Mike Wallace Is Here
“You really are a son of a bitch,” Barbra Streisand says. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini probably said the same thing, but it wasn’t translated.
The documentary “Mike Wallace Is Here” is a blast from the past for news junkies, history buffs, celebrity watchers and fans of the late “60 Minutes” correspondent, who defined the CBS newsmagazine with his tough interviews and exposés that never let his subjects off the hook.
Director Avi Belkin’s film comprises archival footage, some never before seen. He had access to the raw tapes at “60 Minutes,” which meant he could show Wallace and his interview subject at the same time with a split screen. We see the reactions we could only partially see on TV.
And although there are stars and important historical figures aplenty — from Johnny Carson and Bette Davis to President Richard Nixon and Vladimir Putin — Belkin keeps the narrative on Wallace himself.
He doesn’t just document Wallace’s career from ad pitchman, radio voice and latenight host (on “Night Beat,” a talk show that prefigured “60 Minutes” by a decade) to network star. He attempts to paint a psychological portrait of Wallace: how the death of a son in a climbing accident led to his desire to become a serious newsman; his devotion to work that wrecked several marriages (he relates when Larry King says, “If I got two notes that said ‘Your wife called: Urgent’ and ‘CNN called: Urgent,’ I would call CNN”); and the yearslong depression that led to a suicide attempt.
However, Belkin almost blows his own film with one of the worst, most illadvised music scores ever. It’s not that John Piscitello’s score is bad — it’s fine musically — but it’s completely inappropriate and intrusive. It’s more suited to a thriller than a documentary about a globetrotting newsman, and sometimes the music is mixed so high it drowns out words.
In fact, “Mike Wallace Is Here” really didn’t need any music at all. I don’t need to hear throbbing electronic music over archival footage of Walter Cronkite delivering a news report, or Wallace interviewing Rod Serling on “Night Beat.”
And sometimes Belkin’s editing is frustrating, such as when, on “Night Beat,” Wallace asks Eleanor Roosevelt why her husband was hated by half the country, and she pauses to think about her response — then Belkin cuts away. I’d have liked to have heard her answer.
But none of this is a deal breaker considering the irresistible parade of figures from history: Martin Luther King Jr., Salvador Dali, Frank Lloyd Wright, Arthur Miller, Anwar Sadat, an ’80s Oprah Winfrey, Malcolm X, Donald Trump, the gangster Mickey Cohen (question: “How many men have you killed?” Answer: “No one who didn’t deserve it”), Barbara Walters and all the CBS heavy hitters, from Edward R. Murrow to “60 Minutes” producer Don Hewitt.
And Belkin does manage to construct a good psychological portrait of Wallace, who died in 2012 at age 93. Especially good is the section about Gen. William Westmoreland, the commander of American forces during the Vietnam War, and his $120 million libel suit against CBS after Wallace interviewed him as part of a special 1982 documentary called “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception,” which alleged that Westmoreland intentionally underreported enemy troop strength to keep up American troop morale and domestic support for the war.
The lawsuit had huge implication for the media — had Westmoreland won, tough investigative journalism would have suffered because of the risk of expensive lawsuits. And it brought Wallace’s depression to the forefront. Westmoreland eventually dropped the lawsuit.
In the end, “Mike Wallace Is Here” isn’t just about one journalist, but a different cultural landscape, before a mass of cable network screamers and talking heads, checkbook journalism, social media and viral videos.
Not that it was necessarily a better time. As Wallace in the late 1960s notes the Vietnam War and the assassinations of the Kennedys, Malcolm X and King, he asks, “What kind of country are we?”