WUSA

WUSA (1970)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Heavy-handled political drama about a radio host (Paul Newman) who gets a job in New Orleans and quickly starts a relationship up with a former prostitute (Joanne Woodward). It doesn't take long for the host to realize that his radio station has some right-wing views and are using him to spread some not so innocent things. All the time one man (Anthony Perkins) has been collection survey data on welfare but it turns out he too was just being used to try and get people kicked off the system. WUSA has some terrific performances in it but the film is so over-the-top and melodramatic that you can't help but finally give up on it and especially once we hit the final twenty-minutes when everything pretty much gets thrown out the window. There's no question that the filmmakers and producer Newman wanted to get their message across and there are many ways to do this without having to be so heavy and dramatic. I won't ruin what happens in the final twenty-minutes but it's a real shame that the film spent so long building up the characters and only to have what happens bring them down so low. I think the biggest problem with the screenplay is that we've basically got three different movies rolled into one and each story is pulling in a separate direction. You have a romance between Newman and Woodward. You have Perkins realizing that someone bad is trying to hurt the poor. You then have these two connected to the third story dealing with the radio station and its owner (Pat Hingle). The problem is that all three stories are just way too far over-the-top that you can never really believe anything you're seeing and especially all the political stuff. Instead of telling a realistic story, it seems as everyone felt no one would understand what they were trying to say so they just went as far as they could to make that point. It really wasn't needed. The one strong point are the terrific performances led by Newman playing one of the darkest and meanest characters in his career. I really thought the actor did a tremendous job in the part, which is unsympathetic and at times rather hateful. Just check out the scene where Newman is ripping into Perkins on his "good" heart and it's certainly a side of Newman that we didn't get to see him play too much. Woodward also turns in a marvelous performance as she's pretty much the heart of the picture. I thought she was extremely effective as the down-on-her-luck prostitute early on but she also handles the more dramatic stuff later in the pic. Perkins too is very good in his part as is Hingle, Laurence Harvey, Bruce Cabot and Cloris Leachman. Shockingly, I think the best portion of the film is the romance between Newman and Woodward. The two obviously have great chemistry and I thought the scenes with them just sitting around drinking and talking were the best and most memorable in the film. Its said that originally this 115-minute movie clocked in over three hours and I can't help but think what hit the editing room floor. WUSA is well made and well acted but sadly it just tries way too hard to get its message across.

Whilst I would make it clear that I enjoyed much of this film, I would make it equally clear that I found a fair amount of it ill-developed and tediously clunky.

It is a ripe political melodrama, clearly borne out of passions and disappointments which arose from the particular year of 1968 and lingered long into the 1970s. I don't think I could make much argument with the previous commentator's view that the film is made from a certain left-liberal point of view. But a moderate left-liberal stance, and tacitly so. Despite saying that, Anthony Perkins' character - an embodiment in many ways of the "liberal" stereotype - is not made particularly sympathetic. Well-meaning, obsessive, anguished and humourless, I would agree with the Time Out reviewer that it was astute - if unimaginative - casting. Perkins comes across as if his Norman Bates persona has been relocated to late-sixties urban America and forcibly invested with a political conscience.

Paul Newman, who shares perhaps too few scenes with his nemesis Perkins, is also rather good, as the wanderer with a certain cocksure touch, who easily becomes an on-air "communicator" for this WUSA radio station - which is involved in fraudulent dealings and far-right preachings. Newman is every inch the tabloid professional; he is able to claim that he has no agenda and is 'just doing a job'. His political views are ambiguous; his final speech indeed suggesting he has no real belief in the "new right". It difficult to precisely gauge what makes the character tick, besides an vague cynicism; he is as flawed and formidable as Perkins, but diametrically opposite, with his rejection of abstract morality: his behaviour set on a course of mere self-aid. He proves to be the adept survivor, in contrast to genuine ideologues of left or right, but he has no moderation instinct, and turns out somewhat troubled, baffled even, at the film's appropriately frazzled conclusion.

Then there is Joanne Woodward; first film I have seen her in, and one of I gather, many, with Newman. Her character is a trifle ineffectual, present, as if a chess piece, to engage the elusive Reinhardt's desires for a period, and to provide a more 'ordinary' site of audience identification, who does not have right or left-wing politics, and does have more endearing traits: at least compared with Reinhardt. Woodward is quite memorable, cutting a wilting, waning figure as this unfortunate woman, herself much as transitory as Newman at the film's beginning. If she convinces as a 'realistic' character, it is albeit as one implicitly used to condemn the excesses of the New Right and the confrontational politics of the time. Her sickly teariness near the close, and the fact of her being the only person in the riotous hall to listen to Newman's absurdest "we're o.k.!" irony, suggests an idealised 'ordinary person' wrapped up in harmful political events. This is all rather undignified and melodramatic to stand for one who is expected to take this overwrought stuff seriously, and merely serves to draw out some of Reinhardt's humanity for the ending.

Newman does invest Reinhardt with a portion of his customary charm, but this is largely and effectively shown to be a front. Woodward is taken in, like the general audience as it were, by this superficial charm, and she ends up broken both by Newman's inconsistent, careless attitude and by the rupturing of the society depicted.

The film does not go far enough with many of its themes, and I did expect rather more in the dramatic and comic departments - if melodrama is going to work it needs either grand force or a bathetic line in absurdity. The whole lacks humour: born of a self-consciously 'serious' grounding in the subjectivity of U.S. politics in the late-sixties era. On this point, note that Laurence Harvey is vastly under-used; and he of that deeply substantial and bizarre masterpiece of a political thriller, "The Manchurian Candidate"... And additionally, we never see enough of Newman's dealings and relationships with his Rightist colleagues - similarly to how we never see Perkins in the broader context of Left politics. Loose ends were certainly left untied as regards Perkins' character.

I did on the whole quite enjoy this, but it was not a particularly entertaining film: variable in its plotting, dialogue and tone. A case of potential untapped? Undoubtedly. But it is worth paying close attention to those central performances, and it is at least part of its era's Hollywood; markedly less 'safe' and conformist then than now.

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.

A lot of what was predicted in the film Network about the media was also put forth in this film about radio WUSA. Sad to say it was laid on a bit too thick by its players and director.

Paul Newman who had a lot of faith in this project plays an itinerant disc jockey who both gets a job at this New Orleans based radio station WUSA and takes up with hooker Joanne Woodward, a girl whose heart really isn't in her work anyway.

As station owner Pat Hingle says, "this is a station with a point of view" and Hingle expects that point to be emphasized at all times. At that time the Richard Nixon White House was big on telling us that they were looking toward the great 'silent majority' of Americans who took the 'my country right or wrong' dictum to the exponential height. That's WUSA's point of view.

Newman is not a terribly sympathetic figure here which is one of the reasons the film flattens out. He sees what's wrong, but just goes with the flow. A whole lot like the characters with one exception in that other Louisiana based political drama, All The King's Men.

One who doesn't is Anthony Perkins who plays this rather pitiable 'survey taker' whose job is really to foster racial discontent by getting minorities thrown off welfare. I imagine there were many a Perkins out there, but this one doesn't like being taken for a fool and he reacts most violently. Perkins is probably the character you most remember from WUSA.

WUSA correctly predicted the advent of right wing talk radio about fifteen years before it became a fact. Rush Limbaugh would have been right at home on Pat Hingle's station. They've even got a right wing political preacher played by Laurence Harvey as part of their family. Harvey's another interesting character, but he's also laid on a bit thick for my taste. He should have adapted a more subtle approach to the part.

I wish I could rate such a prescient film as WUSA a bit higher, but the heavy handed approach just gets in the way.

When I first saw this movie in 1971, it impressed me, and my friends, very much. I saw it at least 4 or 5 times. This is one of the most important films of the '70, a political fiction of its time... but in a revision a few days ago in VHS, a film that seems as new as before, very actual. Although I think that Rosenberg was not the most indicate director for this film (Frankenheimer seems to me a most appropriate election, due to his asphyxiating atmospheres), the strong of the story and the interpretation of an extraordinary Anthony Perkins, among the others actors, gives its force to the movie. It is a pity that there are no DVD edition (I suspect that the Spanish exhibition in its time was very censured...) for to see that film in good conditions. The people that doesn't know are missing a very notable film. I liked so much that in my blog I have written a long essay about the film, for the benefit of the young people that doesn't know it.