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Ed vs. Joe vs. CBS

"Good Night, and Good Luck" and the perils of Hollywood history.

Oct 31, 2005, Vol. 11, No. 07 • By MARTHA BAYLES
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LET ME START ON A positive note. For a film made in the present climate that dramatizes the 1953-54 clash between Edward R. Murrow, the broadcast personality who pioneered the TV news magazine, and Joseph McCarthy, the Republican senator who gave anti-communism a bad name, Good Night, and Good Luck has many fine qualities. If you like rich black-and-white cinematography; precision-tooled acting (especially David Strathairn as Murrow); artful skeins of cigarette smoke; meticulous re-creations of early-1950s offices, TV studios, and hotel bars; and jazz standards sung by the incomparable Dianne Reeves, then you will relish every minute of this film, which was cowritten and directed by George Clooney (who also plays CBS news producer Fred Friendly).

Or almost every minute. Curiously, the critics have ignored this movie's most glaring artistic flaw: a subplot about Joe and Shirley Wershba, two Murrow associates who kept their happy marriage a secret because of CBS's anti-nepotism rule. This is possibly the dullest subplot of modern times, made even duller by the casting of Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson, a couple who generate about as much spark as a Kent cigarette stubbed out 50 years ago.

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