Reader Recommends: All the President's Men (1976)

Today I reached out into the Twitter-verse and asked for a quick recommendation. @2dreviews, who you might remember did some guest writing for us in the summer, replied in a matter of seconds that I should watch All the President's Men. Having never even heard of this film, and seeing that it starred Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, I knew this had to be a good one for me to watch. It wasn't until I started it up that I realized it was about how two reporters broke the Watergate case on Nixon! Wow, I sure didn't see that coming! Hit the jump to see if this was a tension filled thriller, or a total snooze-fest.


Bob Woodward (played by Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) are two reporters for the Washington Post. Bob's only been working at the paper for nine months, and he's so green they're on the verge of firing him. Right when he needs it most though, he starts to stumble upon some odd facts and people avoiding him and denying things they just said were true seconds before. After a few more calls he brings the story to the boss and they let him run with it. He teams up with Carl because he's a more experienced writer, which even he can see. Together they begin to unravel one of the biggest conspiracies ever uncovered in American history.

Carl and Bob work together to crack the biggest stories of their lives

While it doesn't seem at first like a journalistic story such as this might be entertaining, you have to remember these two guys were poking around in stuff that was being covered up by the Justice department, the FBI, and even the CIA. To say their lives weren't at risk is foolish. The tension in parts of this movie as they get closer and closer to the answer was nearly unbearable! Bob Woodward even has a covert deep cover source who can never be named that he meets in darkness who points him in the right direction. These scenes were among some of the most tense and it's in these scenes where the thriller aspect seems to really kick in!

I have to commend Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman on their acting as well. There were moments where I was utterly engrossed in the film and totally forgot they were just actors. I really felt like they were two reporters, one more rookie than the other, but both still a tad green, just scrambling to do their best and remain calm when insane facts are suddenly spit out of a witness' mouth. The way they do their interviews and their questioning, the way they spoke and their mannerisms, everything about them seemed natural to the characters they were meant to be portraying, and it totally sucked me in.

Bob Woodward meets his undercover contact under cover of darkness

The most amazing thing about this movie, is that as they uncover the conspiracy and it just keeps going deeper and deeper and higher up the chain of command, it starts seeming literally unbelievable. There was a point when I was thinking "this is absurd, this can't be right" and yet the fact remains that it is. This is the Watergate scandal that everybody has heard of. Now please keep in mind that, growing up in Canada, learning American history and things about it's Presidents is obviously only lightly touched on. I knew of Watergate, but anything I had loosely learned about it in grade school has long since faded. Basically I recognized the name and new it had something to do with money, but beyond that I was unsure. To finally learn about it in the depth this film goes into it, it was astounding! What was even more fun, was that I was basically learning about these facts at the exact same time as Bob and Carl learned them, and I was just in shock as they often were!

I would definitely recommend this movie to anyone who likes political thrillers or anything about history. I especially liked how they incorporated so much actual TV footage from the time, and you often see it playing on TVs in the office while Bob is furiously typing in the background. This is a great piece of film and it was a great watch! If you haven't seen it, give it a shot, I highly doubt you'll be disappointed.