One of the few complaints

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One of the few complaints about Good Night, and Good Luck is that Edward R. Murrow (played by David Strathairn) is portrayed in ways that are insufficiently fleshed-out. He's too virtuous, too noble...too much of a paragon of journalistic integrity. In my first riff on the film in early October, I said that co-screen- writers George Clooney and Grant Heslov should "have added more shading to Murrow. He's just a rock-ribbed man of virtue here. He needs some ticks and peculiarities. Men of consequence are usually driven by more than what they believe in and are willing to fight for. If he had a thing for butter pecan ice cream, let's say. Or if he lost it every time he heard Abbott and Costello's 'Who's on First' routine...something." Well, I watched a Murrow documentary on DVD over the weekend called "This Reporter" (off New Video Group's "Edward R. Murrow Collection"), and Murrow's former colleagues talk about an aspect of Murrow's character that the movie utterly ignores. Murrow was a danger junkie...a guy who liked driving fast, taking risks, going on bombing missions during World War II and generally tempting fate. A former CBS News colleague named Edward Bliss, Jr. says that Murrow "liked to gamble...he gambled with his life in the way he smoked... he gambled in the way he drove around London in his little roadster...he gambled by going up in aircraft during the war." This suggests that Murrow went up against Sen. Joseph McCarthy at least in part because he was into the thrill and danger of taking on an important public figure who might possibly hurt or even crush him. So he wasn't just this noble crusader -- he was a guy who stood for the right things, but also got a charge out of putting himself in harm's way and seeing what he could get away with. Right away this makes Murrow much more human and ten times more interesting than the guy he appears to be in Good Night, and Good Luck. I think that Clooney and Heslov wrote a strong script, but they could have bumped it up a notch or two if they'd figured a way to work this in.