Network (1976)

Official trailer

Network is Sidney Lumet’s 1976 American satire about commercial television.

The film depicts UBS news anchor Howard Beale, who announces on air that he’ll commit suicide on the next broadcast after being fired due to declining ratings. The network exploits his later breakdown instead of removing him. Beale becomes the highest-rated host on television by delivering increasingly unhinged rants about American institutional collapse. Programming executive Diana Christensen pursues Beale’s commercial potential while engaging in an affair with news division chief Max Schumacher. Peter Finch plays Beale.

Faye Dunaway plays Christensen. William Holden plays Schumacher. Robert Duvall plays network executive Frank Hackett. Ned Beatty plays corporate chairman Arthur Jensen.

Beatrice Straight plays Schumacher’s wife Louise. Paddy Chayefsky wrote the screenplay. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and United Artists produced the film on a budget of approximately 3.8 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 24 million dollars worldwide. The work won four Academy Awards.

I measure every other satire against Network. It’s furious and funny and so well written that the actors seem to be riding the dialogue, and every year the real news catches up to another one of its jokes. It’s a 10, and I can’t find a thing I’d change.

The film is among the most prescient American films ever made and remains one of the principal satirical achievements of American cinema. The Chayefsky screenplay predicted reality television, sensationalist news, the merger of entertainment and information programming, and the corporate consolidation of American media.

The Finch performance as Howard Beale produced the I’m mad as hell speech that’s become a classic cultural reference. Finch died of a heart attack two months before the Academy Awards and won Best Actor posthumously. Faye Dunaway won Best Actress.

Beatrice Straight won Best Supporting Actress for a single five-minute scene. Chayefsky won Best Original Screenplay. The film correctly identified what American television would become and what American culture would do as a result. Later decades have verified the predictions.

Chayefsky’s Prediction

Paddy Chayefsky wrote Network as a direct attack on what he believed television was doing to American culture. He argued that the medium had abandoned its public service function and become pure entertainment driven by ratings instead of journalistic principles. The 1976 film depicts a network commissioning the Mao Tse-tung Hour starring actual revolutionary terrorists, a psychic delivering daily predictions on the evening news, and an angry prophet ranting at the camera as primary entertainment.

Each prediction has materialized. Reality television featuring criminal participants exists, cable news commentary has replaced news reporting, and outrage entertainment dominates American media.

The film was satire when Chayefsky wrote it, and later decades have turned it into documentary. That’s what gives me chills. He saw where the trajectory led, wrote it down as a joke, and television has spent the decades since catching up.

The Mad As Hell Speech

Howard Beale’s speech in which he urges viewers to open their windows and shout I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore has become a cultural reference beyond most American film scenes. The speech appears in popular reference, political commentary, and educational contexts across years. The scene’s specific construction matters.

Beale delivers the speech as a disorganized rant instead of as polished oratory. He repeats himself. He loses his place. He stares at the camera with the disorientation of a man whose breakdown has become his profession.

Delivering the speech as breakdown instead of performance gives it its power.

Beale has no constructive action to offer, and he’s screaming because nothing else seems available. The call to shout from windows is the suggestion of a man who’s lost the capacity to plan. Making the prophet deranged instead of wise gives the satire a moral weight wise oratory couldn’t have produced. Finch plays it like a man falling down a staircase in slow motion, and it scares me more than most horror films do.

Ned Beatty’s Speech

Late in the film, network chairman Arthur Jensen summons Beale to a darkened boardroom and explains to him that there are no nations, no peoples, only the dollar, only the corporate cosmology. The speech runs approximately five minutes. Beatty delivers it as a theatrical sermon, gradually building from quiet explanation to thundering revelation. Beatty was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for the single scene.

The speech reframes the entire film. Beale has been ranting about corporate power. Jensen explains the actual power structure. The corporations have replaced governments and individual nations matter only as administrative subdivisions of the global economy. The speech was 1976 satire. The European Union, multinational corporations whose revenues exceed national GDPs, and the post-Cold War global trading system have all confirmed the structural argument Jensen made. The satire was preview instead of exaggeration.

Beatty’s speech is the scene that makes this a 10 for me. He gets five minutes and turns a boardroom into a pulpit, and by the end he’s half convinced me the dollar really does run the world, which frightens me more than anything Beale shouts.

Does Network still hold up?

My 10 for Network rests on two things: it saw what American television and culture would become with frightening accuracy, and it does it as a comedy that bites. Finch’s Beale, Beatty’s boardroom sermon and Chayefsky’s dialogue are as sharp as anything American film has produced, and I think Lumet’s rehearsed, rapid-fire staging is what holds it all together.

If I have a complaint at all, it’s that the film gets harder to laugh at every year. Watch it if you care about satire, television or the world we ended up with.

Frequently Asked Questions