Best Actor in "Network"

Hard to say... Holden is best among the humans, but Dunaway, Finch and Beatty all excel in cartoonland.

Haha, knew you did this poll. Kinda wish I could vote for Laureen Hobbs tbh.

Sarah Palin as the "magnificent messiah inveighing against the hypocrisy of our times."

Beatty and Duvall come off worst (except when Duvall tells the network brass over caesar salads that they're running a whorehouse network).

Used to like Beatty the best in this, now I'm pretty sure I'm in Dunaway's camp.

Or any of the female actors in this movie, for fighting the uphill battle the script presents them.

"I was married for thirty years to shrill, shrieking fraud."

also i think the most nominations for acting in any one film?
i still think they went a bit nuts giving ones to beatrice straight for her two or three brief scenes and one to ned for an afternoon's work.

You are meddling with the primal forces of Beatty

Faye Dunaway, easy.

One of the best movies of all time, easily.

One of the best scripts of all time, def.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcXIktL55Gw

http://whisty.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/faye-dunaway-by-terry-oneill.jpg

Straight's performance is much warmer than the script demands, for which I'll give Lumet some credit; I think Chayevsky really wants Straight to accept the terms under which she and Holden have agreed to a separation.

Also:

Holden >>>>>>>> Finch

Still love that pic, nrq.

yes ^^this^^ xp i voted holden

Finch should've been supporting and then this movie could've ran the acting categories.

faye dunaway channeling bryan ferry

(Refuse to entertain the idea that Stallone would've snuck in from behind on the movie's coattails.)

that's the night after the oscars rite?

When I was 11 or so, my dad took an acting class and performed this monologue. I helped him memorize his lines, so I heard him do it over and over, and know it word-for-word.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ygxi2YOn5sM

Finch gives the part a pathos it badly needed. I love his little smile at the end of his first newscast rant: "I just ran out of it, you see."

No, this is NOT one of the best scripts of all time. In the genre, Bulworth's is probably better.

do people rate this film? like with chinatown, the conversation etc
suppose i should probably watch it in any case

do people rate this film? like with chinatown, the conversation etc

it's dece but not on that level nah

Morbs, you would hate the one legitimately good defense for cinematic curmudgeonliness.

As amusing and satisfying as some of the anticorporate tub-thumping is, much of Paddy Chayefsky's POV on how great TV news (and '50s live TV dramas) used to be is "shrill, shrieking fraud."

^^^

faye dunaway is mad hot tho

Eric, may I suggest an even more prescient film about the last 25 years of pop culture? Scorsese/De Niro/Jerry.

It's fraud alright, but not shrill. Too fun to be shrill.

and I don't hate this movie! The praise is overblown.

So are the damnations.

Pauline Kael was not crazy about it.

Pretty sure she said she wanted to kick a kitty cat after watching it.

Or something like that.

voted for Beatty

The movie's obviously more prescient than ever, but I'll be damned if I'll be lectured to by a guy who condemns soullessness and peddles it at the same time.

just watched this for the first time a few months ago--couldn't believe how bad Faye Dunaway is in it

gotta say Holden

xpost omg you have to add Mommie Dearest to your netflix queue immediately!

http://i41.tinypic.com/5nknwz.jpg

thinking her or vitti for #1 alltime

nakhchivan i dunno whether you wanna listen to me but this is in my all-time top 5...it is so, so, so entertaining, forget the 'satire'

um as for my answer...damn they all pull it out really - dunaway kinda deserves it for the sex-scene alone, probably gonna vote for holden but damn finch's descent into mania is good too

dunaway kinda deserves it for the sex-scene alone

*strokes chin, agrees*

Considering how few women were in TV at the time, I find Dunaway's character being the main demon a tad troubling.

thought beatty was like the palpatine to her vader tbh

and the Angela Davis knockoff is a total wheeze -- whatever else Davis was, a cynical ratings whore wasn't one of them.

xp i mean fair point...but was the 'career woman' such a thing then? in a way making her the hotshot controller is pro-equality, even if she's bloodless and craven

and beatrice straight alone absolves this movie from sexism, one might think

Pseudo-Angela Davis also has one of the absolute best pop offs in the whole movie.

but was the 'career woman' such a thing then?

As far as fictional TV professionals go -- Mary Richards? Dunaway is like the bizarro version.

Mary Tyler Moore Show, 1970-77

By mid-October, the Howard Beale show had settled in at a 42 share, more than equaling all the other network news shows combined. In the Nielsen ratings, the Howard Beale show was listed as the fourth highest-rated show of the month, surpassed only by The Six Million Dollar Man, All in the Family, and Phyllis. A phenomenal state of affairs for a news show.

one week to see this so i can vote in the poll

what I remember about seeing this with my dad in the winter of '76-77 is that we were seated during the end credits of the previous screening, as was customary in midtown Manhattan theaters. Hence, SPOILER.

Voted for Holden, even though he obviously said the hell with it and starts yelling a lot in the last twenty minutes.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Went with Finch. Monologuing for three and four and six minutes at a time is not easy, but he sells the character and Chayefsky's speeches in a way no other actor in the movie does (or really even has the opportunity to). I love the little flourish he puts into the line from this clip about "We'll tell you any shit you want to hear." He's not JUST mad and angry, he's something very specific and impossible to duplicate. He's motherfucking acting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDWtZ3xRMb0

Even though I won't deny that this is one of the best scripts ever to find the Courier typeface, there is a script-level problem that bugs me. Chayefsky misuses big words. Don't use big words if you're going to misuse them. Look it up, duncecap.

This exchange has always bugged me:

Arthur Jensen: Good morning, Mr. Beale. They tell me you're a madman.

Howard Beale: Only desultorily.

Jensen: How are you today?

Beale: I'm as mad as a hatter.

Cute, except that "desultory" doesn't merely mean haphazard, it means haphazard in a specifically thoughtless and bored way. If he knows he's mad as a hatter, then it isn't desultory. And nothing about Howard Beale is disinterested. This isn't bending the word to the writer's will, it's just misusing it.

Another example:

Max: Why is it that a woman always thinks that the most savage thing she can say to a man is to impugn his cocksmanship.

Diana: I'm sorry I impugned your cocksmanship.

"Impugn" is not just a fancy word for "insult". Impugning something means questioning the motives, values, and probably the morals of that something. This is not what is being talked about here. She is not attacking his motives or values in bed, and he is not responding to any such accusation. They're both just misusing the word "impugn".

and yet it's still a great, great line

Except that it doesn't actually make sense!

classic middlebrow overwriting.

It's a very entertaining film, and not REMOTELY a great screenplay.

Not even remotely? Come on. There is great in this movie. Admit it.

you're probably both kinda right in a sorta purist pedantic way (would call it a subjectively great screenplay however) but as I keep saying, this film's flaws don't in any way detract from its strengths

the desultorily line works because it is the calling that is desultory, not the madness

I see... they say it about him desultorily. I can see that. But it's not clear, and so shouldn't have been dialogue.

Robert Duvall struggles with the speeches he's given. It's painful to watch him rant about being the "heir apparent" when that's not even his character. His best line is about the show being a "big, fat, big-tittied HIT". That's the character.

I wish I could go back in time and punch up this script, for real.

anyway, Holden first, Finch second.

I think the reason I like Finch best is that since the character is completely unhinged, he's allowed the rambling, sometimes mush-mouthed verbosity that every other actor in the movie visibly struggles with from time to time.

I do love Beatty, though. I like the idea of Lumet saying to him, "That's good, but bigger. Much bigger." A thousand times. (PS I have no idea if this happened, but it looks like it did.)

The problem is Lumet probably instructed the rest of the cast to do the same.

Let's not underrate Dunaway either. kenan's right about Chayevsky's use of ten-dollar words, but Dunaway's the only one who uses them well (I liked how she pronounced "prescient"), and manages to suggest in her first couple of exchanges with Holden that she was once an extremely well-read, politically active young woman. Pauline Kael: "She makes us side with the humanoids."

So we're nitpicking the fact that sometimes well-read people choose the wrong word?

Voting Dunaway, tho. As I said before, she and Straight had much taller orders to fill. (That said, I'd have given the two female Oscars to the Carrie pair. This was a tough year.)

I voted Dunaway

I can't call any script with Holden's last speech to Dunaway (if only she could feel love, like the lucky sellouts of his generation!) great. It's saucy though.

Usually I hate it when scripts get in the way of everything else, but this is the big fat big titted exception.

never got in D*P*lma's way!

Finch has the juiciest role and puts it across with plenty of nuance. Holden's role anchors the movie, but he does slip and slide a bit toward the end. (Because movies are rarely shot in sequence, these may have been early in the shooting for all I know.) Dunaway's role is not that well conceived, but she does admirably with it.

I'll go with Finch. He had more to work with, but he gave more, too.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Still hard to believe that Dunaway was married to Peter Wolf at the time.

“Bryan Cranston is set to play Howard Beale in Lee Hall’s adaptation of the classic 1976 film Network for the National Theatre in November,” reports Deadline‘s Erik Pedersen.

crusty but benignly no doubt

duvall in this vs duvall in the paper

A craggy middle-aged man reaffirming his middle-aged manhood.

Revive is reminding me of my surprise and delight this weekend when checking the local huge bookshop's Bestseller list and seeing that Angela Davis was on there, with _Women Race & Class_ at #34.

(My freshman dorm had lounge space named after her, so she's always existed in my head as this historical figure only, not necessarily as a still-active author.)

Holy heck this movie

Chayefsky took a lot of chances by pushing it so far toward the edge, but reality has been catching up.

Ned Beatty was a BEAST.