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Television is often thought of as an instant medium, especially when it comes to reporting on world events, be it the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the Apollo 11 moon landing, or, in more recent decades, 9/11. But even the most experienced people can get caught up short in a news event that they're not necessarily fully qualified to report on but find themselves in the middle of. This is what happened on September 5, 1972, when ABC Sports' coverage of the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany went suddenly into hard news mode at the moment gunfire was heard in the Olympic Village early that morning. Before long, ABC Sports president Roone Arledge and his broadcast team, including the legendary Jim McKay, found themselves broadcasting live for the first time ever an actual terrorist attack, namely the ultra-violent Black September terrorist splinter group of the Palestinian Liberation Organization holding eleven Israeli athletes hostage. The film SEPTEMBER 5 is a vivid dramatization, though done in a quasi-documentary style, or how ABC's coverage of this horror unfolded.

Peter Sarsgard portrays Arledge, who finds himself in the unenviable position of broadcasting the world's most important sporting event, the Games of the 20th Olympiad, and then being forced to improvise, along with his entire broadcast crew, in covering a story where two Israeli athletes have already been killed, nine other Israeli lives are being threatened, and nothing can be nailed down definitively. And they also must walk a fine line as they cover it, being careful to get the story out while at the same time not looking like they are giving the Black September militants too much of an opportunity to show off. Fighting off the limitations of the kind of satellite coverage available in the early 1970's. John Magaro and Ben Chaplin are, respectively, Arledge's two top assistants Geoffrey Mason and Marvin Bader; and with the help of a good German female translator (Leonie Benesch), they are able to interpret what the German officials are doing about a situation that, because of laws written into the German constitution following the Nazis' defeat in World War II, they are not exactly qualified to handle. Sarsgard and his staff, however, realize the bind they themselves are in when it is learned that every athletes' room in the Olympic Village has a television, and that the terrorists are watching everything going on just mere yards from the Israelis' apartment. There's a whole air of tragic inevitability to the story, given how it turned out; but as with so many great films based on true stories, it's the depiction and the process of events and characters that keeps the viewer glued.

Aspects of the Munich tragedy have been filmed before: the 1976 made-for-TV film 21 HOURS AT MUNICH; the highly acclaimed 1999 documentary film ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER; and the masterful 2005 Steven Spielberg film MUNICH (which told of how an elite Israeli hit squad sought out those who planned the Munich horror). SEPTEMBER 5 joins that distinguished trio of films, thanks in no small part to the cast assembled by director Tim Fehlbaum, whose previous credits included 2011's HELL and 2021's THE COLONY. The control room that was recreated for the film based on what existed in televised sports and news coverage is exceptionally realistic, and shows the audience what it meant to be dealing with what by 21st century standards is considered antique technology. That a lot of the footage used comes from the actual ABC News coverage of the event is not terribly surprising, but not only do the seams not show, it only adds to the chilling realism being displayed.

Fehlbaum and his cast and crew knew better than to turn SEPTEMBER 5 into am early 1970's version of a high-tech, virtual reality video game; and by shooting it in a documentary fashion, they give it a realism that only exists in the best Hollywood dramatizations of historical events of our time. The dialogue in the control room comes in hot and heavy, which is right for the story itself; and the cast more than ably delivers the emotional tenor required without lapsing into overt melodrama. The whole Munich saga itself had the world in its grip for twenty-one straight hours, with as many as nine hundred million people tuned into the horror that had exploded in a place of peaceful competition. SEPTEMBER 5 is a testament to the professionalism of the ABC crew, and a fitting tribute to the athletes whose horrific demise they had to cover; and it is one of the best movies released in 2024.

I'm giving SEPTEMBER 5 a '10' rating.

Created by veteran television writers Richard Levinson and William Link, and spawned off by two TV pilot films made in 1968 and 1971, "Columbo" was part of NBC's "Mystery Movie" TV cycle during the glory years of television in the 1970's. In it, Peter Falk portrayed the frequently rumpled title role, a lieutenant in the L. A. P. D. out to solve murders, and not let the perpetrators know that he in fact is onto them...until the end, of course. The series ran for six glorious seasons, from 1971 to 1977; and even to this day, it remains one of the highpoints of television.

The first episode of "Columbo" that aired (on September 15, 1971), though it was actually the third one to actually be filmed, "Murder By The Book" involves a jealous but supremely under-talented writer, portrayed with sinister relish by Jack Cassidy, who murders his writing partner (Martin Milner), the more talented one, and tries to make it look like the whole thing happened in Milner's 8th floor office on Sunset Boulevard, except that the murder takes place in a cabin in isolated mountain lakeside town in San Diego County. It all seems quite devious and unsolvable. But then, of course, Lieutenant Columbo shows up.

Apart from Cassidy's seedy performance, done with a touch of oily smugness, and of course Falk with his famous "There's one more thing" line, the film also features a good turn from Rosemary Forsyth as Milner's wife, who hears her husband on the phone at the moment of his getting bumped off. So much of this can sometimes seem like an imitation of Hitchcock classics like DIAL M FOR MURDER done for the small screen-not to mention kind of formulaic to boot. But evidently nobody had counted on the young kid known derisively on the Universal lot as (Sid) Sheinberg's Folly, a then 24 year-old named Steven Spielberg, being given this plum assignment of directing the whole thing; and neither did they count on this episode being written by a not-much-older Steven Bochco, who would later go on to create landmark TV series like "L. A. Law", "Hill Street Blues", and "N. Y. P. D. Blue", in a way that involves a certain amount of craft and craftiness, the kind of which was perhaps more plentiful in the 1970's than it is these days.

Although Spielberg had already gotten episodes of "The Psychiatrist", "Owen Marshall", and "The Name Of The Game" (the famous sci-fi themed episode "L. A. 2017", plus his involvement with "Night Gallery", and although all of those showed he was already a director to be reckoned with, he still didn't exactly have a lavish budget to work with ($100,000) or a long-enough schedule (no more than a week). And he was still working with crew people who were a hell of a lot older than he was, notably the crusty veteran cinematographer Russell Metty, who had won an Oscar in 1960 for SPARTACUS. But even so, he put those limitations to good use, making the most of a very fine Bochco script without allowing either Falk and Cassidy to ham it up too much. And there is also the matter of the ingenious underscoring by Billy Goldenberg, including synathesized typewriter sounds, sitars, and flowing orchestrations.

All of this adds up to one of the all-time great examples of episodic TV from am era that had so many, thanks to a pair of young guys who would thoroughly turn the way movies and television were done on their collective heads.

"Murder By The Book" gets a definite rating of "10"...by the book.

With an iconic image that encompassed the "Man With No Name" persona in the spaghetti western he did for Sergio Leone in the 1960's, and his steely performances as Dirty Harry Callahan in five movies, it is sometimes a bit too easy to overlook how complex a figure Clint Eastwood has shown himself to be over time, both in front of and behind the camera. The tough guy persona has made him a hero of the political Right in America, even though he himself is a more commonsense conservative; and subsequently it has tended to obscure equally valid and more humanistic roles such as the one he essayed in the 1976 western classic THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES. But throughout his career, he has done roles that a lot of actors would not touch with a ten-foot pole. One such role could be found in the highly underrated 1984 suspense thriller TIGHTROPE, his first venture into this Hitchcock-inspired territory since his own 1971 directorial debut PLAY MISTY FOR ME.

Set in New Orleans, TIGHTROPE puts Eastwood into another cop role, but this one is the more complex role of Wes Block, a New Orleans cop investigating a series of killings involving call girls in the seediest parts of the city's famous French Quarter. As it happens, he has an unavoidable predilection for such women of the night, even though he is also a family man for his two children. The methods the killer uses against these women are roughly the same, and pretty brutal; and what makes things even more disturbing, as time goes on, is the fact that, as more cal girls fall victim, they all share a link with him in that Eastwood is always the last one to have seen them alive. While continuing his investigation of the crimes, he becomes "chummy" with a steely rape counselor (Genevieve Bujold), and they discus the sexual proclivities of this serial killer. It isn't too long, however, before the killer gets awfully close to Eastwood, and suspicion falls on him (he himself even believes at times that its him that's doing all these things). When his own daughter (Alison Eastwood) is almost raped and killed during a break-in at Eastwood's house, it is just a short step before his investigation becomes a quasi-revenge manhunt.

Having just come off doing his fourth turn as Dirty Harry in 1983's SUDDEN IMPACT (which he also directed), Eastwood teamed up with first-time director Richard Tuggle, who had also scripted the 1979 prison drama ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ, which he starred in under his mentor Don Siegel's direction. Much like PLAY MISTY FOR ME, and, perhaps on an even greater level, HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER and THE BEGUILED, the character of Wes Block in TIGHTROPE allowed Eastwood to explore his darker and more vulnerable side, this while also venturing into the seedier areas of sex and violence that used to be starkly defined by those on the Right, both in Hollywood and in America in general during the age of Reagan. The seedy aspects of the story contrast starkly with Eastwood's character's family life, making TIGHTROPE every bit as intriguing and similarly steamy 1980's film like BODY DOUBLE and BODY HEAT. There are also, of course, the unavoidable parallels to Hitchcock's classic films, notably PSYCHO, ROPE, and FRENZY, but Tuggle isn't so brash as to think of himself as another Hitchcock (or even Brian DePalma). The dark and seedy nature of the New Orleans French Quarter is well-conceived by both Tuggle and veteran Eastwood cinematographer Surtees, with Lennie Niehaus, who had helped orchestrate previous film scores for the likes of Lalo Schifrin and Jerry Fielding, making a solid scoring debut here with New Orleans jazz and blues motifs.

Given the notorious anti-feminist stance that long put him in good stead with the Right, Eastwood manages to mix it up well with Bujold, whose realistic character in TIGHTROPE has close parallels with her role in Michael Crichton's 1978 medical thriller COMA. The film's very title, contained in a remark made by Bujold that we often "walk a tightrope" between good and evil, is letter perfect for the plot on hand; and while the subject matter may be distasteful at times, and perhaps a disappointment for Eastwood's more macho male fan base fringe, the end result in TIGHTROPE is one of his best and most underrated films, hugely atmospheric, suspenseful and downright frightening in ways that so many ultra-violent slasher horror films, full as they are of sex and blood and guts, never were and never could be.

TIGHTROPE gets a '10'.