Good Night, and, Good Luck.

GOOD NIGHT, AND, GOOD LUCK Directed by George Clooney (Warner Independent Pictures, 2005)

Hollywood did some of its best work responding to McCarthyism and the Red Scare, with Fred Zinnemann's High Noon and Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront offering two opposing views of America's struggle against communism. George Clooney's taut new drama about Edward R. Murrow's confrontation with Sen. Joseph McCarthy is a welcome addition to this collection of cinematic civic lessons.

Unlike Brando and Cooper, however, the hero in Clooney's film doesn't carry a meat hook or a badge. Instead, David Strathairn, known for his understated portrayals of quiet, cautious men, plays the dean of early television broadcasting as a man armed only with his convictions, intellect, and a healthy respect for the truth, reminding us that real courage often wears a jacket and tie and has to please a boss worried about the bottom line.

Strathairn's Murrow is a man willing to make compromises, signing loyalty oaths and interviewing Liberace and Mickey Rooney, but also enough of an idealist to inspire his colleagues and to believe his industry and nation are capable of more than Milton Berle or Joe McCarthy.

Robert Elswit's black-and-white photography slips us back into the golden age of television, but Clooney means to use Murrow to teach lessons for our own time. The similarities between an era when rabid anticommunism threatened to undermine the very liberties and freedoms Americans feared the Soviets would deprive us of and our current willingness to surrender these same liberties in the war on terror are obvious.

Strathairn's Murrow warns both his contemporaries and Clooney's modern audience that the real dangers to America come from within, not from without. In a time when American journalists have been all too embedded in the war effort, it is refreshing to remember when a free press asked hard questions of those entrusted with the protection of our freedoms.