Capital Celluloid 2017 - Day 49: Sat Feb 18

Network (Lumet, 1976): Regent Street Cinema, 1.30pm & 5pm


NB: This film is presented in a double-bill with the current release 'Christine', the story of newsreader Christine, according to popular myth, the inspiration for Howard Beale, the mad prophet of the airwaves, in Sidney Lumet's Network (1976).

Chicago Reader review:
Good campy fun from the combined talents of Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet; Chayefsky was apparently serious about much of this shrill, self-important 1976 satire about television, interlaced with bile about radicals and pushy career women, and so were some critics at the time. Peter Finch, in his last performance, effectively plays a network news commentator who blows his top and his mind on the air and quickly becomes a self-styled messiah; William Holden plays the wizened TV executive who has the Truth, which pushy, nihilistic program director Faye Dunaway wants; and Robert Duvall, Wesley Addy, Ned Beatty, and Beatrice Straight are around for comparably juicy hyperbole.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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