A good night with George

Good Night, and Good Luck
Venice Film Festival

Hollywood stars often want to direct but only Clint Eastwood, and possibly Sean Penn, have succeeded in becoming as good filmmakers as they are actors.

These are now joined by George Clooney, whose second film as director, Good Night, And Good Luck, was given prolonged and deserved applause at its Venice Festival premiere last night.

Audaciously made in black and white, it tells the story of Ed Murrow, the CBS broadcaster who, after becoming famous for his reports from wartime London, took on the full might of Senator Joseph McCarthy at the height of the anti-communist Senate hearings in the Fifties.

All are excellently portrayed by a cast that includes Clooney himself as a cautious CBS producer, David Straithairn as Murrow, and Frank Langella as the nervous head of CBS.

The film serves three purposes. It is a tribute to Murrow - who ended all his broadcasts with "Good night, and good luck" - and refused to bow to sponsors who were terrified of offending Senator McCarthy.

It is an obvious warning to America's contemporary media, which also prefers not to rock the boat too much, specifically over the Iraq war. And it is a nod to Clooney's own father, also a broadcaster of note in the Fifties.

Its great virtue is that it achieves exactly what Murrow himself managed in treating its audience as adults who do not need to be patronised but are capable of remembering American history and the fraught times of the McCarthy period.

Most of it is talk rather than action as Murrow - in between conducting absurdly soft interviews such as with Liberace on why he remained unmarried for so long - plans to take on

Senator McCarthy when a young American airman is dismissed from the service as a dangerous radical, because his father has been caught reading a Serbian newspaper with communist sympathies.

What we see are the powerful constraints put on the media at the time as Murrow fights with CBS for the right to tackle awkward political and social subjects.

Clooney does not suggest that McCarthy was defeated solely by Murrow. It was the New York Times too who had a profound effect on the turning of the tide. But he does show that Murrow was a great broadcaster - a fact the British knew already from his broadcasts in London.