The 1950s represent a time we associate with jukeboxes and sock-hops not fear and terrorism. George Clooney’s latest directorial effort, ‘Good Night, and Good Luck,’ acts as a history lesson about the realities of the early 1950s.

Clooney, whose father was a long-time news anchor in Cincinnati and Lexington, tells the story of CBS news anchor Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) and his attempts to stop the McCarthyism that swept the nation. Murrow’s signature closing line of each broadcast, “Good night, and good luck,” lends itself to the title of the film.

The movie is in a black-and-white newsprint style, a throwback to the days before color television and film. This period piece takes place in the confines of the television studio. The only input from the outside world is through newspaper columns read in the office and footage of McCarthy’s hearings being shown on CBS broadcasts.

Clooney focuses on the goals of Murrow and his associates, camaraderie in the workplace and respect for constitutional rights. His film resembles an hour and a half PBS documentary about scare tactics used by Joseph E. McCarthy, a junior senator from Wisconsin, who went on an anti-Communist witch hunt from 1950 to 1954 until he was censured by the Senate. McCarthy plays himself in this movie as the film uses actual footage from the Senate hearings and interrogations McCarthy held in order to call out those he believed to have red party sympathies or affiliations.

Murrow and his team risked their careers, at a time when most American journalists were all too aware of how easy it would be to lose their job by speaking out, by standing up for those who did not have a platform to stand on to argue against the terroristic methods McCarthy used to make broad claims of communistic loyalties.

The film acts as a meticulous depiction, even down to the heavy tobacco usage that was so prevalent in the time before society was aware of the health hazards associated with smoking, of a small but brave step taken by the CBS broadcasting team.

Clooney’s film is refreshingly succinct and well-edited without so much as a full minute devoted to filler. The jazz music that weaves throughout the story acts as a relaxing contrast to the tense emotions playing out on screen. The ensemble, which includes Patricia Clarkson, Robert Downey Jr., and Ray Wise, as suicidal anchorman Don Hollenbeck, works together in seamless rhythms, making you believe they actually experienced these roles.

Overall I found the film incredibly fascinating and even-toned and well worth the trip to the theater.

****

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