WITH the possible exception of the scene in which Jack Nicholson's character is told "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown" - at the close of a film about murder, incest, greed, and political corruption, none of which has anything to do with Los Angeles's Chinese community, the innocent backdrop of the denouement - my all-time favourite film ending has to be that of All The President's Men, writes Frank McNally
It too involves a brilliant piece of counterpoint. The camera lingers not on the triumph of Woodward and Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who humbled the White House. Instead it shows Richard Nixon in his glory, still untouched by the embryonic Watergate scandal, and being sworn in for a second term as President, with a 21-gun-salute and a band playing Hail to the Chief.
The pictures are showing live on a television set in the Post newsroom, a contrastingly prosaic backdrop. Nobody is watching the TV. Instead, reporters and sub-editors are calmly battering away at typewriters, as the mostly-humdrum work of turning out another day's newspaper continues.
Among them we see Robert Redford's Woodward, tapping with two fingers, and Dustin Hoffman's Bernstein, one of those eccentric reporters who can type properly - both engaged in the dogged, unglamorous slog of an investigation that will expose Nixon eventually.
But it's the previous scene that gives the low-key ending its power and that (I hope) excuses my indulgence in so admiring a movie in which reporters are heroes. Because even if the film is a hymn to journalism, it is also a master class in another discipline - screen-writing - courtesy of one the great exponents, Hollywood's William Goldman.
In his riveting memoir, Adventures in the Screen-Trade, Goldman describes the many problems he faced turning the two reporters' absorbing but dense book on the Watergate events into cinema. The story had more names than a telephone directory. There was no real action. And any attempts to dramatise the plot at the expense of authenticity risked having the film slaughtered by the very profession it glorified.
Above all, everybody knew how the story ended: the good guys won. This was not a recipe for a gripping night at the movies. So after wrestling for weeks with the material, Goldman had a counter-intuitive idea: "Throw away the second half of the book."
Woodward and Bernstein had made one big mistake in their investigation - prematurely naming White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman as part of the cover-up. Haldeman was guilty, all right. But the source who had seemed to finger him disowned the story, and a relieved White House counter-attacked, blasting the Washington Post for its liberal conspiracy to undermine the American way of life.
It was not a fatal mistake, but it did slow the reporters' pursuit. And Goldman made this, their greatest failure, the film's climax.
With the newspaper in the dock and themselves facing replacement on the story by the heavyweight political correspondents who now covet it, our heroes go for broke. Woodward angrily confronts his White House insider, Deep Throat, who finally tells him everything ("Get out your notebook - there's more. Your lives are in danger. . ." ).
Then they take the ultimate risk: visiting their editor (Ben Bradlee, played to a tee by Jason Robards) at home, at night, to explain that while they screwed up, they didn't really. And thus, in the penultimate scene of a film about journalism's finest hour, the reporters are given a dressing-down, like naughty schoolboys, on the editor's front lawn.
"You know the results of the latest Gallup Poll?" Bradlee snorts. "Half the country never even heard of the word Watergate. Nobody gives a shit. You guys are probably pretty tired, right? Well, you should be. Go on home, get a nice hot bath. Rest up. . .15 minutes. Then get your asses back in gear. We're under a lot of pressure, you know, and you put us there. Nothing's riding on this except the first amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country. Not that any of that matters, but if you guys fuck up again, I'm going to get mad. Goodnight."
Goldman's idea was to "let the audience supply [the reporters'] eventual triumph". But he does give the audience a big prompt. And in fairness to the Woodward-Bernstein book, the second half is rehabilitated, in very condensed form, to provide the film with its knock-out flurry of punches, as dramatic in an understated way as the ones Muhammad Ali threw when he came off the ropes to floor George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle.
The pictures of the TV monitor and the Post newsroom fade, to be replaced by an almost abstract scene: a typewriter in close-up beating out headlines on a page in small print. We can still hear the guns in Washington saluting Nixon, but they gradually give way to the rat-tat-tat of the type-writer keys, punching holes in his story and sounding a bit like the drum-roll at a guillotine.
The film cheats a little even here. Although the selected headlines appear like a chronology, they skip forward to 1975 to record the indictment of Haldeman (the Mounties get their man!). Then back, finally, to the two headlines that can still make a news journalist's spine tingle. Rat-tat-tat: "6 August 1974. Tapes show Nixon approved cover-up. President says he won't resign." Rat-tat-tat: "9 August 1974. Nixon resigns. Gerald Ford to become 36th President at noon today." At that, the screen goes black. The credits roll slowly. And the rest, as Hamlet said, is silence.