Watergate At the Movies

For some reason, don’t ask me why, I am having nostalgia for the days when an American President could be run out of office with a sufficiently bad scandal. Here’s a review of two movies which captured the era of Watergate.

The Conversation

Central to The Conversation is the character of Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), a lonely little man with an empty little life, whose nondescript appearance and meticulously-guarded privacy disguise his true job as the head of a small private surveillance company. Widely respected in his field – as shown by the reverence he is accorded when he happens to attend a surveillance worker’s convention – Caul works for a wide variety of clients, including several government agencies (though he doesn’t always know which one).

When his company is hired to do some more government work – keeping tabs on a nervous young couple (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest) – they figure it’s most likely IRS work. But when Harry pops by to drop off the surveillance tapes, the director (Robert Duvall) of the agency he’s been working for is mysteriously absent, and his assistant Martin Stett (a startlingly young and wonderfully sinister Harrison Ford) insists that he should take charge of the tapes – which flies in the face of the instructions Caul was given. His suspicions aroused, Harry reviews the tapes and realises that the pair he’d been trailing might have been more scared than he’d at first thought. A clash between his personal ethics as a devout Catholic and his professional obligations to his client ensues; eventually, Harry ends up convinced that something tragic and horrible is about to happen, something he might be powerless to stop.

---

Of course, in this time period super-pervasive CCTV isn’t on the cards (though a primitive CCTV system is on display at the convention), and widespread tapping of mobiles is a fantasy (as are mobile phones themselves), so Caul’s job requires much more in the way of co-ordination and footwork than it would these days. Particularly fascinating is the way that Caul is able to take several tape recordings produced simultaneously and, without the aid of computers, sync them up precisely and use them to get a crystal-clear recording of the conversation. The action of the film is actually set up by a single conversation between Caul’s two targets, the capture of which from several different sources is depicted in the opening scenes. The first time we see it, it’s almost unintelligible, but as Harry uses his skills to put the pieces together we get to hear more and more of it.

The understated performances Coppola evokes from his actors, coupled with the minimal use of background music, is great at creating the impression that the film itself has been cobbled together from eavesdropped conversations. Films regularly depict private conversations and encounters between characters, of course, that’s how the medium works, but in this case Coppola seems to specifically go out of his way to make us feel like we’re intruding – like when we see Harry coming home to his apartment, or hanging out with his friends at the office after the convention, or going to confession in church – and the fact that Harry doesn’t welcome anyone into his life and is shown guarding his privacy so intensely means that the insights we are permitted into him seem even more voyeuristic.

Allen Garfield is great as “Bernie” Moran, a loudmouthed competitor of Harry’s whose insistence on getting into pissing contests about the scale and scope of his surveillance work with other people in the business ends up revealing the terrible consequences of some of Harry’s earlier work.

Although apparently Coppola had developed the script for The Conversation in the mid-1960s, and all the surveillance techniques depicted were independently researched rather than being directly based on the Watergate revelations, it’s nonetheless a timely movie for the era. But even though it appeared in precisely the right place at the right time, The Conversation couldn’t escape being completely overshadowed by The Godfather Part II. (If it hadn’t, Harrison Ford’s A-list career would have probably started a decade early.)

All the President’s Men

Critically revered as the definitive cinematic treatment of the Watergate scandal, Alan J. Pakula’s adaptation of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book chronicling their Watergate investigations – featuring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein respectively – came out in 1976.

Nixon himself doesn’t appear except through archive news footage, which means Pakula doesn’t have to cast anyone as him and allows him to set up Nixon as this distant personality whose will is being enacted by the Watergate burglars and others. For the most part, it goes for a very low-key presentation, with minimal background music and scenes recorded with realistic sound – like the constant chatter of typewriters in the Washington Post offices, noisy aeroplanes flying overhead during outdoor interviews, and so on. This can make some of the dialogue tricky to follow at points, especially with the quite mumbly delivery from Hoffman and Redford.

Occasionally, Pakula will try something fancier – like the slow bird’s eye view zoom out showing Woodward and Bernstein flipping through Library of Congress requests searching for a needle in a haystack, until they themselves become specks within a massed crowd of researchers, which is rather effective. In other respects Pakula gets a good effect through the edit and scene structure; there’s a fun early part where Woodward’s dogged persistence is depicted by him repeatedly popping up and trying to get Markham (Nicolas Coster), the attorney sent to represent the Watergate burglars, to talk to him, with a sequence of short scenes in which Woodward keeps showing up next to Markham.

To avoid the movie becoming a totally dry dramatisation of the investigative process, a certain amount of newspaper drama is added – disagreements between editorial staff as to whether Woodward and Bernstein are right for the job or whether it should be given to more seasoned political journalists (though since they’re all distracted by the Democratic primaries they’re short for time) and some ruffling of feathers between Bernstein and Woodward themselves until they get into the flow of working with each other. This might be fascinating to people inside journalism, but isn’t really why we’re here – we’re here for the Watergate dirt.

Robert Redford’s casting was no accident. Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting on Watergate in The Washington Post had already done its work of keeping the subject in the public eye and exposing information which was fatally damaging to Nixon’s presidency, but they weren’t sure about doing a book until Redford expressed an interest in buying the film rights if they produced one. They therefore wrote a book which focused as much (if not more) on the narrative of the investigation process as it did the facts of the case, which then provided the basis of the movie; in essence, they wrote the book so that this film would exist, and the film is consequently quite dedicated to the myth of Woodward and Bernstein.

As important as the journalists were, I can’t help but think that this approach ultimately compromised the film. Whilst Woodward and Bernstein are naturally good first-person sources for their own story, they cannot be expected to be objective ones; a really first-class account of their work would need to take into account a broad range of their views, and the movie risks making it seem like they were working in a vacuum or that they were uniquely great journalists without whom nobody else would have got the story. (Wouldn’t Deep Throat – AKA Mark Felt – have just found some other journalists to leak information to if Woodward and Bernstein hadn’t worked out?)

In essence, there’s an inconsistency of approach here: on the one hand, the movie is all about providing scrutiny to the official narrative and evidence-based corroboration of people’s claims, on the other it presents Woodward and Bernstein’s view of themselves uncritically. You cannot put so much weight on the importance of checking out people’s stories and then not do the same for the characters you put at the centre of the story. Moreover, it makes the downfall of the Nixon presidency a sort of duel between the White House and our two plucky heroes and makes the Watergate break-in the straw that breaks the camel’s back, a narrative which overlooks COINTELPRO, the content of the White House tapes, and all sorts of other nastiness that Nixon presided over.

Guess who was supervising COINTELPRO in the early 1970s? That’s right – Deep Throat himself, Mark Felt, who in that capacity ordered a number of illegal activities. Far from being an angelic whistleblower concerned about government dirty tricks, Felt was a practitioner of those tricks, a right-hand man of J. Edgar Hoover, and there’s good reasons to think he leaked the Watergate information not out of any high moral calling but because he wasn’t getting on with Nixon and decided to turn the screws on him. This information, once you know it, makes much of All the President’s Men dealing with Deep Throat unpalatable.

Much of this only came out later, of course. Any history of a subject produced so quickly, whilst information was still in the process of coming out, is always going to be flawed and incomplete to a certain extent, and the same is true of All the President’s Men; it was doubtless an important tool for explaining Watergate to a confused public back in the day, but there’s surely better sources now. One suspects that the film has the good reputation it has in part because so many movie critics in its time were journalists working alongside journalists, and therefore prone to be well-disposed to material that flatters journalists.