Movie of the Week: Quiz Show

Alexa: I remember vaguely hearing about the scandal surrounding “Twenty One” but knew little about the details until watching “Quiz Show.” I have to wonder if the revelation that a massively popular game show was fixed would have the same impact today in the age of “reality” TV, but “Quiz Show” still resonates for modern audiences because director Robert Redford and screenwriter Paul Attanasio do an impeccable job of conveying the story’s significance. A bit of the film’s 2-hour-and-13-minute run time drags in places, but overall “Quiz Show” captivates throughout. You really feel what a high-stakes operation this was for everyone involved. The film’s driving force is Ralph Fiennes as Charles Van Doren. He’s so clean-cut and charming that you can’t help but feel the same kinship with him that “Twenty One” viewers must have felt at the time. Fiennes infuses him with such heart that you sympathize with him even when he admits the major role he played in the show’s deception, but at the same time you know he deserves to be held accountable for his wrongdoing. He’s not a hero or a true villain, and his humanity is what makes him so interesting to watch - even with that uneven American accent.

Joel: It’s really amazing to look at the show, just a simple question and answer show really, and know that at the time, this was must see television. It’s important to remember that though, for the drama of the movie to work. The drama of these contestants was what drove the ratings at the time and what created a situation for a scandal like that to be possible. The movie does a great job of helping the audience understand what watching the show would have been like in the 1950s. One of the first sequences in the movie consists of people hurrying to their television sets to watch the show. We see people gathering around the windows of other people’s houses to tune in to the show that everyone was watching at the time. And while the television footage was made to look as close as possible to what the original show looked like, its was a different matter when it came to shooting the studio parts of the movie. The movie was does a great job of heightening the drama of the game’s simple setup in a way that would be more captivating to a more modern audience. This really helps you get the feel for how invested the audience and America would have been when the shows were first airing.

It’s amazing when you step away from the movie to realize how, mundane perhaps, the whole story is. Nobody in this so called scandal kills anybody. Nobody is on the run from the police. When people are called to testify they show up and testify. There isn’t even that much yelling. There’s no moment of “You can’t handle the truth!” or “I’m as mad as hell!” Even the rigging of the quiz show was done in an effort to steal the money. It was just the producers taking liberties with their show to create an entertaining program, something that today is not only accepted but maybe even expected with how stories are told in reality programming. This is a scandal that today feels like it would barely justify the use of the word scandal. But the movie goes all out in making this whole thing feel like a big deal. There is some genuinely talented directing going on from Robert Redford in this movie who earned an academy award nomination for Best director for this movie. The movie takes you along for what genuinely feels like a wild ride while you’re watching it. It’s able to make people answering trivia questions feel genuinely thrilling, and gets you quickly invested in the story. This movie is able to remind you that the quiz show scandals were actually a big deal at the time by making the whole thing feel really scandalous.

Chris: Remember back when the general public wasn't distrustful of what they saw on television? Well here's the story of how that was ruined, or at least one of the initial cases of how that distrust came to be. Overall, it's an alright movie in which all the parts fit and are well executed but my jaded 2017 brain was stuck on "so what? it's TV. That's the nature of the business" so that tension or sense of danger about what happens when Twenty One is found out and the responsible parties are subpoenaed was never really there for me. Even in the text at the end, all traces of danger were gone, everybody involved landed on their feet and had nice jobs the rest of their lives. Nobody went to jail, no harm came to anyone and there was no cause for sympathy for anyone implicated in the scandal. It isn't a bad movie but it just kinda felt "paint-by the numbers" to me. An alternate title could be "Alright...so what? The Movie"

Jason: For me, this movie was a fine movie. I wasn't terribly interested in it to begin with. I hadn't heard of the quiz show scandals beforehand and so knew nothing about the story. By the end, I pretty much got what I expected. Cinematically, this is a well put together product! Direction was great, acting was top-notch, all of that. It just didn't grab me the way it was designed to. The part that I really dug was the music. I'm a sucker for some good big band and swing. However, I did notice that their use of Bobby Darin’s version of “Mack the Knife” was anachronistic. If I'm not mistaken, the movie is set in the mid/late 50’s, ‘56-57ish. That recording didn't come out till 1959. They could have used Louis Armstrong’s version and been fine. But that's super nitpicky.

So yeah. It was good just… not interesting enough for me to care all that much. I figured that all TV has been rigged since the beginning of TV. So it wasn't news to me. The biggest question I'm left with is what why Ralph Fiennes pronounce his name so weird?