Film Review: Quiz Show

Before the credits have finished rolling, the historian cannot help noticing little touches that mar the accuracy of Quiz Show. The posh Chrysler convertible that attorney Richard Goodwin (Rob Morrow) admires is undoubtedly shown with exactitude. But the car radio that is turned on picks up sputnik, which had begun emitting its beep across the North American skies that morning. That dates the opening as October 5, 1957. Though the cinematic Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes) has not yet decided to make the Faustian bargain to compete on Twenty-One, the real scion of a distinguished literary family had first appeared on the NBC program eleven months earlier, and had already flubbed the name of King Baudouin of Belgium in March, 1957. The song first heard on the soundtrack is Bobby Darin’s version of “Mack the Knife,” which was not released until 1959, which is when the real Van Doren testified in Washington and finally admitted his involvement in television fraud. Yet shortly before the cinematic quiz show champ goes to the capital, Professor Mark Van Doren (Paul Scofield) asks him what he thinks of Norman Mailer’s piece in Dissent. Since “The White Negro” had appeared in the summer of 1957, these two intellectuals are slow enough to be lip-readers. Perhaps most anachronistic is how co-educational Charles Van Doren’s classes seem to be, though in that era Barnard College students did not commonly enroll at Columbia College.

The film buff can defend these historical distortions according to the thematic aims of Quiz Show. Sputnik discredited the faith in the scientific supremacy of the United States, and makes admiration for Van Doren as an intellectual celebrity plausible and his motives more complicated than mere greed. His success would make education itself look more glamorous. The lyrics that Darin sang were of course Bertolt Brecht’s, and “Mack the Knife” had launched the most savage attack ever mounted within the precincts of musical theatre against the hypocrisies and injustices of capitalism. The entanglement of respectability and criminality that The Threepenny Opera discloses is hardly ancillary to the message of Quiz Show. “The White Negro” is a vindication of instinct even if it means lawlessness, even if it means subverting conventional moral norms. As the object of the adoring female gaze, Van Doren is readily seduced not only by the promise of sudden lucre but perhaps even more by the bewitchment of fame. An academician who needs makeup, he is a telegenic “egghead” who is mobbed like a matinee idol.

Though the historian can respect the artistic choices that Robert Redford made and can even praise his brilliant evocation of the Zeitgeist of the late 1950s, the movie failed to capture an audience when it was released (ranking an abysmal 57th in earnings for the year). ¹ Quiz Show has no violence, no sex and no nudity, and is virtually barren of obscenity. But what should merit the interest not only of historians of the Eisenhower era but students of American Jewry as well is the careful attention paid to what would have been minimized or even obscured in that decade: ethnicity. Indeed Jews are everywhere in this film, as they were in the actual imbroglio that in 1959 was compared to the Black Sox scandal of 1919. Quiz Show is presented as a morality tale in which Jews are perpetrators and victims of television fraud (which in itself violated no criminal statute but only the public trust). Jews are shown wearing black hats and white hats, because they were indeed sucked into the vortex of a scandal that mixed duplicity with unchecked avarice and ambition. A review of Quiz Show is therefore apt in inaugurating what may become a regular feature of this quarterly, since Redford’s film is closely based on actual historical events in which American Jews were implicated. Though not its most important intention, Quiz Show takes a look at a...