peteg's blog - noise - movies - 2011 02 06 Network

Network

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Robert Duvall as a body-and-soul corporate man. This is a strange one with four strong leads; Dunaway comes off fake as she hams it up a little too much, as does Peter Finch in the crazy man role. William Holden is sincere, too sincere. Duvall goes over the top less successfully than he did a few years later in Apocalypse Now. This is one of those high-concept pieces they don't make any more, something like The Great Gatsby, a tale of the emptiness at the core of modern America without the pizzazz of a Hunter S. Thompson. Here the TV itself has some humanity while the corporation behind the network gets massaged by the events of the 1970s.

Parked at #198 in IMDB's top-250.