#77 ‘All the President’s Men’

Typewriters, Truth, and the Sexiest Thing Two White Men Ever Did Was Believe Women

All the President’s Men (1976) is journalism’s wet dream—a tense, methodical descent into America’s political rot, carried out by two impossibly earnest reporters in crisp shirts and serious expressions. It’s a film with no explosions, no car chases, no romance, and not a single wasted breath. Just dogged research, whispered phone calls, and the radical 1970s idea that facts might still matter. Also: the entire U.S. government falling apart because someone broke into an office with a roll of duct tape.

Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman play Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who unraveled the Watergate scandal one phone call at a time. They’re opposites—Redford’s Woodward is the clean-cut all-American golden boy, while Hoffman’s Bernstein is the chain-smoking, streetwise scruffball. They finish each other’s sentences. They drink each other’s coffee. They might be the most romantic onscreen pairing of the decade, if your idea of intimacy involves cross-referencing campaign donations and passive-aggressive editorial meetings.

Director Alan J. Pakula shoots the newsroom like a secular cathedral: all fluorescence and silence, the holy hum of typewriters replacing a score. Gordon Willis’s cinematography—the so-called “Prince of Darkness”—makes every parking garage meeting look like a noir séance. And Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee growls through the smoke like a man who’s one misquote away from divine retribution.

But let’s talk about what really happens here: two white men get famous for listening. They knock on doors. They take notes. And—brace yourself—they believe the women. The whole thing cracks open because a bookkeeper hints at financial irregularities. Because secretaries don’t hang up. Because wives talk when their husbands won’t. The patriarchy failed to protect its secrets, and the fourth estate showed up with a notepad and a deadline.

That said, the women themselves? Ghosts. Anonymous. Side characters in their own betrayals. They’re sources, not subjects—valuable only as long as they provide access. Once the quotes are typed, they disappear. The film doesn’t linger on their risk, their fear, or the fact that whistleblowing as a woman in 1972 could cost you everything. This is their story too, but you’d never know it by the end credits.

Still, All the President’s Men remains a high watermark for films about power, process, and the slow grind of truth through bureaucracy. It doesn’t glamorize journalism—it ritualizes it. The breakthroughs are small. The tension builds from silence. And the final scene—just a teletype machine hammering away as Nixon is re-elected—lands like a gut punch. Victory is coming, but it hasn’t arrived yet. That’s real suspense.

4 out of 5 rotary phones
(One for Redford’s jawline of integrity. One for Hoffman’s twitchy brilliance. One for the way the film makes typing look like an act of rebellion. One for the rare depiction of journalism as sacred labor. The missing star? Reserved for every unnamed woman whose voice cracked the case but never made the byline.)