Mike Wallace is Here (2019)

Mike Wallace is Here, the new documentary film about legendary newsman Mike Wallace begins with its star interviewing Fox New personality Bill O'Reilly for a 60 Minutes profile piece during the George W. Bush years. At one point O'Reilly, a prickly interview subject tells Wallace that he can blame himself for O'Reilly's success, claiming that he modeled himself after the news icon. The look on Mike Wallace's face is kind of fantastic, there is a mixture of things going on their, surprise, some incredulity, he is not liking what he's just heard, and a little bit of critical self reflection. Wallace himself was a complicated man with a long and varied, and sometimes counterintuitive career.

A Jew from Massachusetts Wallace describes himself as a very self conscious child who didn't think much of his own appearance. He gravitated to radio but by virtue of right place right time ended up in television where he did all sorts of things, game show host, company pitch man, even star of a short lived early television series called Stand by for Crime, which lasted about seven and a half months. He got into journalism by way of interviewing, in the mid 50's he was given a late night interview program broadcast only in the New York area called Night Beat. In order to mix things up from the standard soft ball interview programs of the time Wallace decided to have all his guests thoroughly researched and ask them tough questions. Despite, or perhaps because of the confrontational style, guests came, the program was a success and eventually went national on ABC as The Mike Wallace Interview. That program was canceled do to suites from unhappy guests and Wallace eventually ended up on CBS, first on their morning show and later as a correspondent.

As a correspondent Wallace followed the Nixon Campaign in 67 and 68, he got to know Nixon and various members of the inner circle pretty well and there was enough mutual like there that Nixon invited Wallace to join the campaign as official spokesman. The offer was tempting, but then Wallace's long time producer Don Hewitt came to him with an offer to do the kind of hard hitting interviews he missed doing, he was putting together a new concept, a television "news magazine" he was going to call 60 Minutes.

Of course from there the rest is history. 60 Minutes was a surprise success and today after more then 50 years on the air it is still, remarkably, one of televisions highest rated network programs. Wallace had a long, career defining stint with the program, not retiring until he hit the 40 year mark in 2008. Wallace would die 4 years later.

The film focuses of course on Wallace's journalistic career, the interviews and the investigative reporting for which he became best known. Some of the stories are remarkable. Of particular note is a 1979 interview with Iran's new leader the Ayatollah Khomeini, in which the theocratic leader calls for the overthrow of the more secular Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated by religious radicals two years later. There was the libel suit by General William Westmorland, who had once been commander of U.S. forces in the Vietnam War, Westmorland would eventually drop the suite. There was the interview with tobacco company whistle blower Jeffrey Wigand in the mid 90's, an interview that CBS first sought to suppress, but which Wallace fought for and was eventually aired, it is the basis for the theatrical film The Insider staring Russell Crowe and in which Wallace is played by Christopher Plummer, casting which he took as a great compliment.

Less explored, though not entirely neglected is Wallace's personal life, he was a very private man, a self confessed bad husband (he was married 4 times) and absentee father. Plumed in most detail is Wallace's reaction to the death of his eldest son in Greece in 1962, Wallace had gone searching for the young man and was the one who ultimately found the body. Wither this death was accident or suicide is hard to say from what little information is provided in the film, but it would haunt Wallace. So too would depression, which onset a couple of decades into his 60 Minutes career and which he generally sought to hide, at least at first, finally facing up to a failed suicide attempt in an interview with his colleague Morley Safer.

This film is composed entirely of period footage, no present day talking head putting things into perspective, though the film is still in fact composed principally of talking heads because its mainly old interviews. It is a collage, and a supremely effective one, a portrait of a news man through the news, it's Mike Wallace presented the way he was meant to be seen. ***1/2