Clooney's Latest: A Sunday Review

How To Make Entertainment From A Civics Lessons

(CBS)  CBS News Sunday Morning contributor David Edelstein reviews "Good Night, and Good Luck," the new movie about the early days of broadcast journalism in 1950s America.

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George Clooney has been sounding off about politics lately — not so much about the war in Iraq, but the larger issue of intolerance toward dissent. Consider the prominent cable news host who labeled critics of the administration's war "enemies of the state," or the author with the bestseller accusing liberal Democrats of "treason."

To make his case for dialogue as the cornerstone of democracy, Clooney has gone back half a century to the early days of television. Sen. Joseph McCarthy was hauling supposed Communists before Congress and destroying their lives with hearsay when a CBS correspondent named Edward R. Murrow stood up and said, "Enough."

Murrow wasn't the first journalist on the anti-McCarthy bandwagon, but TV networks were — are — pretty nervous about declaring for one side or another, and Murrow's 1954 broadcast was momentous.

"Good Night, and Good Luck" is a civics lesson, but not a dry one. It's fevered, it's rousing and it's unapologetically one-sided. It paints Murrow, played with grave intensity by David Strathairn, as a saint of journalism, and McCarthy, played with creepy intensity by Joseph McCarthy, in period footage, as a man who fought his battles not with argument but innuendo and outright slander.

But the larger battle for Murrow and his producer, Fred Friendly (played by Clooney), is with the network itself. CBS employees have just been made to sign loyalty oaths to the United States. The chairman, William Paley, played by Frank Langella, allows Murrow to go after McCarthy, but with solemn reservations.

A mid-level executive, played by Jeff Daniels, threatens the worst fate imaginable for a serious journalist: puffy celebrity interviews on "Person to Person."

The bulk of "Good Night, and Good Luck" is set in the CBS studios — not the one I'm in now; this place was being converted from a milk factory. But it's anything but static.

The cinematographer, Robert Elswit, uses high-contrast black-and-white to evoke both the era and the starkness of the forces in play. The movie never settles into one of those loitering period pictorials: It has the chain-smoking jitteriness of its hero.

Cigarettes, by the way, are everywhere, and the way the white smoke curls against the deep blacks is both beautiful and ominous. Murrow died of lung cancer at a relatively young age.

It's amazing in our era of fast editing and whooshy sound effects that people back then were riveted to a man staring down at a script. But I think you will be, too.