Winchell

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.

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.

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.

"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.

This HBO presentation was a somber and bittersweet depiction of famous columnist, Walter Winchell. Director, Pat Mazursky, illustrates this biography through the eyes of Walter Winchell's key assistant. This assistant viewed Winchell as someone for whom he garnered an ardent admiration! My association with Walter Winchell was that he use to narrate episodes of "The Untouchables". In the zenith of Winchell's career, he was an uncompromising columnist who exemplified the phrase; "The power of the pen is mightier than the sword". Anybody who was anybody in Hollywood during the late thirties through the early fifties, was interviewed and featured in Walter Winchell's column! Winchell's quip about how "Hollywood has to be seen to be disbelieved" was a witty one liner which described Hollywood to be a tenuous hotbed of raw capitalism! Walter Winchell engaged in many commentaries which ultimately gave him a political prowess during World War II !! He was always greeted as a recognizably formidable foe by prominent paragons at the pinnacle of national power; This included moguls and dignitaries such as William Randolph Hearst and President Franklin Deleno Roosevelt. Walter Winchell possessed many qualities which made him successful.. The fact that he went after the truth, and eventually acquired a cunning and creative stranglehold on the American News media, is something which can be attributed to Winchell's basically egotistical nature. Winchell's callous determination made him vicariously ruthless just by virtue of adhering to some simple journalistic procedures!! While this hacked out, made for TV movie, by HBO, cannot really be considered one of the best efforts of movie making, it definitely served a useful purpose!! What I conceptualized with "Winchell" was that he was driven to make a difference in the American News media world!! Making a difference in the American news media subsequently translated to Winchell evoking a radically different perspective on many of the sordid events which were pertinent to a myriad of individuals in the entire world altogether. This movie gave you an effectively brief synopsis of the type of life Walter Winchell engaged in, as well as the life he wound up with! So!! What was the scoop on his personal life? He died a lonely widower, his son committed suicide, and his mentally disturbed daughter was the only one who attended his funeral!! Such a grim scenario suggests that Winchell's national prominence concurrently manufactured a personal life of domestic alienation! The fact that nobody attended his funeral is painstakingly ironic for Winchell, as a newspaper columnist perceives that the most heinous emotion by which to be afflicted is the emotion of being deluged with disinterest!! The knifing acrimony to Winchell's deteriorating fame manifested itself most convincingly when people talked about him in past tense!! When his assistant heard of his passing away in 1972, Winchell's obituary served as a platitude consisting of mere mention of the bygone era in which Walter Winchell was a news media legend! Time erosion relegated Walter Winchell to a sinister anonymity!! The utterly insidious monster of death reduces even the most famous people to faint memories. Walter Winchell's tumultuous life epitomized his philosophy which was expressed very succinctly with his famous quote of "America,love it or leave it". I enjoyed this HBO production, and, I definitely feel that Walter Winchell is, without question, a noteworthy element of historical importance in America!! See this movie if you can!!