David Strathairn plays the heroic broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow, and George Clooney plays his congenial boss, Fred Friendly, in Clooney’s film, “Good Night, and Good Luck.” The film dramatizes the time in 1953 when Murrow and Friendly dragged CBS News kicking and screaming into a confrontation with Sen. Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy had been throwing his weight around, betting his career on a bogus “anti-communist” crusade, intimidating the entertainment industry, the universities, and the state department with his wild, unsupported accusations of wide-spread communist infiltration. Sponsors cancelled, CBS chairman William Paley threatened reprisals, but the show went on the air.

Clooney -- who co-wrote, directed, and produced the film, in addition to playing Friendly -- is clearly thinking of the present as he sifts through the past. Then as now, there were public officials trying to hit the jackpot of money and power by sowing fear and chaos in the American people. Then as now, the news media were reluctant to take a stand, for fear of being accused of taking sides; they preferred to hide behind their code of “objectivity” -- which seemed to dictate that they report both sides of every issue, even if there was only one side, and that they not give their audience and/or readership any hint that there was a moral question involved.

Murrow and Friendly were not communists. They were not even especially left wing. They thought that McCarthy’s accusations and smears denied their victims due process. People lost their jobs, their standing in the community, even their freedom, without ever getting to confront their accusers or see the evidence against them. It was, in fact, McCarthy whose activities were profoundly and dangerously un-American. What Murrow reported, and Friendly sanctioned, was simply objective reality -- though, of course, CBS chairman William Paley (Frank Langella) didn’t see it that way: he saw it as arrogance.

Among the many flawless choices Clooney made on the road to making “Good Night, and Good Luck,” picking David Strathairn to play Murrow has to rank very near the top. Having given us 25 years worth of exemplary performances -- his first film was John Sayles’s “The Return of the Secaucus Seven” -- Strathairn has finally been given a role that will make him immortal. The rest of the cast -- Clooney, Langella, Jeff Daniel, Patricia Clarkson, Robert Downey, Jr. -- are worthy support for Strathairn’s performance.

George Clooney didn’t take up acting until it became obvious to him that he was never going to play major league baseball. But with “Good Night, and Good Luck,” he has hit one out of the park.

Courtesy Photo