On Screen

...It suggests, in addition, that Pakula's concern is less for the faots than for effects...

...Woodward and Bernstein's late-night, confidential visits to the homes of Committee to Reelect the President staff members, for example, are described in only 10 pages or so of the text, while the corresponding sequence in the movie takes 25 minutes...

...She does such a good job, in fact, that the intent of the scene, the sequence of which it is a part and the film itself all become apparent...

...It is one thing to acknowledge dramatic imperatives, but quite another to falsify the sequence of actual events in the interest of providing a climax that is ultimately a non sequitur...

...but not without suggesting that the Post's pursuit of the truth and willingness to countenance what only seemed to be paranoia, was instrumental in preserving all three...

...The confluence of interests was perfectly in keeping with the blatant, self-perpetuating self-aggrandizement currently characteristic of the press...

...At the Washington premiere of All the President's Men, a gala benefit for the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Post staff members and their movie counterparts were the focus of attention for reporters actually covering the affair...

...But the account of Watergate in the cinematic All the President's Men, the uses and misuses of the truth, seem most of all to reflect a peculiarly skewed political vision...

...This incestuous media extravaganza coincided, too, with the publication of excerpts from The Final Days, Woodward and Bernstein's latest expose, in Newsweek, a Post subsidiary...

...As the film proceeds, the themes of paranoia and conspiracy come to dominate until it finally resembles not so much the original book as Pakula's The Parallax View...

...Even on its own terms, then, the ending is false...

...In the film, when Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook) has his first conversation with Woodward, he is hidden by shadows and his voice seems curiously disembodied...

...And nothing at that stage of the investigation could have remotely justified Bradlee's fears???certainly nothing that Woodward and Bernstein had found out...

...In the case of Watergate there were real enemies and a geninue conspiracy...

...Partly it may be attributable to the considerable differences between the book and the movie...

...By dwelling so long on Woodward and Bernstein's nocturnal interviews and emphasizing the anxiety of the Bookkeeper and others, the movie implies that their tears are real and gives substance to the paranoia the reporters themselves are beginning to feel...

...He has a peculiarly lifeless and abstract quality in the book that is designed, for the most part, to protect his still-secret identity...

...A A serious problem with this is that Bradlee's impassioned oration is chronologically inaccurate...

...We go into the movie aware that the fears of the protagonists are not fantasies, that a conspiracy is waiting to be exposed...

...it revolves around the possible embarrassment of the Post over a story lacking proper confirmation...

...When she finally agrees to give information, agony at betraying her fellow workers and fear of reprisal from her superiors inhibit her from naming names...

...nearly one fifth of the running time...

...Bradlee is shaken by their revelations and makes a rousing speech that "the First Amendment of the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country" are riding on their investigation...

...On Screen THE SHADOW KNOWS BY ROBERT ASAHINA T HE movie version of All the President's Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's best seller about how they "uncovered" the Watergate scandal for the Washington Post, appears to be both a popular and a critical success...

...A reading of All the President's Men reveals that the role of newspapers in bringing Watergate to light was actually rather small...

...As the reporters begin to unravel the tangled threads, though, Deep Throat emerges from the shadows, and he is completely visible by his final scene...

...No matter that the "facts" have been badly twisted...

...Fearful for their safety, the two reporters call on their editor, Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards), at home...

...In a highly effective scene, Bernstein pressures a nervous source known only as the Bookkeeper (Jane Alexander...

...Indeed, one explanation of the striking differences between the book and William Goldman's screenplay is that Goldman and director Alan Pakula took the promotion seriously and gave us a real "detective story, a romantic thriller with only the most tenuous connection to the facts...

...What happens in the movie before that climax has nothing at all to do with the First Amendment, freedom of the press or the future of the country...

...The earlier film had an investigative reporter (Warren Beatly) uncovering another hidden plot, a nightmare of political .assasistations, and Pakulas concern there tor the shadowy realm where paranoia and genuine fear are difficult to distinguish surfaces again in All the President v Men...

...The book, promoted as "the most devastating detective story of this century," was really the story of how Woodward and Bernstein made public the genuine detective work of others...

...Near the climax of the film, Deep Throat warns Woodward that his and Bernstein's lives are in danger, adding that half the nation has never heard of Watergate and that "nobody gives a shit about the country...

...Perversely, however, the conclusion succeeds, precisely because Pakula and Goldman's carefully crafted fantasy of conspiracy really has less to do with the real Watergate case than with our retrospective feelings about it...

...This is especially true of the scenes involving Deep Throat, the nameless source who provided "deep background" confirmation to Woodward and kept him pointed in the right direction...

...But the paranoia that is as blind as simple faith leaves the public and the press susceptible to shrewd manipulation and myth-making...

...What sustains the myth of investigative journalism is the unshakable conviction that there is always a disparity between the public record and the truth, that behind the official veil of secrecy always lies a scandal...

...Shortly afterward, the movie ends...

...The success of the film version of All The President's Men offers compelling testimony to that...

...Investigative journalists found only what the FBI, the grand jury, the Federal prosecutors, and Congressional committees had already discovered, and what self-interested sources wanted to reveal...

...Alexander's portrayal vividly captures the distress and bitterness of the helpless, compromised informant...

...As Edward Jay Epstein has persuasively argued, reporters merely functioned as "conduits" for a carefully orchestrated series of leaks...

...she can only nod when Bernstein mentions initials...

...Part of the audience appeal results, no doubt, from the casting of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, two of Hollywood's biggest stars, as Woodward and Bernstein...

...Although our knowledge might seem to undercut the suspense, it actually renders us that much more ready for Pakula and Goldman's distortions...

...But the accolades the film has been receiving, I think, suggest something more: a general susceptibility to the myth that has been built up around the mystique of investigative reporting...

...The movie makers were undoubtedly subject to constraints of time (the film concludes in January, 1973, more than a year before the book does) and dramatic structure as well...

...All the President's Men is really a new version of The Parallax View, with the spurious legitimation that the paranoia is factually justified...

...His gradual clarification is a rather clumsy contrivance to indicate the growing menace of the conspiracy...

...a cinematic correlate to the book's camouflage...

...It occurs on page 351 of the book, after the beginning of the Senate Watergate hearings and well past the compressed period (up to about page 270) covered by the movie...