This One Also Goes to Eleven and Might Even Go All The Way To China

I can't walk away from talking about films with journos that I love without mentioning THE CHINA SYNDROME. It's another one that fell off the list but still deserves a mention, I think, because it shows the evolution of the mistrust of government in the 1970s. And it kicks ass.

It's more than half a decade after ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN. No one is shocked any longer when there are accusations that a large company is trying to cover up some kind of evil deed. But adding the complication that women in the workplace were still fighting stereotypes (Jane Fonda plays a reporter who always gets assigned the "Fluffy the Cat" story) and so the accusations of Fonda's character were not immediately taken seriously ups the cultural ante in a pretty interesting way for me.

This is more a story about what we're willing to believe depending on who says it to us - and our own prejudices about that person - than it is about journalism or anything else. I must give mad props to Michael Douglas for producing it, James Brooks for directing it and Jack Lemmon and Jane Fonda for acting the crap out of it.

And, in case you're wondering, the writing - done by Mike Gray, T.S. Cook and Brooks - isn't bad either:

Jack Godell: What makes you think they're looking for a scapegoat?
Ted Spindler: Tradition.

This clip really only shows the opening credits of the movie and some great shots of SoCal roads in the late 1970s. I'm including it just as much for the time capsule it provides. I was astonished to see all those freeways with almost no one on them.