His father was an actor; he started as an actor; and Sidney Lumet’s movies are memorable as feasts of acting. In particular, he was a master of anger: his first movie was “12 Angry Men,” and the great moments in his movies smolder and rage, often in righteous frustration. With his sense of moral outrage, he kept abreast of the passions of the times, whether the railroading of the innocent, the threat of nuclear holocaust, the repressed consciousness of the Nazi Holocaust, police corruption, rising crime, or corporate malfeasance. And in one film, he took a step ahead of the times—and brought them somewhere, I suspect, that he didn’t intend for them to go.
“Network” was on released November 14, 1976, twelve days after the election of Jimmy Carter. Following Paddy Chayevsky’s tightly wound script, Lumet presented, in the character of a madman, the ultimate angry rich white man, whose madness took the form of grossly exaggerated common-sense populism. He opposes corporate takeovers (indeed, foreign corporate takeovers), the superficial and venal vulgarity of the mass media, and, at a moment of sharply rising unemployment, the new world of business contractions. What’s more, the story’s model of media villainy propels a left-wing militant group to celebrity—shades of the New York beau monde’s earlier embrace of the Black Panthers.
One never knows where outrage will lead. Lumet seems to have been an unabashed liberal, yet the paradox of art is its unpredictabilty; his volatile blend of incensed decency and histrionics broke out of the contours of the conventional and blazed the trail for—even sparked—an altogether different sort of revolt. Four years later, voters, mad as hell and unwilling to take it any more, propelled to the White House a cranky, anti-technocratic nostalgist and actor speaking folksy, moralistic common sense.
It’s Lumet’s great moment in history, and one that, I’d bet, he’d have wanted to live down.