Good Night and Good Luck

This film opens with a scene in which Ed Murrow warns his audience of how television can easily and was in fact rapidly becoming a means of mere and vacuous entertainment and was not being adequately utilised as a means of education, investigation or as a vehicle for change and good. For a speech made in 1958 it showed remarkable prescience and awareness by the speaker.

This is a challenging and engaging film which uses media coverage from the day to give the effect of a docu drama rather than a fictional movie. The resulting film is fast paced and informative as it follows the succesful attempt by Murrow and Friendly to stand up to and question the tactics of Senator Joe McCarthy during the infamous McCarthy era witch hunt.

There are many different layers to this film as it covers the story one of the most interesting to me was the parallel stroy of the young married couple who had to hide the fact of their marriage from the network as it was against company policy for colleagues to be married. When they were eventually discovered it was put to them that it had been in the company's knowledge all along that they were married but now that they were forced to aly off staff they were being approached to have one party resign in order to save the job of another person who wasn't breaking company policy. It wasn't clear which one would be resigning but I guess it was the wife as condidering the era the film was set in she would be the more likely candidate. The fact that the film was focused on the fight against injustice in society by a news room team and yet there was injustice happening under their noses struck me as a brilliant parallel and was just one of the impressive achievements in this film.