Some thoughts on watching "All the President's Men" for the sixteenth time

Too bad there's no Oscar for Casting ...
... because Alan Shayne would have won it, hands-down. This is maybe the finest ensemble cast ever assembled for a major movie (and yes, I'm counting Robert Altman's oeuvre). Every single role, no matter how brief, is cast with absolutely the right actor. Aside from the principals (Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford—in what is arguably his best performance—Jack Warden, Martin Balsam, Hal Holbrook—chillingly serpentine as "Deep Throat"—Jason Robards—a perfect Ben Bradlee—and Jane Alexander) the movie offers a panoply of richly detailed character work from the likes of Meredith Baxter, Ned Beatty, Stephen Collins, Penny Fuller, John McMartin, Robert Walden, Lindsay Crouse, Polly Holliday, Allyn Ann McLerie, Neva Patterson ... and on and on and on.

The movie also provides an increasingly important pair of messages for the present era: 1) The utter necessity of a free press, unfettered by threats of jail-time for the current sin of refusing to reveal one's sources; and 2) The importance to a investigative journalism of appallingly tedious leg-work and the application of craft-something the would-be heirs of Woodward and Bernstein ought to take to heart instead of printing rumors as fact, and grabbing headlines without engaging in the soul-numbing practice of painstaking research. They've become so enamoured of what Woodstein achieved that they've lost sight of how it was done, and why it held up so magnificently.