It's a film unusual in that its by line in the title sequence features not the director or producer but the writer. Director Sidney Lumet was already an accomplished veteran with the likes of Dog Day Afternoon and Failsafe (and far too many more to mention here) and while his direction is superlative, Chayefsky takes the big credit deservedly. Never has such an overly talky movie with such wildly unrealistic speeches felt so natural. He'd already had success on Broadway and Network came out of the deep dark well of experiences in early television he'd been through. These words kill presumptions.
So, because Howard's action gets his friend and boss the sack for allowing it, he is prey to the new and viciously ambitious entertainment director Diana Christensen who wants to turn the news hour into a crowd pleasing rabble rousing. She's already in negotiation with a terrorist group to give them an hour weekly. Her boss, pugilistic corporate thug, encourages this as it allows him to set in for greater control. And that old friend and former boss? He gets his job back due to boardroom politics and is predated by Diana (godess of the hunt, after all) for more personal reasons: no, not love (although there's winter/summer sex involved) but as a kind of contact high.
Meanwhile Howard's explosive rants have become the most popular thing on TV. While he's doing all that soaring close to the sun, he must have forgotten what happened to Icarus. One tirade takes him there and piques the corporate generalissimo Mr Jensen who delivers a deafening sermon on the world of money and how it has rendered notions such as nations and individuality into thin veils. Howard's deal-stopping broadside about foreign ownership and the effect it will have on the delivery of the truth was too far. Jensen's opening salvo to him from the end of a boardroom table is: "You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr Beale, and I won't have it!"
Howard, no longer able to tell if his illusion of the face of God and the blast he's just received are separate things, goes back on the air and bums out the nation with Jensen's "reality. The ratings head for the Earth's core. So, what are we going to do about Howard?
Peter Finch as Howard Beale was the first Posthumous recipient of the Best Actor Oscar. There had been other posthumous awards but that death did not prevent the accolade for such a personal-appearance-dependent gong is impressive (considering how the ones who just don't turn up are always thought weird). While he isn't effectively the lead role (that's more like William Holden, more later) his fiery turn is at the centre of every scene. His range from whimpering, drunken pentitence to screaming public admonition is breathtaking.
A lesser piece would make him cynical but this film doesn't work that way. Beale is convinced of his righteousness to the extent that he is blind to the exploitation that is driving him to broadcast it. Diana delivers a projection of the news hour as rating raking juggernaut in a turn that is unmistakably sexual (even throwing in a quick watch check which I think is quoting Klute). She's only partially doing that for Hackett (though she knows he's impenetrable from that angle) the rest of it is everything else that she is. Mr Jensen's epistle to the idealists is so sincere it could convince the basest of cynics and does, in fact, turn Howard. And Max Shumacher (am extraordinary William Holden) whose own cynicism is jettisoned when he understands what's at stake if he does not act with the purest of decency. The celebrated fight with his wife when he leaves her for Diana (Beatrice Straight's five minutes, here, won her the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress) could be from Strindberg or Chekov (Tolstoy gets a namecheck).
Faye Dunaway won her Best Actress award because, however grotesque her snakedancing turns can get, the moments of vulnerability in her showdown with Max. She grew up on TV. To Max's generation that is hard to imagine but there she is, terrifying proof of ethics drawn from the Wylie Coyote. Intense, yes, but never a caricature. Her other team mate, Robert Duvall is also on eleven, building to explosive outbursts. The moment where he asks a colleague for confirmation and interrupts the answer before it's a syllable old is still funny. As overdriven as things get (and they do) this film never allows its performances to burst the latex into disaster. Nothing gets regrettably whacky.
That is the realm of Lumet's direction. This talky boardroom satire played as straight as All The President's Men (same year) is never less than cinematic. The control room in the TV studio feels documentary authentic. Mr Jensen's lamplined meeting table is a real one. The Manhattan towers visible through office windows are real. Add the conviction of the performances that are rendering speeches that no one would make in real life and you have what a movie looked like at the height of New Hollywood and still does when the crews go into the darkened corners of capitalism's homeground. But then, you also have the escalating scale of the scene where Howard yells his catchphrase, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" and demands his audience at home do so along with him. Teh Schumachers are watching at home and the daughter goes to the window to see. Heads are poking out of the massive apartment block windows, getting soaked by the rain, flashed by lightning as the shots just grow in size. This would never have just been a filmed play with Lumet, it is, as usual, pure cinema.
Since the 2000s Network has been cited as the film that prophesied the future with an accurate prediction of what became reality TV and its instant mass appeal. But it's also a significant timeline point in the dialogue about the notion of the post-truth world. When you think of Howard's rants it doesn't take much to dismantle them. He admits, at several points, that he doesn't have the answers, that, really, he's just angry. All he knows, he says, is that first, you've got to get mad. His stirring speech about the Saudi deal that gets his audience to stuff theWhite House with telegrams of protest works.
It doesn't need to work because it's true, though, it works because they trust his anger. He cautions them against relying on TV to tell the truth but can give them no better advice than to go to trusted sources. That's still the line in the age of AI, deep fakes, the blurred line between information and the claim of an influencer. The health crisis of COVID-19 was corrupted into a civil rights crisis by people who "did their own research" by plunging into online confrimation bias. Truth as an absolute value is vulnerable to degradation as long as complicity with flattering untruth can hold sway. That's as old as human settlement but it just keeps surfacing. Tim Robbins' satire of a rapidly rising rightist demagogue Bob Roberts in the '90s is forgotten when Network is remembered because Network went as far as that blurring point, the extent where it is genuinely terrifying. We're there yet again. I just know that, first, we've got to get mad.
Viewing notes: I watched the recent Criterion 4K release which has scrubbed up beautifully. They even fixed the weird chorusing in the audio during once scene that I can remember from the movie on VHS and later digital presentations. Beautiful authentic grain with the Dolby Vision pass and audio that keeps things to a controlled vintage state (apart from that unusual for Criterion fix). You can rent it from Prime or watch it already paid for with a subscription and its rentable from Apple. My Criterion was expensive but it's one of my favourite films so I ponied up. For other pyhsical media copies, you could try an online market, chance it at the op shops or one of the online retailers.
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