The Quiz Show featured in the movie is 50's quiz show 21 in which the winner is the first to 21 points. John Turturro plays Herbie Stempel the reigning champion on the show when the movie begins, but as the story unfolds, it is revealed that the Quiz Show bosses keep the favoured contestants on the show because it keeps ratings up, and they do this by giving them the answers to the questions.
When Herbie takes a dive and answers wrong as the bosses tell him to do he is replaced by Charles Van Doren the son of a well respected university lecturer. Soon after Van Doren is on the show and being very successful on it because he is also fed the answers an attorney with the federal government named Dick Goodwin begins to investigate the suspicious goings on, and the more this guy finds out, the more determined he is to put NBC on trial.
The movie is OK, but I ended up not really giving a flying flip what happened in the end and was glad when the movie finally finished. It is watchable but when it was over I felt that there was something wrong with the movie but I don't really know what it was, maybe it concentrated too much on ethics and in trying to give the audience a message. It needed something else to make it a great movie, maybe a different director would have brought that extra little somethng to it, I don't know. For example Mr. Martin Scorsese who appears in the film and plays one of the sponsors of the quiz show. |
