Winchell

Being a child of television. The legacy of Walter Winchell to me previously consisted of bits and pieces. ITEMS as it may.

This recent in a series of HBO bio-pics gives loving attention to Winchell, the man, his inventiveness, dedication and ultimately, his power. It seems complete enough in the spectrum with which we view the man. There is suggestion that his influence may have rivaled FDR himself, and he shows William Randolph Hearst to be no match mano-a-mano.

Paul Mazursky is perfectly suited to direct this and gives us everything we need on the screen. Stanley Tucci earns a well-deserved Golden Globe in the title role. Paul Giamatti is superb as Winchell's ghost, Klurfeld (who's book sourced this film), only Glenne Headley, who's work tends to be spotty at times, seems a bit overmatched as WINCHELL's southern-fried moll, Dallas.

I left with renewed respect, for the man.

The pickings at the Video store have for me been slim. Slimmer in fact than the theatres. I did however rent WINCHELL an HBO movie starring Stanley Tucci in his Emmy Award winning performance as Walter Winchell the famous newspaper columnist and radio commentator of the 30's through the 60's. I did not know much more than that about WW, but after seeing this film I learned a great deal. HBO's attention to historical detail in costumes and art direction are superb. Stanley Tucci proves once again that he can't do a bad performance. Paul Giamatti as his head press agent is marvelous. This is an excellent rent.

This is a good biopic of Walter Winchell, a popular and controversial figure in American journalistic history. The movie shows how Winchell, a vaudeville entertainer, managed to pass himself off as a journalist and became, for a time, the most famous and influential gossip monger in the United States. That he jumbled up the English language and, according to the movie, had an abrasive personality did not seem to impede his career. Also, that ethical standards seemed to mean nothing to him, and that he was willing to use information to hurt people did not seem to bother him until he became a news story. What Winchell lacked in charm he made up for in sheer brazenness. He was engaging and could be your friend, but only if he could use you, and he was prone to smearing people he did not like. The movie shows how Winchell's career took a hit after the Josephine Baker incident. Yet, the movie also shows how Winchell used the microphone to attack Adolf Hitler and to warn the American people about Nazism. For that Winchell deserved credit. This movie provides an excellent dramatization of the rise and fall of media giant and of the need for the media to report the news in a responsible matter. Stanley Tucci is excellent as Walter Winchell.

I had never heard of Walter Winchell before Paul Mazursky's movie came out. I was pretty impressed by his movie. We see Winchell's beginnings and rise to mild gossip (where he started ratting on philandering politicians) until he became a major part of the political discourse. But there came a major split. While Winchell befriended Franklin Roosevelt and tried to make the Nazis' actions known to Americans - and went so far as to oppose the bombing of Hiroshima because Harry Truman "didn't do it right" - after WWII he sided with Joe McCarthy and started red-baiting people. When a former girlfriend got blacklisted, he didn't come to her aid. I'm not surprised that few people attended his funeral.

Stanley Tucci does a really neat job bringing Winchell to life. You gotta love how he reports on the issues of the day, even if it was sort of a forerunner to infotainment. Christopher Plummer looks almost exactly like FDR, and Paul Giamatti makes Winchell's promoter Herman Klurfeld really something. Also starring is Glenne Headly as the former girlfriend.

Overall, I recommend "Winchell". It shows that Paul Mazursky is in fact a capable director, even if a few of his movies haven't been masterpieces.

"Winchell", a Tucci tour-de-force and docudrama, tells a somewhat biased story of Walter Winchell, renown gossip columnist of the 30's and 40's who rose to considerable influence and fame in the early days of radio as the most listened to reporter in America only to die in obscurity in 1972. An okay biography, this journeyman HBO flick does a good job of hitting the high points of Winchell's life but will have little value to those with no particular interest in the period or the man as he simply wasn't, by cinematic standards, that interesting.