Jeremy’s Tophunder №27: All The President’s Men

7 min readApr 5, 2020

Let’s get the criticisms out of the way before I start talking about my 27th-favorite movie.

This is a really hard movie to follow unless you already have a decent amount of background knowledge on the Watergate scandal. There’s a staccato-like dialogue that is mostly just Robert Redford (Bob Woodward) and Dustin Hoffman (Carl Bernstein) just throwing around names and other information about the investigation, and if you go in cold, you might get lost. When the movie came out, in 1976, all of this was still fresh on everyone’s minds, so they didn’t need to explain who everyone was. 45 years later, you’ll probably want to skim over the Watergate entry on Wikipedia before diving in.
The movie is technically classified as a political thriller, but its pacing is very emblematic of its era. It feels like a movie from the 1970s. There are a few scenes that seem to linger for just a few beats too long. For the most part, the dialogue is snappy, and the stakes involved are obviously high, so I’m certainly not saying the movie is boring by any stretch of the imagination. You just have to know what you’re getting into.
The movie is almost exclusively just people sitting and talking. When they want to change it up, they do a scene where people are standing and talking. It’s not a very visually impressive movie. Obviously, there isn’t going to be a lot of action in a movie about newspaper reporters investigating government corruption, but again, you have to know what you’re getting into. There’s suspense and uncertainty, but not a lot of movement.

With that out of the way, let’s get into what makes the movie great.

I kind of alluded to this already, but the dialogue drives the movie really well. If you can keep track of all of the names, the back-and-forth between Redford and Hoffman becomes really entertaining to listen to. The Oscar-winning screenplay was written by William Goldman, one of the most-respected screenwriters in Hollywood history. He also wrote Butch Cassiday & The Sundance Kid (for which he won another Oscar) and The Princess Bride (based on the novel he also wrote), and he also served as a consultant for the screenplays of A Few Good Men and Good Will Hunting.
The performances, across the board, are fantastic. Redford and Hoffman are very strong (Hoffman especially), Jason Robards (Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee) won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat was great, and Stephen Collins was also strong as Hugh Sloan. My personal favorite performance was from Jack Warden (probably best known as the Juror with baseball tickets from 12 Angry Men) as metro editor Harry Rosenfeld. He’s funny (or funny-ish) in every scene he’s in, and he delivers my favorite line in the movie. Following a tense-ish scene when Redford and Hoffman are feeling each other out, to see if they’ll be able to work together, Warden comes striding through the newsroom and says “Woodward, Bernstein, you’re both on the story, now don’t fuck it up,” while never breaking stride. For some reason it always makes me laugh.
For someone that has always (to some extent) romanticized newspapers and newsrooms in general, this movie is right up my alley. My mother was a professional journalist across multiple mediums, and has been a journalism professor for the last 20 years or so, so The News was always a big deal in our house. I worked in a newsroom for about two weeks, and hated it, and quit, and somehow I still find movies and TV shows about news organizations exhilarating. It’s almost like a sports movie for me. This story, especially, because Woodward and Bernstein were relatively young, inexperienced reporters. Sure, they worked for one of the most prestigious newspapers in the world, but they were still underdogs working their way to expose criminal activity, and in the process topple the power structure of the country.
I’m a sucker for music and sound, and All The President’s Men uses it in rather interesting ways. Music is used sparingly, which seems surprising for a movie that’s mostly just people in a room talking. Most movies try to layer multiple levels of sound to keep things interesting, and if there isn’t a lot of action going on, they’ll use music. All The President’s Men uses the sound of the newsroom as music. Here’s a scene early on that features Hoffman on the phone, then a quick conversation between Hoffman and Redford, and then Redford on the phone. But notice all of the other sound in the scene — scratching of a pencil, typewriters, phones ringing and being hung up — and especially how they get louder when there are lulls in the dialogue. The movie ended up winning the Oscar for Best Sound, which is usually an award that goes to movies with big, noticeable sound effects (in 1975 it went to Jaws, and in 1977 it went to Star Wars). Music was used mostly in scenes that (a) were outside the newsroom, and (b) had little or no dialogue. The music was there mostly to amp up the tension during pivotal moments, and it worked.
The production crew built a full-sized replica of the Washington Post newsroom on a soundstage in Burbank. The Post wouldn’t allow them to film in the actual newsroom, so they built their own. With permission, the production team measured the Post newsroom, took hundreds of photographs, and even collected boxes of trash (discarded drafts and notes) from the newsroom to use on set. They ordered 200 desks from the same company that sold desks to the Post in 1971. They even made replicas of phonebooks when they couldn’t find the ones they wanted. The level of detail that they went to was staggering, which may or may not have been necessary, because I never really noticed anything.

Sorry, there’s one more criticism that I didn’t get to up front, because it’s only fair to wait until the end to bring it up. The ending of the movie kinda sucks. You’re ready for a huge climax when Woodward and Bernstein go to Ben Bradlee’s house in the middle of the night, telling him that they have the story cold, but they’re nervous because their source tells them that their lives could be in danger. Bradlee gives them a great kick-in-the-ass speech, and tells them to go for it and bring down the crooks in the White House. Then we cut to Woodward and Bernstein in the newsroom, and then we smash-cut to typewriters typing out a bunch of headlines involving Watergate conspirators going to jail, and eventually Nixon resigning the presidency. Like, we don’t actually see Woodward and Bernstein connecting the rest of the dots and chasing down the rest of the story and, you know, getting the bad guys. The reason is that the movie only really covers the first half of the book. Again, because the movie came out in 1976, the story was still fresh and people could connect the dots on their own. The first time I saw it, however, I thought to myself, “wait, that’s it? All they did was figure out who was controlling the money. How did -that- lead to Nixon resigning?” I had to do a little research to figure out what happened in between.

That being said, this movie (and the book it’s based on) are a big reason that I got so interested in Watergate. It’s truly a bananas-crazy story to read about from start to finish. Like, Nixon himself had recording equipment installed in the Oval Office, and then proceeded to talk about an ongoing criminal conspiracy, as well as an ongoing effort to obstruct the investigation of that conspiracy while standing in the Oval Office. Like, what? Are you kidding me? And it’s not like the corruption had much of a high-minded effort. Like, if you’re a modern-day conspiracy theorist, you might say that the Bush administration lied and doctored evidence in order to go to war in the middle east to direct profits to their cronies in the oil and weapons industries (and, you know, you might be right). Or you might say that the Trump administration is intentionally advancing policy decisions that will directly or indirectly make more money for the Trump Organization (and, again, you might be right). That’s not really what the Nixon regime was doing. They were just cheating to win another election. Winning was the end in and of itself. It seems bizarre now, but there hasn’t been much to suggest they had motives beyond that.

In any event, All The President’s Men is admittedly dense at times, and admittedly difficult to follow if you aren’t already familiar with Watergate. However, if you are, it’s a fun watch. Even if you aren’t, you can just trust that the dots connect, and you can watch two great actors bounce off each other while they go to work. Parts of the movie don’t quite hold up 45 years later, but most of the movie does. It’s not the oldest movie on my list — there are two that are older that we’ll get to later — but among movies released prior to 1990, it’s the highest ranked. It slides in at №27 overall.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

6. The Fugitive

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

17. Ocean’s 11

22. Remember The Titans

24. Apollo 13

27. All The President’s Men

31. The Lost World: Jurassic Park

34. Catch Me If You Can