FILM (1994)
Quiz Show John Turturro, Ralph Fiennes, Rob Morrow, Paul Scofield Director: Robert Redford
It didn't take the people involved in the television trade long to realise that it was fairly simple to blur the lines that separated what was real and what was pure fiction.
Money was at the heart of things, of course - and a glance through the news section of any daily newspaper in Hong Kong over the past few weeks will confirm it still is.
From almost the very advent of the medium - back in the 1950s - there were scandals involving the manipulation of what was being presented, fuelled by the realisation of just how influential advertising could be and how much money people stood to make.
More than half a century later we are still being subjected to claims of 'reality' when we really should know better by now.
What makes director Robert Redford's thoughtful examination of the Twenty-One scandal that rocked 1950s America so engaging then is that it casts a sideways glance at the bigger picture all the way through.
There's the scandal itself - which saw one of America's top-rated quiz shows ask its dorky champion to take a dive so a more appealing character could take his place (and be given the correct answers). But there's the wider implication that as the 50s were drawing to a close, America's innocence (or what was left of it) was fast being eroded by the fierce desire to earn a buck - by any means necessary.
And these two sides of the coin are examined through the characters of Herbie Stemple (John Turturro) and Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes).
Turturro captures the frantic desperation of an old school grafter given a sniff of success - of celebrity, of escape - only to have it snatched from him at the last minute. And Fiennes embodies the back-then new image of a perfectly groomed - and manufactured - American man, who was open to any sort of manipulation.
The strength of their performances lies also in the fact that you feel for both characters, despite their many faults. They are both neither entirely good nor entirely nasty, just caught up in circumstances that soon spiral out of their control. But you see the darker sides of their characters, and the greed that lurks within all human beings - something we might never have seen had the notoriously image-conscious Redford trained the cameras on himself rather than others.
Lurking in the shadows of course is 'big business', as ruthless in Redford's wonderfully realised 1950s framework as it is today. In the end, as a few individual lives lie shattered, the machine keeps grinding on.
Redford wants us to question just what was ever learned. Switch on the TV today and the answer will stare you right in the face.
