Quiz Show *** (1994, Ralph Fiennes, John Turturro, Paul Scofield, Rob Morrow) – Classic Movie Review 2254

Director Robert Redford conscientiously probes the circumstances, characters and issues surrounding the scandal attached to American TV’s rigging of the then famous 1950s quiz show Twenty One. It was so popular that fifty million people watched it. It is an interesting subject, and good performances, an air of quality and some thoughtful ideas in the script make for a painstaking, intelligent film. But it does go on and on, running to an unnecessary 133 minutes.

Ralph Fiennes is the posh contestant, who replaces an angry, vengeful John Turturro as reigning champion on the quiz, becomes popular with the viewers then has to be helped out with the right answers. As Fiennes’s scathing father, Paul Scofield is fantastic, a marvel of authority, able to give anyone an acting lesson, though Turturro is great too in the movie’s other standout performance.

Rob Morrow also stars as the idealistic young lawyer Dick Goodwin who is working for a Congressional subcommittee in the late 1950s and discovers that TV quiz shows are being fixed. His investigation focuses on two contestants on Twenty One: Turturro’s Herbert Stempel, a brash working-class Jewish man from Queens, and Fiennes’s Charles Van Doren, the patrician son of one of America’s leading literary families.

Paul Attanasio’s intelligent screenplay is based on the Book: Richard N Goodwin, but this is an uncomfortable case of the movies taking pleasure in bashing their TV colleagues that they so obviously look down on.

Also in the cast are David Paymer, Hank Azaria, Christopher McDonald, Johann Carlo, Elizabeth Wilson, Allan Rich, Mira Sorvino, George Marton, Paul Guilfoyle, Griffin Dunne, Michael Mantell, Byron Jennings, Timothy Busfield, Jack Gilpin, Bruce Altman, Martin Scorsese and Matt Keeslar.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2254

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