Name of actor: Peter Finch
Name of film: Network
Director: Sidney Lumet
Year: 1976
Poster
Why this actor:
Sidney Lumet's 70's film Network, features Peter Finch's star turn as an unhinged Howard Beale. His roaring performance has now become part of pop culture. Finch's performance is all fire and worthy of the description 'powerhouse'. It's a wonderfully mental performance – and as an acting role, perfect for Lumet's film.
The film was written and released during the Watergate crisis, when Nixon resigned from the presidency and Gerald Ford succeeded him.
It is a satire on the dehumanisation of American life - heightened by the cheap commercialisation of television news. The movie centres on the once celebrated network anchor, Beale being fired and announcing that, as a protest, he’ll commit suicide on television the following week. But he doesn't. He rants instead. Beale’s increasingly wild performances on air make him a hero, a spokesman for latent American rage, then some sort of prophet, encouraging everyone to shout out from their windows at a set time - “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.”
Each time Finch is on air, his rantings get worse, or better - he targets everything about the hypocrisy at the base of the good old American way. - as he gains more popularity, his bosses and programmers realise he is pulling in too many viewers to keep off air, and exploit his mental decline.
The main characters are the dubious, executive, Robert Duvall, network supremo Ned Beatty and an ambitious, exploitative programmer, Faye Dunaway - all played, perhaps with the exception of Dunaway, really as caricatures to serve Finch.
Some critics thought Network was a cheap film for this reason and dismissed Network - yet it endures as an outspoken work that brought Oscars to Dunaway and a posthumous best actor Oscar for Finch, who really puts his all and more into this performance but died before the film's release. It was a commercial success, yet that year’s best film Oscar went to crowd-pleaser, Rocky, not to, All the President’s Men, Taxi Driver or Network.
Network did receive acclaim - there was particular praise for all the performances and of course for Finch. It was was nominated for ten Oscars at the 49th Academy Awards.
In 2000, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant"
In 2002, it was inducted into the Producers Guild of America Hall of Fame as a film that has "set an enduring standard for American entertainment". In 2005, the two Writers Guilds of America voted the script one of the 10 greatest screenplays in the history of cinema. In 2007, the film was 64th among the 100 greatest American films as chosen by the American Film Institute, a ranking slightly higher than the one AFI had given it ten years earlier.
Peter Finch (28 September 1916 – 14 January 1977) was an English-born Australian.
He was the first person to win a posthumous Oscar in an acting category. As of 2021 - the only other person to have done the same was fellow Australian, Heath Ledger for his role as the Joker in Batman.
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