Movie review - "All The President's Men" (1976) ****1/2

Top notch political thriller which has a great subject matter but it was confusing as buggery so full marks for William Goldman to knock it into shape - you are fully aware of what is happening and why and why it is important. There's not much time to create characters for Woodward and Berstein (hence stars - Dustin Hoffman has a little more flair than Robert Redford though Redford is fine - as pointed out by David Shipman since he was playing a real person his usual hesitant performance was appropriate) but the support characters are vivid, esp Ben Bradlee, Ronseberg and Sloan. Alan J Pakula was ideal for directing this sort of paranoid thing coming off The Parallax View (DOP Gordon Willis created a created look, plenty of dark alleys and creepy parking lots). The film is also one of the few that give an impression of how newspapers really work - journalists motivated by competition with other papers as anything else, the mistakes they make, pressures put on them from editors and owners, how they go about collecting information, the pressure they apply to sources. Its rivetting.