All the President’s Men (Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Robards, Hal Holbrook) – Winner of four Academy Awards and eight nominations (including Best Picture and Best Director, which it didn’t win), All the President’s Men is unique in that it serves as most Americans’ reference source for all of Watergate, according to national surveys. Political buffs and journalism students (like me, who served as City Editor of The Lantern, the Ohio State daily newspaper in the summer of 1974) devoured the book. But most Americans don’t read books or newspapers so they relied on the movie as history itself. The all-star cast was led by two of the most popular and outstanding actors of their generation, Robert Redford (as Woodward) and Dustin Hoffman (as Bernstein), who recreated the story and their patient unveiling of the conspiracy. In general, they were ignored by other journalists (although the New York Times and Los Angeles Times played catch-up) and were aggressively subverted by Nixon’s propaganda machine. Even if you knew the story well, Director Alan J. Pakula creates suspense, fear, and loathing. It takes you inside the newsroom with the two reporters and their editors, most notably Executive Editor Ben Bradlee (played brilliantly in an Oscar-winning performance by Jason Robards). The two, whose styles are very different, have a hard time convincing even their bosses that they have the story of the century. But they plug along, in part thanks to Deep Throat, who is portrayed so expertly by Hal Holbrook that most people think he was the source, something that haunted his career for many years (until he became Mark Twain in the Broadway play). There are early performances of future stars, too, as the movie launched careers of people like Meredith Baxter, (Des Moines’) Stephen Collins, Jane Alexander, Robert Walden, and F. Murray Abraham. This is a truly wonderful docudrama, which spawned later ones like Executive Action and JFK, both of which were more conspiracy theory than this fine film. If you want to remember the lessons of Watergate … which shaped Washington politics and investigative journalism to this very day (including the use of unnamed sources) … go rent this classic film.