Barbarians At the Gate

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

It was one of those moments the moralists live for: nice young man -- good family, college teacher, an earnest intellectual yet rather cuddlesome -- is caught cheating not only in public but also on television. Fame and fortune were the prizes he very nearly got away with, but infamy was his final reward.

What instructive lessons could be derived from this outrage, this tragedy, this affront to the button-down proprieties of the 1950s? Surely something was revealed here about American materialism. Or the cynicism of its media masters. Or perhaps the gullible neediness of the public, yearning to identify with a guy who somehow managed to be smart, cute and lucky at once, just the way we all want to be.

In our tawdry age, one can almost wax nostalgic about a time when Charles Van Doren could cause nationwide outrage. For a few months in 1956 and 1957 he became a celebrity by remaining champion for weeks on a television quiz program called Twenty-One. In the process he won $129,000 and 500 marriage proposals. But two years later he admitted to a congressional committee that he had been fed the answers by the show's producers. Compared with the participants in today's scandals, Van Doren seems more pathetic than notorious; compared with contemporary affronts to our sensibilities, his misdeeds seem infinitely forgivable.

Indeed, watching the film Quiz Show, a compressed and therefore somewhat distorted version of his story, you can't help but think that these days Van Doren would have entered a 12-step program for liars, negotiated a million- dollar deal for a confessional book and eventually gone into politics. It is one of the several virtues of this thoughtful and hugely entertaining movie that it encourages such reflections. Written with clean-cut force by Paul Attanasio and directed with panache by Robert Redford -- they know how to efficiently shape a character and point a scene -- Quiz Show neither nostalgizes about nor inflates its drama. Rather it contextualizes it, makes us see it not merely as an antique controversy but as a symbolic turning point in recent cultural and social history.

This story actually begins with an edgy, brainy nerd named Herbert Stempel (wonderfully played by John Turturro), who was a steady winner on Twenty- One. The trouble was that white-bread America couldn't identify with him. Enter Van Doren (played a little too stiffly by Ralph Fiennes), trying to pick up a few dollars to supplement his instructor's pay at Columbia University. He was a godsend. Not just any old Wasp, but the scion of arguably the nation's most distinguished literary family. His father was Mark Van Doren, Pulitzer- prizewinning poet and scholar; his mother was a novelist; his uncle, a famous historian; his aunt, editor of a respected book-review journal.

What capital could be made of Van Doren on lowbrow TV. And what capital he could make of it. For Charlie Van Doren was overwhelmed by his bloodlines, needed to succeed somewhere on his own. And this new medium, despised by his family and their friends, seemed perfect. He could become a hero by co-opting it for truth and light. The producers persuaded him to accept answers in advance by telling him how much good he was doing the cause of education with his presence. And the schmuck (to borrow a word from Herbie Stempel's lexicon) believed them.

Between the Wasp damaged by privilege and the Jew damaged by under- privilege, the movie places a third figure, Richard Goodwin, a smart, completely unneurotic young man (played by Rob Morrow) working as a congressional-committee investigator. Historically, he does not deserve the central role the film gives him (Goodwin is the author of the book the script is based on and is one of the film's co-producers), but structurally this figure is a masterstroke. He's Jewish, but he's been to the right schools (as he never fails to mention, he graduated first in his class from Harvard Law School). He understands where everybody's coming from. More important, he knows where TV is going -- not just toward media dominance but toward cultural, social and political dominance as well. He wants to use the quiz- show scandal as a way -- exactly how he doesn't really explain -- to bring the entire medium to heel.

Was he really that prescient? Or as noble as he's portrayed here? Doubtful. But he was as ambitious. In a few years Goodwin would begin his long career as a Kennedy factotum-apologist. And seeing through his eyes, the movie gets one very big thing right. The genteel and patrician Wasps who still ruled the nation's cultural life lost their remaining power by their smug, simpering dismissal of TV and all the vulgar stirrings in postwar popular entertainment. Paul Scofield's great performance as Mark Van Doren perfectly personifies their cluelessness. And impotence. This smart, sad movie is the epitaph of the tweedy elite. They should have taken more care to defend the values they appointed themselves to uphold, instead of twittering among their teacups. The film is set in a time when even game-show executives would recognize the name of a Pulitzer-prizewinning poet, but there's not much call these days for the collected works of Mark Van Doren.