CATCH A CLASSIC
Journalists in Danger
TCM, beginning at 7 p.m.
Tonight’s triple feature of films chronicles journalists who brave war zones to bring back the story. First up, Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (pictured) (1982) follows the relationships among an Australian journalist (Mel Gibson), a British embassy officer (Sigourney Weaver) and the journalist’s Chinese/Australian local photographer contact (Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner Linda Hunt) amid the
backdrop of an attempted 1965 coup in Indonesia. Next, in Under Fire (1983), Nick Nolte, Gene Hackman and Joanna Cassidy star as journalists involved in political intrigue and a romantic triangle during the last days of the corrupt Somozoa regime in Nicaragua before it falls to a popular revolution in 1979. Finally, the harrowing, Best Picture Oscar-nominated 1984 drama The Killing Fields, about Cambodia’s brutal Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s, is based on the actual experiences of Cambodian journalist Dith Pran (Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner Haing S. Ngor) and American journalist Sydney Schanberg (Best Actor Oscar nominee Sam Waterston).