 | Even more compelling today than when it was first released, Network is a wickedly funny, dead-on indictment of the TV news media. Winner of four Academy Awards including Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress and Best Screenplay, this searing satire pulses with "vitality and a provocative excitement that is forever rare" (Charles Champlin, Los Angeles Times).
Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch, and Robert Duvall star in [screenplay-wright Paddy Chayevsky's] portrait of television exploitation. When longtime UBS-TV news anchor Howard Beale (Finch) is fired, he suffers a violent, on-air breakdown. Ironically, his angry rantings boost his sagging ratings - much to the surprise and delight of the UBS brass. Subsequently rehired and reinvented as the "mad prophet of the airwaves". (from original studio synopsis).
Objectivists will very much enjoy this movie for the stark honesty in which the modern media is presented, as dedicated to zombie-fying the general public, and the way that playwright Chayefsky was perhaps the first major writer to openly indict the selling out of the American system of rational capitalism, to the madness of Arab Islamic fundamentalist financiers, which is of course highly relevant today.
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