On it’s opening night, a 138-storey skyscraper is having a celebratory party on the 135th floor. However, due to corners being cut during production a fire breaks out on floor 81. It is up to the building’s architect Doug Roberts (Paul Newman) and Fire Chief O’Hallorhan (Steve McQueen) to try to save as many people as possible as the blaze intensifies.
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The life and career of long-serving news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) has taken a downward slide recently after his wife left him and he sank into drink, and his once high ratings have fallen to the point where his network, UBS, is forced to let him go. After being told he has just 2 weeks left on the air Howard broadcasts that in a week he will kill himself, live and during his show. Understandably he is immediately taken off the air by Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), a rising executive surreptitiously taking over UBS from the inside, however Howard’s best friend and manager Max Schumacher (William Holden) is able to allow Howard one last show, for a chance at a dignified farewell, which Howard takes and runs with, instead offering up some frank and hard truths the general public eats up. Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), UBS’ new head of programming, sees potential in Howard’s popularity, and adapts his news show to suit, but what is more the important, the ratings or their host’s sanity?
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Los Angeles, 1937. Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is a private detective specialising in domestic cases. One day a woman (Diane Ladd) shows up at Jake’s office and hires him to follow her husband, Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling) who she suspects is having an affair. Jake tracks Mulwray and does indeed photograph him embracing a much younger woman. He gives the photos to Mrs. Mulwray, and soon sees them printed on the front page of the newspaper, only to discover that the woman who hired him wasn’t Mrs. Mulwray, and the real one (Faye Dunaway) is somewhat irked that her husband has been publicly humiliated and has now disappeared, and all this is just the start of a web on intrigue that leads further than Jake could have imagined.
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This review was originally written for French Toast Sunday as part of my USA Road Trip series.
In a retirement home, a 121-year old man – claiming to be the only white survivor of the battle of Little Big Horn – is being interviewed about the habits of the Native Americans. Instead he recounts his life story, starting when he was ten years old and, after his family’s wagon trail was attacked, when he and his older sister were taken in by a tribe calling themselves the Human Beings. We see the boy – originally called Jack Crabb until the tribe renames him Little Big Man – undertake many adventures, becoming embroiled with the likes of a devout Christian couple, a snake oil salesman, Wild Bill Hickok and General Custer along the way.
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Life Vs Film 