One Sentence Movie Reviews: “Quiz Show”
Quiz Show (1994): “A small disappointment can be indicative of a sad moral decline.”
Notes: A re-viewing, Tivoed at home. When I first saw it in the theatres, I found it a bit formal and cold, too dependent on Federal Investigation Hearings (FIH’S), which may be the most exhausted staged scene in film history (senator looks imperious at witness over glasses, witness stutters but then declares great truth while leaning forward). But this time around, I remembered this review from Roger Ebert.
The 1950s have been packaged as a time of Eisenhower and Elvis, Chevy Bel-Airs and blue jeans, crew cuts and drive-ins. “Quiz Show” remembers it was also a decade when intellectuals were respected, when a man could be famous because he was a poet and a teacher, when TV audiences actually watched shows on which experts answered questions about Shakespeare and Dickens, science and history. All of that is gone now.
This is a such a sad movie, about the loss of innocence and civility but worse about disapppointment in ourselves. It doesn’t argue things were better then, which would have been the easy route. It instead submits that, as a country, we once believed in certain noble things, even for the wrong reasons of class and gentle bigotry, but we gave them up, not just because of the temptation of money but by asking less of our fellow citizens. However much we complain about declining standards, says Quiz Show, we each brought it upon ourselves. I applaud its courage in saying so.
