Networking

Network seems to have elbowed its way into the current lineup of theatre re-issues.

 Director Sidney Lumet and writer Paddy Chayevsky had been pillars of the so-called Golden Years of US TV and they knew what they were on about. Network makes an interesting comparison with The Big Knife, in which Clifford Odets does a similar hatchet job on Hollywood, where he’d only been a guest, I love The General Died at Dawn and None But the Lonely Heart and can even spare a kind word for The Story on Page One. These films all make sour grapes an art form.

 Network opens with a four-way split TV screen, which Peter Finch shares with the actual US network news anchors of the day and picks up him and William Holden weaving drunk through the New York traffic at night, celebrating the fact Holden’s UBS TV news division is going to fire Finch in a doomed attempt to salvage their miserable ratings. Corporate suit Robert Duvall and lady from Programming Faye Dunaway are circling and we get to the film’s first big ask. Finch freaks on air and declares his intention to commit suicide during the following night’s broadcast and Holden in the control room lets the item run.

   Network - Holden, Duvall, Finch & Dunaway.

They go with this, showing Dunaway waving the jump in ratings-share and coverage in The New York Times, who Duvall dismisses for not buying advertising with them. Watergate, Vietnam and Pati Hearst are elbowed. It takes talent of this standard to make this proposition go and an audience follow it.

The scene that everyone remembers follows, with a wild-eyed Finch, now having visions, chased round the studio by boom man and camera, demanding his viewers go to their windows and shout “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” Dunaway on the ‘phone, relates that the affiliates are calling, saying people in their cities are doing it, and we cut to Holden’s home where his daughter Cindy Grover (she gets eaten in Jaws) has gone to their apartment window - to see if their neighbors are joining in. The panorama of project apartment dwellers screaming from windows is the film’s most striking moment. 

Network "I'm mad as hell ..."

There’s lots more. Despite the skill of the leads, glamorous Dunaway’s daddy issues driving her into bed (super discreet nudity)  with mature Holden doesn’t fly but the cut to the close-up of plausible wife Beatrice Straight is a masterful enough moment to get her the support actress Oscar for a three minute role. The back and forward between executive William Prince and old associate Holden, which preserves loyalty past the point where he fires him, is vintage. When it comes down to Capital Murder, it is a kidnapped heiress who objects and when sympathetic executive (Robert Aldrich associate) Wesley  Addy speaks out, it is to make sure that the Network avoids damage to its reputation.

There’s enough material here to carry a production longer than this film’s two hours and, when some of it fails to register, there’s always something coming after to retrieve attention. I’d have liked to see Dunaway’s revised schedule with a Mao Zedong series, live camera bank robberies and the news complete with horoscopes and gossip. We do get them auditioning alternative prophets.  Network has dated remarkably little, possibly because there is minimal street footage, eliminating those two clues - female fashion and traffic. The studio does look not a little like Fail Safe’s War Room.

Technique is polished and unobtrusive and the cast are consistently brilliant - movie stars and walk-ons.  Conchatta Ferrell and Lance Hendrickson have acquired profiles since but they still fit naturally into the assembly. In a roll call where it’s a Herculean challenge to be conspicuous, playing Ned Beatty against type (“because you’re on television, Dummy”) works a treat and the now late Robert Duvall, with nothing but contemptibility to work with, and Peter Finch, who’s figured that the way to handle Paddy Cheyevsky’s contemporary realism is to go Shakespearean, do stand out.

Fifty years ago Network was outstanding - possibly the most accomplished thing we had from Sidney Lumet, when he was on the way to being the world’s best working filmmaker. Back then it didn’t convince when it laid all the evils of the world at television’s door and still doesn’t. Now however, even if its strength remains as entertainment, it doesn’t do too badly as prophecy, when we’ve had Fox News and government placating oil rich Saudis. I still recall Oz TV allocating the entire night’s News bulletin to Australia carrying off the America’s Cup - the evening it looked like the black box from the downed Korean jetliner had been found too.

Also Network’s  language was too much for Broadcast TV and the copy on US HBO replaced black Ecumenical Liberation Army activist Marlene Warfield’s ”You can blow it out your ass” line with “You can blow it out your - nose!” Let’s be grateful that version appears to have sunk without trace.

Barrie Pattison 2026.