All the President’s Men, the Alan Pakula film, was a stand-out in 1976 largely because most other movies that year were so dismal.

Scripted by William Goldman, Men concerns the Bob Woodward-Carl Bernstein breaking of the ’72 Watergate story, and is as evenhanded about it as it needs to be, however skeptical I am about . . . this and that.  In the final analysis, it’s not a very important film, merely a celluloid chronicle telling us a lot about the newspaper business but not much about anything else.

Even so, for a long time it’s very absorbing; all the time it’s wonderfully acted.  It almost convinces me that the American media in the 1970s was not quite the joke it later became.   Not THAT big a joke.

All the President’s Men (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)