All the president’s men [ 1976 ]

The 37th US Pres­i­dent Richard Nixon sent 3 mem­ber crew to moon, 5 mem­ber crew to hotel and the later inci­dent sent him home. He is the one and only pres­i­dent who resigned from the white house. Why?

The very basic qual­ity of inves­ti­ga­tion is ask­ing ques­tions. Inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism is equally impor­tant to detective’s job in any mys­tery case. With their con­tacts, they drill and get the deep­est infor­ma­tion possible.

A nor­mal night patrol police offi­cer hap­pened to find a break-up in one of the offices in the Water­gate [Not the Vel­laigate near Kanchipu­ram ] hotel com­plex [ Hotel,Rooms and offices ]. The office is not a bank but it was Demo­c­ra­tic Party office. They were caught and arrested for plant­ing micro­phones in the Demo­c­ra­tic Party office and arrested at 2.30 AM. The out­look of the case looked sim­ple and grabbed no atten­tion to press except Wash­ing­ton post. 4 of the per­son­nel were Cuban refugees and one of them con­fesses to the court that he as an ex-security con­sul­tant to a gov­ern­ment agency. He coolly added that the gov­ern­ment agency was CIA [ Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency ]. This ignites a spark in the WP crew [ Word­Press illeenga.. Wash­ing­ton Post :) ]

2 jour­nal­ists spend full time inves­ti­ga­tion in this case and roam clue­less for days to find out names and con­nec­tions to this case. The story is dry as the bone but the fan­tas­tic mak­ing turns this story as one of the finest polit­i­cal thrillers in Hol­ly­wood. An unre­lated house break event led to the great­est scan­dals of our time. How?

Plot

This came as a book in 1974 writ­ten by the actual jour­nal­ists Bob Wood­ward and Carl Bern­stein. The same was adapted to screen and enacted by Robert Red­ford and Dustin Hoff­man, in respec­tive roles. The story is based on the series of reports which started as a nor­mal break-in event in Water­gate hotel.

View

At the first attempt, I had stopped watch­ing this after 10 min­utes of the story and switched to some other movie. The sec­ond time, I gave a wild try with­out know­ing the back­ground of the movie and found out that after 15 mins, the story trav­els in top gear :). I never expected a dry n dark inves­ti­ga­tion told in an inter­est­ing pat­tern. That’s the good part.

On the per­for­mances part, I liked the vibrant per­for­mances of Dustin Hoff­man and Jason Robards [ Chief edi­tor ]. I was won­der­ing why this film got an award for art direc­tion — I was aston­ished to know that the Wash­ing­ton post office was a set [that’s the rea­son for the award! ]. The non-stop pace of the film has to be cred­ited to the script writer William and bril­liant edit­ing done by Robert walfe.

The film tries to explain the ini­tial period of the inves­ti­ga­tion and the later events were shown as the print­ers types the head­ings. The film involves no com­edy, fights, romance [ not even the for­mal­ity kiss at the end :) ], great action sequences, etc., Still the movie is very grip­ping. Coin­ci­den­tally, I hap­pen to watch another movie from the old col­lec­tion called ‘FROST NIXON’ — a con­nected movie which is based on David Frost’s inter­view series with Richard Nixon [ One more blog :) ] . Could you rec­ol­lect a Tamil film which has got 10 mins of great inter­view sequence?

All the President’s men — A fine polit­i­cal thriller!

Happy watch­ing :)

–Toto

Related Posts B

1. Hotel Rwanda — African Genocide
2. That was a good interview