Butler's Cinema Scene

“MIKE WALLACE IS HERE” My rating: B 

90 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Mike Wallace was the take-no-bullshit TV newsman who asked the questions that made his subjects — and sometimes his audience — squirm in discomfort.

Early in “Mike Wallace Is Here” we see some old studio footage of Wallace being “interviewed’ by his “60  Minutes” colleague Morley Safer.

“Mike,” Safer asks, “why are you such a prick?”

Questioned about his borderline brutal methodology, Wallace would say he was motivated by a search for the truth.

But as Avi Belkin’s documentary makes painfully clear, much of Wallace’s bulldog style was born of insecurity, of a sense of unworthiness.

Indeed, the first 20 or so minutes are crammed with cringeworthy examples of the things an acne-ravaged young Mike Wallace did to survive in the early days of television. He took acting gigs. Even more dubious, given his future calling as a journalist, he was a glib pitchman, a shill, a soulless talking head for products ranging from cigarettes to kitchen gadgets.

Small wonder that during his early years at CBS Wallace’s newsroom colleagues speculated that he was only portraying a journalist.

It’s pretty clear that Wallace was himself hung up on that question.

Belkin lays out Wallace’s career in more or less chronological fashion.  The first big break came with 1956’s  “Night Beat,” a local TV interview program that soon went national.  In the opening episode Wallace told his audience what to expect, explaining: “My role is that of a reporter.”

Some found his interviews more like a police interrogations. Nevertheless, the public responded to Wallace’s “singular brand of browbeating charm.”

Then, in 1969, Wallace got in on the ground floor of CBS’s Sunday night phenomenon “60 Minutes.” His co-workers were something less than welcoming; Wallace’s dubious history of hawking products and his aggressive style put him in stark contrast to the  professorial gentility of Walter Cronkite, the network’s news guru.

But as time passed, Wallace’s ethos became the hallmark of the program, which developed its own mythology of hero reporters and sweating villains.

That success came at a cost.  Wallace went through four marriages and admits that he was a lousy husband and father.  The job meant too much to him.

Late in life (he died in 2011 at age 93) he endured an epic bout of depression that had him contemplating suicide. He dismissed himself as “a fourth-rate individual.”

Maybe. But he was a  fearless and hugely effective interviewer, as demonstrated by snippets from sessions with the likes of Vladimir Putin, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Kirk Douglas, Bette Davis and Johnny Carson.

| Robert W. Butler