Network (1976) - Characters

Few can write a script as smart as Paddy Chayefsky could, especially one regarding the television industry.

This is a multiple watch film.
Thick. Surreal. Telling.
(As I write this, another Network post already comes to mind.)

The characters in this kind of piece are very important, and they deliver from the page to the screen and in between.

Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch) and Diana Christensen (played by Faye Dunaway) are the two that grab me today.

Robert Duvall isn't discussed here, though I will acknowledge that he crushes it and probably deserves his own blog all together.

Howard's early actions are the inciting incident of this film. A man on the brink of insanity, on the brink of genius, claiming to kill himself on live TV.

Director Sidney Lumet was nervous about casting a non-American English accent. He made the right call though. Finch gives a great performances. Without this character's full blow commitment, and near religious passion, without their belief, observable in the legs and deep in the eyes, the film falls flat. Finch hits a home run.

Diana Christensen (played by Faye Dunaway) is another type of character. Lumet told Dunaway that if she shows any vulnerability in the character, he would cut it out in the editing room. She is heartless and cutthroat but doesn't know any better. She was raised by television. Just watch the sex scene between her character and William Holden's character; the entire time she is discussing ratings, business, success. Chayefsky is showing that in her core "vulnerable," her core physical, she is a company woman. A sharp storytelling move. There are many more.

Cheers to the storytelling skills of Chayefsky and Lumet.
Cheers to great characters.

Another interesting note: Lumet had the lighting style ramp from basic and realistic to dramatic and surreal throughout the film as the plot intensified.

Be well.