For anyone interested in another film on the McCarthy era, I would like to recommend "Hollywood on Trial:"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074635/

To really understand the momentousness of Murrow's attacks on McCarthy, we have to know two things: (1) as you mentioned, the mood of the times, with the anti-Communist fever that took perhaps its most dramatic form in McCarthy; and (2) Murrow's status as an impeccably objective journalist.

The latter is perhaps even more important than the former. We all learn in high school about the McCarthy era. Many people will be coming to this film, however, not knowing much about Murrow, if anything at all. There's an implication that his stand against McCarthy is a big deal for him personally, but we never get any context, we're never shown why it's so huge.

How could Clooney and crew have fixed this? I don't think it was fixable. It was inherent in the movie that he wanted to make that this wasn't going to take a standard narrative film. It was, in some sense, a no-win situation: either he gives us the history, which is boring and lengthens the film; or he doesn't and we proceed on assumptions. He chose, probably correctly, the latter as the lesser of two evils, but that doesn't mean it wasn't an evil.

By no means does this mean I didn't like or enjoy the movie. It's made my Top Ten for the year so far (though it'll be knocked out at some point, as I see some of the winter movies: Jarhead, the next Harry Potter, Syriana, Walk the Line), and it certainly was beautiful, even if the "smoky black and white" look felt a little contrived.

Also, I should note, I thought this review was excellent and, as 1 noted, as well-written as usual.

But considering how confined the movie's settings were it didn't achieve the kind of tension you got in movies like "Fail Safe" or "Twelve Angry Men." This isn't an entirely fair analogy, but those were two movies that jumped to mind...

Even with a large (and growing) body of evidence of the absolute horrors of Soviet terror and mass murder, the regime always seems to get a pass with the Hollywood cognoscenti, who seem either poorly informed, willfully ignorant, or both. But mostly I think it is just the effect of years of mythmaking and devotion to the tribal idols, which this film upholds with perfect fidelity.

If you want a clearer picture of what the Soviets were, how they operated, and the extent to which they did penetrate the United States at so many levels, don't bother with "Goodnight;" it's just another rehash of bad history, old scores, and horseshit. Instead, I'd recommend any number of important works over the past decade, starting with the Yale series on communism by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. Both men have made monumental strides in pulling back the veil on Soviet espionage and why it created a man like Joseph McCarthy. It will also help to understand the most inscrutable aspect of the Cold war: how so many otherwise thoughtful Americans could be so credulous as to the reality of the Soviet Union.

The whole back story that "Goodnight" drops is the Soviet Union itself. My problem with this film, and my problem with Mr. Clooney, is the same: neither seems inclined to address the fact that the fictitious "witches" of the film were actual Soviet spies, saboteurs, propagandists, party-members, and fellow travelers of all sorts. Hiss, by the way, was a Soviet spy, as were the Rosenbergs, you can believe the very slender thread of people who continue to uphold their innocence, but you may as well believe OJ was framed if you are so inclined. Laurence Duggan. Murrow's friend was a Soviet spy who killed himself after being caught; Murrow blamed the investigators for his death. And Annie Lee Moss was a communist; she lied about it and should never have been given any kind of security clearance.

As far as "blacklisting," the generations of Russian intellectuals (Mandelstam, Babel, Anna Ahkmatova, Pasternak, Alexei Tolstoi, Gorky, Bulgakov, and Prokofiev just to name a small handful) who were tortured, murdered or relentlessly hounded by the very entity that people like John Henry Lawson were defending, would have viewed the HUAC trials a little differently. Also, the "suffering" of Hellman, Hammett, Trumbo, Lawson, et al. was so slight as to almost risible, especially in contrast to the very real persecution of the Soviet intelligentsia. If anything, the "blacklist" gave their case cause celebre status among the leftist industry types who were to rise during the next generation—where it remains decked out in Hollywood tinsel. What a farce! While assholes and liars like Lardner and Hellman feigned injury, the whole of Eastern Europe was being force to swallow a boot heel, and while the "champions" of freedom among the American left were rallying to their new icons, the icons were completing a lifelong whitewash of the gulag archipelago. Of course, the real horror of the Soviet Union was known very early on, but with so many western leftists working so hard for the Comintern, it took decades longer than it should have for us to realize the danger.

The reason the Soviets were so successful, initially, in infiltrating the West (Britain and the US) was that there were a substantial number of well-educated, ivy-league traitors who had, by virtue of their position and background, wormed their way into the highest levels of American and English government; these were often the children of great wealth and privilege who went to first-rate schools and who went into various branches of politics and public service. They were also communists and were passing along sensitive secrets to the Soviets for decades. Meanwhile their friends were running cover for them in Washington, the media and in Hollywood.

If Czeslaw Milosz is right to be concerned about "the vulnerability of the twentieth-century mind to seduction by sociopolitical doctrines and its readiness to accept totalitarian terror for the sake of a hypothetical future," then why shouldn't we remain perplexed at the unwillingness of Hollywood to at least come to recognize that the people saying that it was OK to be a Communist or say laudable things about the Soviet Union were either nuts or vile or both. No one would be defending the fellow travelers anymore if they were Nazi apologists, so why should people whose guiding ideology (and I mean that in an ironic and pointedly Marxist sense) was so hostile to liberal democracy be treated as mere dissenters? If it is indeed true that McCarthy was reckless and irresponsible, and both Klehr and Haynes argue he was, then when will the movie be made showing that Whittaker Chambers and Elia Kazan were actually right, that the apologists for the Soviet gulag state were abetting mass murder as a political program.

Obviously, HUAC and McCarthy were not the same thing. McCarthy did not emerge until 1950, and in the Senate, but by that time Truman had largely taken care of the problem; McCarthy was grandstanding for partisan purposes, mainly. And Murrow wasn't ahead of the curve; he was actually rather a latecomer, even something of an opportunist, when it came to going after McCarthy. Plenty of good print journalists had been on him for years, and even the Republicans were trying to get away from him by the time he made McCarthy look bad (which he did not so much by grilling Joe as through mean editing, using the cutting room to make McCarthy appear to be nuts.