TV hell: "Network"

Increasingly, it seems 1976's much-laurelled media satire Network - reissued this weekend to mark the centenary of its late director Sidney Lumet - is destined to be remembered for one speech, and for one line from one speech ("I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take this any more"), which falls perilously early in the film's two-hour running time. Upon release, this was a clear case of the New American Cinema trying to have it both ways: taking a passive-aggressive swipe at its rival television, while tempting viewers with the prospect of the inside scoop on how TV really operates - the meetings, the lunches, the bad decisions that somehow make it to air. What's surprising is how shaky and inconsistent its line of attack now appears: the movie at once wants to go off at the younger upstart medium for being ruthlessly corporate while attempting to persuade us on a narrative level that this ruthlessly corporate enterprise would keep Peter Finch's veteran newsman Howard Beale on air even after he goes rogue, turns the air blue, and threatens to top himself. Perhaps it's the fallout that is meant to concern us - perhaps we're just meant to go with some of this and see where it all leads - yet even here, there's a jarring contrast between Lumet's typically low-key, hands-off realism and the booming theatricality of Paddy Chayevsky's script, the most illustrious example of those splenetic splurges writers thrash out when striving to nail the zeitgeist with each punch of the typewriter keys.

Historically, only a certain species of writer has been sanctioned to bash these things out for a studio paycheque, and you can still feel the sway Chayevsky held within Hollywood circles in this script's indulgence of unkillable repeated lines ("crusty yet benign", "an angry prophet denouncing the hypocrisies of our times"). If his best-known phrasing retains some potency as a shout into the void, there's not much else here worthy of praise or salvage. The second hour gets bloated and hysterical with lowest common denominator programming that never came to pass (soothsayers on the news, a reality show about a Symbionese Liberation Army knock-off) and then there's the altogether icky relationship between William Holden and Faye Dunaway's grasping, neurotic exec (who only gets off when she's talking ratings, a musty locker-room joke). The warning that corporations weren't doing much to protect the mental health of their employees might have been revelatory at the time, but seems way too overblown in this framing - all that BELLOWING - to merit close heeding. Finch got the Oscar posthumously, having stuck in there for so long; he is, granted, the one actor in this ensemble who does seem to have got their head around the levels of muttering and spluttering Chayevsky demanded. More telling, I would argue, is the number of performers - Dunaway, Robert Duvall, Ned Beatty - who, having been subtly terrific in other New Hollywood ventures, look terribly awkward, even outright hammy when asked to channel the playwright's relentless, bilious logorrhea.

Network returns to selected cinemas from Friday.