At the time, this was considered a parody.
Plot summary (with spoilers): Howard Beale is the anchor or the nightly news at the realistic sounding "UBS" station. He's just been given his two week notice by his boss and friend, Max Schumacher. That night, while doing the news, he announces to his audience that he'll be gone in two weeks, and since he has nothing but the show to live for, he'll be killing himself the following evening live on television. Hilariously, most people in the crew are barely listening to him, and chatting among themselves, so only a couple people even take note of what he said. But those who do manage to tell the director, who immediately pulls him off the air. Network head and billowy old white guy Nelson Chaney fires Beale on the spot. In the meantime, Schumacher attends a stockholders meeting that night where new network underling Frank Hackett announces that the News Division is going to be broken up and put under the control of the other branches of the network because it's the only part of the network that continually loses money. The next day, Beale asks Schumacher if he can go back on air one last time to say goodbye to his audience and salvage a little dignity, and Schumacher agrees. However, when Beale gets back on the air he loudly declares that life is "bullshit" and all the day-to-day crap is bullshit etc. Instead of cutting him off again, a disillusioned Schumacher lets him speak his mind.
That night, Hackett and the sexy new network gal Diane Christensen think that hiring Beale to rant and rave on TV every night would be an excellent plan, and a sure-fire ratings booster. Schumacher goes along with the plan at first, even after Diane comes to his office late in the evening and informs him of her desire to take over the news portion of the network, and create shows like "The Howard Beale Show" and have a physic try to predict the news every Friday, and report on what he got right on Monday and other such ideas that are obviously supposed to play like broad over-the-top parody in 1976, but sound perfectly run-of-the-mill in 2011. At any rate, Schumacher is disgusted and appalled by Diane's ridiculous attempts to dumb down the news for the sake of ratings and sensationalism (and again...this is supposed to be parody, people) so of course he decides to go out with her that very night and sleep with her, despite being married. He gazes at her romantically throughout the evening, and she admits she's a terrible and selfish lover and that she has ambition and a drive to succeed in her career which has made her miserable and alone because women aren't supposed to want those things. She also talks excitedly of ratings shares and advertising revenue, and expresses her wishes to make a "homosexual evening soap opera" called "Dyke's Lives", so we know she's evil because she's trying to put gays on TV.
So Howard does another broadcast and is so loopy, Schumacher tells him he's not letting him go on TV anymore. Howard freaks out and faints dead away. Schumacher has some co-workers take him back to his (Schumacher's) house for the night, while he yells at Diane and Frank, saying he won't let Howard back on the air. Frank breaks the news the Chaney has had a heart attack, and that now he is the network head. He fires Schumacher immediately, and Schumacher walks out, disgusted with them both.
The next morning, his wife wakes him up and tells him that Beale is gone. Schumacher spends the day looking for him, but can't find him anywhere. But at night, Howard shows up at the studio when he's supposed to, to give his nightly rant. He's soaking wet and crazed looking. He tells the people watching that they're dead inside, all the problems in the country have caused us to not care anymore, and the first step is to shake that off. Get up! Go to your window, open it up and shout, "I"m mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" Schumacher watches with dismay in his living room, with his family. Suddenly, his daughter races to the window and opens it. Over the pouring rain, and thunder and lightning, the voices of the people can be heard. "I'M MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GONNA TAKE IT ANYMORE!" More and more people pour out of their apartments and onto the balconies and fire escapes, shouting over over over as lighting blazes through the sky and thunder rolls. Schumacher's heart sinks as he watches in resigned horror. It's easily one of the most hypnotic and thrilling scenes I've ever seen in film.
So Howard's ratings shoot through the roof and the UBS nightly news becomes The Howard Beale Show, with a studio audience and a supporting cast including a psychic and a TMZ-type gossip hound. Man, how did the writers come up with such craziness? Meanwhile, Schumacher leaves his wife to move in with Diane where he can judge her superficiality and immoral behavior from a closer vantage point.
Also, a radical communist Black Panther-ish group called the Ecumenical Liberation Army sends UBS home video of them robbing a bank. Diane manages to meet with them and convince them to basically create a TV show, where they will film themselves committing crimes and UBS will play the film on TV and then actors will dramatize the rest of the story. Once the communists get a taste of ratings success, they hilariously start arguing over ratings points, ad revenues, and syndication rights.
Everything is going swimmingly for the network until one day when another conglomerate called the CAA announces publicly as required by law, that they intend to buy UBS. Howard takes to the airwaves and tells his followers that the CAA is owned by Arabs and that the Arabs are trying to take over the country and everyone must send a telegram to President Ford right away, protesting this buyout. This would kind of be like if Glenn Beck announced to his Fox News viewers that the second largest Fox News shareholder is Prince Ala-weed bin Talal, who helped fund the "Ground Zero Mosque".
This messes up CAA's plan to buy UBS, and Frank fears he'll be fired. Instead, the CEO of CAA wishes to have a private meeting with Beale. At the meeting, the CEO plays Beale like a fiddle, copying his ranting and raving style, and screaming at him that the individual isn't important anymore, and that corporations, not countries are all that matter.
Beale buys this completely, and tells his audience the next day that resisting the buyout is futile, human life is empty, and human beings are worthless. Soon, his ratings begin to slip. This freaks out Diane, and suddenly out of nowhere Schumacher finally realizes what's been painfully obvious all along: Diane is unfeeling and unscrupulous. He leaves her and goes back to his wife, but not before lecturing her at length about how bad she is for being cold and unscrupulous.
Frank and Diane want to take Beale off the air, but the corporate loving CEO demands that he stay, no matter how low his ratings get. So, Frank and Diane plan the next logical step: have the Ecumenical Liberation Army assassinate Beale live on the air. Not only will this end the Beale problem, but it will be an excellent second season premiere for their own show.
And so they do. Beale's dead, the ratings go up, and everyone's happy. Well, maybe not Beale so much.
Review: Really excellent film. A "parody" so dead on, that thirty five years later, there's much of it that doesn't read as parody at all. Paranoid raving loon with delusions of grandeur being manipulated and propped up by his network and then unceremoniously kicked to the curb when the ratings dip? Why hello, Glenn Beck. (Unlike other professional shouting baboons and outrage junkies like Nancy Grace, Keith Olbermann, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly etc, I believe Beck fully believes his own bullshit). "News" that's all flash and no substance? Why hello, Fox, CNN, MSNBC. The only thing they didn't predict was the flashy CGI graphics and crawling text at the bottom of the screen. Even the Black Panther knock off's TV show is basically a proto-reality show. The hypocritical greedy "communists" and the equally greedy and messianic CEO are also great parodies of both the far left and the far right people in politics. In fact, that even though the movie is clearly a parody all the way through, I was shocked when they suggested killing Beale in the end, at first thinking that the film had unfairly switched genres and crossed into broad satire. But that's really where it had been all along.
But I can't give this film a perfect score. The relationship between Schumacher and Diane is dead on arrival. The actors have zero chemistry and Schumacher knows from the very start that Diane is shallow and ridiculous. It would be fine if he simply lusted after her, but the movie makes a point of telling us he's in love with her, and I just don't buy it. And then their breakup scene was equally painful to watch. He sanctimoniously lectures her about being unfeeling and basically evil, as if he's just discovered this, and she just sits there looking chastened instead of calling him out on being the hypocritical ass who cheated on his wife. And it's not like any one event happened to open Schumacher's eyes to Diane's true nature. He knew it all along, and articulated it several times. I don't think any of this is was supposed to be satire, the actors at least play it totally straight and none of it is convincing. But the rest of the movie...perfection.
Stars: Four and a half out of five.
Next, life is a "Cabaret", old chum, and then time for some "American Graffiti".
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