white of the grainy kinescopes of McCarthy playing himself, did an excellent job of capturing the look and feel of the era at the start of my life - I would hope that it could do that for younger people too. There is no background though, so the audience is just plunged into the midst of events. Most of the characters are real people, but many will be unfamiliar to those not students of mid-twentieth century American history.

The main characters are Murrow and Fred Friendly (Clooney) but a lot of the footage seems to be from the actual hearings.

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