WUSA (1970)

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Not lousy, but rather heavy-handed and didactic play on political morality, allegedly set in the modern age. Paul Newman is an indifferent drifter in New Orleans who finds employment at a local radio station whose broadcasts double strictly as a platform for right-wing political beliefs; soon, the extremists for which Newman works have the city riled up in a hotbed of political tension. Adapting his novel "A Hall of Mirrors", Robert Stone writes dialogue and situations which feel curiously dated or clichéd, like the leftover pickings from a movie made some twenty years prior; as a result, the characters fail to emerge. Newman, at one point in his career, cited this picture as his very best, though he's not very good in it, and neither is co-star Joanne Woodward (working hard at feigning low-class). "WUSA" has an excellent sense of its location, due to Richard Moore's solid cinematography, yet its high-flown aims to be a controversial rabble-rouser drown in the din of over-exaggerated grandstanding. *1/2 from ****

I got so caught up in the movie that a few years later when I got to meet Cloris Leachman she asked me what my favorite movie was. I told her WUSA and she said she was in it. "What part did you play?" I asked. When she replied that she was the crippled girl my jaw dropped and I suddenly recognized her. "I'm so embarrassed," I said. Miss Leachman then graciously said, "Don't be embarrassed. The greatest compliment you can give an actor is to tell them they disappeared into the part." The Newmans (Paul and JoAnn Woodward) and Anthony Perkins vanished into their parts too. Yeah -- the movie was that good!!! Like most period pieces, however, the viewer must be able to recreate the mood of the times. The scary part of the movie is that I knew someone personally who could have been the model for every one of the characters...

Perhaps because the drama is so overwrought, Newman's acute underplaying is effective… Rheinhardt is his most thorough cynic: a failure at marriage and as a musician, he's become a wandering, alcoholic opportunist, so spineless and corrupt he thinks nothing of taking a job as announcer for WUSA… At last—a Newman character who's abandoned all ideals, ambitions and principles, who concentrates exclusively on surviving at all costs… He's even worse than "Hud," because he realizes his corruption but persists… In fact, he uses his self-knowledge to pretend superiority—to laugh secretly at the Neo-Fascists, while working for them… He acts cynically and viciously toward liberal Do-Gooders because presumably he "knows the score," although he really envies their idealism; and he rises above it all to a liquor-soaked detachment… His only ability is the put-on—once the essence of Harper's charm, now exposed as the weapon of a destructive mind… Rheinhardt's first appearance—he drifts into New Orleans, unshaven, tired, defeated, broke—is like Fast Eddie's after his loss to Fats… Like Eddie, he picks up a despairing, fallen woman, Geraldine (Joanne Woodward), a former hooker who, like Sarah, is physically and emotionally scarred… As always, Woodward flawlessly portrays the fragile, easily hurt woman who is wary of Newman, but who ends up giving him more affection than he can return… They have some tender scenes, but with her, as with everyone else, he's most1y indifferent and uninvolved…"WUSA" suffers from conversations that sound like speeches, heavy-handed direction, and a paradoxical reluctance really to meet the issues head-on

I know this film bombed and has some platitudes that are unbelievable script-wise, but I can't believe the ratings people give this. I've been searching for this film for years (having seen in 1970) and it's haunted me. Newman, Woodward, and T. Perkins are awesome with an interesting character by Cloris Leachman. I love the script that has some holes, but 1970 was the perfect year for this type of story.No matter what your political stance is OR was, this has something for everyone. Throw in Pat Hingle and Laurence Harvey as a preacher, it's Americana at it's most corrupt in a turbulent time (that I almost miss). If you can find this somewhere, give it a shot. An 8 out of 10. Best performance = Anthony Perkins.