All the president's movies

The other night on TV, a senior Republican official was slamming The Washington Post. The paper, he declared, used "innuendo, third-person hearsay, unsubstantiated charges, anonymous sources and huge scare headlines" to allege a criminal conspiracy involving the White House.

Sometimes, old movies can feel as fresh as your Twitter feed: This was actually a moment from All the President's Men.

It was the day after U.S. President Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey last month, and as obstruction of justice allegations were intensifying, I had been flipping through the upper reaches of the TV dial and found myself stopped cold: For there, on the classic-movie service Hollywood Suite, the reporter Bob Woodward was sitting in a Washington courtroom as a man charged with burglary at the Watergate office complex revealed to a judge that he used to work for the Central Intelligence Agency. Woodward's eyes grew wide. Under his breath, he muttered an astonished expletive.

It can be an almost vertigo-inducing experience these days to watch All the President's Men, a journalistic procedural about uncovering malfeasance committed by presidential aides trying to derail a rival's election campaign. You feel the decades telescoping before your eyes, as Woodward (Robert Redford) and his colleague Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) cajole information from nervous sources who believe they're being surveilled; as a Post editor characterizes an evasive White House statement "a non-denial denial" of their reporting; and as Woodward's enigmatic source Deep Throat says of the dirty tricksters operating under Richard Nixon, "The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand." At times, it feels as if you might as well be watching a live feed from Washington.

When it opened in April, 1976, All the President's Men lifted the veil for millions of Americans on the mechanics of investigative journalism and helped them move past the constitutional crisis their country had recently endured. But if the film is both a product of and emblem of its time – it won four Oscars, and was nominated for another four, including Best Picture – Trump's election and its mushrooming scandalous aftermath have given it surprising renewed relevance.

I stayed up late after watching All the President's Men that night, mulling the lessons it might hold for us now; after all, as Trump's administration has gotten bogged down, pundits increasingly have been invoking the film (which made Woodward and Bernstein unlikely celebrities) and the book that inspired it.

Bernstein himself has a regular gig as a CNN political analyst, and both men were featured speakers at this year's White House Correspondents' Dinner.

But I began to wonder if it might not be more instructive to take in a wider frame, a filmic proxy of that time. What if we were to refract our current Trump-tinged moment through the prism of that year's five Best Picture nominees? From the earnestness of All the President's Men to the prescient cynicism of Network, the nihilism of Taxi Driver to the folk heroism of Rocky and the little-remembered Woody Guthrie biopic Bound For Glory: Might they offer a kind of Rosetta Stone for our time? Does 1976 have more to say to us than we realize?

After All the President's Men was released, legend has it that thousands of young wannabe Woodwards and Bernsteins swelled the ranks of journalism schools. (Were they idealists or simply starry-eyed? A 1975 Washington Post feature about the making of the film notes that, one day, "high schoolers were touring the Post and spotted Robert Redford standing in an office. They rushed forward, pocket cameras clicking. 'Wait,' a reporter said to them, 'Here's the real Bob Woodward. Don't you want a picture of him?' 'No,' one youngster replied, and they rushed on.")

In our own full-tilt tumble of 24-hour news, with developments lighting up our phones through the day and social-media mobs already convinced Trump and his aides are guilty of treason, the film offers plenty of reasons for prudence. Deep Throat himself chastises Woodward that, by trying to bring down a high target without the proper evidence, "You let [him] slip away. … In a conspiracy like this, you build from the outer edges and you go step by step. If you shoot too high and miss, everybody feels more secure."

If its ending is memorable – a postscript clatter of newswire teletype machines hammering out a quick-cut series of real-life story ledes about criminal convictions and a presidential resignation – All the President's Men takes its sweet time getting there. The movie is filled with investigative rabbit holes the reporters tumble down, hurdles they can't overcome and apparent breakthroughs that spur brief joy but result in more dead ends. When, early on, Bernstein says, "I think it's obvious" the Watergate burglars were attempting to bug the Democratic National Headquarters, his editor snaps: "I'm not interested in what you think is obvious. I'm interested in what you know."

In their pursuit of the facts, Woodward and Bernstein do get some things wrong. But they are backed by their editors, even if the public's interest in the matter is mild. In the film's penultimate scene, the Post's executive editor, Ben Bradlee (played by Jason Robards), says to his two young reporters, "You know the results of the latest Gallup poll? Half of the country never even heard of the word 'Watergate.'"

Then he tells them, with grim good cheer, that they should get back to work. "Nothing's riding on this except the First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country," he quips. "Not that any of that matters. But if you guys [mess] up again, I'm going to get mad."

When the great Paddy Chayefsky wrote Network, he thought it was satire. In 2017, it often feels like documentary: The nightly news of the fictional UBS network, which plays like a cross between a carnival and a game show, featuring a raving madman who is ratings gold; an executive who declares, "There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today"; a pundit (played by Peter Finch) who exhorts his audience to take to Twitter – sorry, I mean exhorts his audience to yell out their windows – to voice their contempt for the state of things. "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!" they scream together into the frigid night.

In Mad As Hell, his 2014 book about the making of Network, journalist Dave Itzkoff suggests that famous cri de coeur was "a plea for basic dignity and a recognition that in anger there was power and there was community. It said that it was permissible to be angry, and if all you could do was be angry, it was enough."

Last November, the U.S. electorate went to the polls angry. It may not have been enough.

The insomniac loner and Vietnam vet Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) is mad as hell at the filth that surrounds him in New York: at the pimps, and the johns and the murderously suspicious husbands. And not only is he not going to take it any more, he's got a plan to actually do something about it.

When Taxi Driver was released in February, 1976 (it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes that spring), a debate broke out over whether – as Pauline Kael noted in her New Yorker review – it advocated "violence as a cure for frustration." The film, she insisted, "doesn't operate on the moral judgment of what Travis does. Rather, by drawing us into his vortex it makes us understand the psychic discharge of the quiet boys who go berserk."

Over the past 40 years, we've come a long way toward understanding the factors that might spur individuals to go berserk. How far have we come, though, in understanding what might spur whole societies to go off the rails, to start seeing enemies everywhere – in the media, in certain religions, in trade deals, in climate pacts, in military alliances – and just open fire?

While the U.S. dithers over whether to build a high wall on the Mexican border, it never occurred to me until I watched Bound For Glory this week, for the first time, that the country had a history of restricting the migration of its own citizens. But in 1936, when Woodrow (Woody) Wilson Guthrie lit out from his home in Parma, Tex., to hitchhike and ride the rails westward among the other desperate and hungry migrants looking for work, he watched as families were turned away at the California-Arizona border if they didn't have $50 a person: what the Los Angeles police considered sufficient funds to survive. And then, settling for a time in a camp of migrants waiting for day jobs as vegetable pickers, he saw private security goons rain beatings upon people just for daring to talk about a living wage.

In Hal Ashby's ambling, rambling biopic, gorgeously shot by Haskell Wexler in luxe tones that will make you briefly forget the iconic Dustbowl black-and-whites of Dorothea Lange, Guthrie (David Carradine) comes around slowly to his pro-union stance, as motivated by his innate obstinacy as by his desire for social change. A few months after snagging a well-paying gig at a radio station, he quits rather than allow sponsors to dictate what he can or cannot sing and say; he walks out of another gig rather than "sing to folks who are drinking martinis, stuffing themselves with lamb chops."

Then he hits the rails again with his guitar in hand, as the sun sets in the distance, and we hear the strains of his most famous song of all, the one that many take to be a socialist anthem, the one which declares: "This land was made for you and me." Whether he was right is still up for debate.

Rocky floated into theatres in November, 1976, on waves of hype, and though some critics sneered – the Times's Vincent Canby tagged it a "sentimental little slum movie" – audiences delighted in the sentimental fairy tale of an aging fighter who just wants to be given one real shot at the brass ring.

In an interview that month with The New York Times, its writer and star Sylvester Stallone reflected on the cinematic landscape then populated with anti-heroes. (Here's looking at you, Travis Bickle.)

"I've really had it with anti-this and anti-that," he told the reporter Judy Klemesrud. "That silver cloud always has to loom. I want to be remembered as a man of raging optimism, who believes in the American dream. Right now, it's as if a big cavernous black hole has been burned into the entertainment section of the brain. It's filled with demons and paranoia and fear. Where are all the heroes? Even the cowboys today are perverts, they all sleep with horses. Let other people suffer and do all those pain things and put their demons up on the screen. I'm not going to."

Stallone wanted to make American cinematic heroes great again. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences rewarded him for his positivity: Rocky won three Oscars, including best picture.

But watching it in 2017, it is impossible not to see the way Stallone's optimism feverishly papers over the cracks of a society that was then losing its certainties, and to feel those changes reverberating even now.

Rocky and his (predominantly white) neighbourhood pals are living on the margins, working on the docks or in meatpacking plants, whiling away their spare hours in dive bars. He is plucked from obscurity by a wealthy black man, the boxer Apollo Creed, who tells his business associates that, "This is the land of opportunity," so he is going to give a local Philadelphia boy – "a snow-white underdog" – a shot at the title. Creed chooses to fight Rocky Balboa a.k.a. the Italian Stallion because, he says cynically, "The media will eat it up. Who discovered America? An Eye-talian, right? What would be better than to get it on with one of his descendants?"

Creed himself seems more interested in business affairs than boxing. And he counsels those who might follow his pugilist's path to choose otherwise. "Stay in school and use your brain," he says during a TV interview. "Be a doctor, be a lawyer, carry a leather briefcase, forget about sports as a profession. Sports make you grunt and smell. Be a thinker, not a stinker." In 1976, as anti-busing riots were still flaring around the country, those would have been powerful words coming from a black man with a global profile.

Rocky, meanwhile, just hopes to stay on his feet through 15 rounds: White America has been so beaten down, it doesn't even believe in itself any more. "Nobody's ever gone the distance with Creed," Rocky tells his girlfriend, Adrian (Talia Shire). "If I can go that distance, you see, and that bell rings and I'm still standing, I'll know for the first time in my life, see, that I weren't just another bum from the neighbourhood."

A few weeks before Rocky opened in theatres, the Democratic candidate and Washington outsider Jimmy Carter, perceived as a change agent who might help set the country straight again after Watergate, won the state of Pennsylvania on his way to the White House.

Last November, Rocky's home state went for Trump by a shade over 44,000 votes.

This week, as I was looking through The New York Times archives for Klemesrud's interview with Stallone, I stumbled upon another one of her articles, from Nov. 1, 1976, and gasped. It turns out, that year saw a new public figure step into the spotlight, only a few weeks before Rocky and Network and Bound For Glory opened in theatres. His chosen vehicle? A Klemesrud profile in The New York Times.

It reads like a template for everything that followed over the next 40 years.

He was shy, he told the reporter, yet he talked non-stop. The story said he had "graduated first in his class," from the Wharton School of Finance – an apparently untrue assertion that, once published in the Times, took on the weight of fact and was repeated in subsequent profiles. An architect told Klemesrud the man she was writing about was "extremely aggressive when he sells, maybe to the point of overselling. Like, he'll say the convention center is the biggest in the world, when it really isn't. He'll exaggerate for the purpose of making a sale."

One critic told the Times: "His deals are dramatic, but they haven't come into being. … So far, the chief beneficiary of his creativity has been his public image."

Klemesrud helped construct that image. "He is tall, lean and blond, with dazzling white teeth, and he looks ever so much like Robert Redford," she wrote. "He rides around town in a chauffeured silver Cadillac with his initials, DJT, on the plates. He dates slinky fashion models, belongs to the most elegant clubs and, at only 30 years of age, estimates that he is worth "more than $200-million."

At the conclusion of their interview, Donald J. Trump told her he was jetting off to California where "he said he planned to wrap up a 'multimillion-dollar' land deal."

Klemesrud does not appear to have fact-checked that claim, or many of the others.

If she had, who knows what might have happened?