DVD review: ‘All the President's Men' (Blu-ray 35th anniversary edition)

Other factors contributing to the film’s greatness were William Goldman’s clarifying adaptation of the Bob Woodward-Carl Bernstein book about their complex probe of Richard Nixon’s Watergate and Alan J. Pakula’s brilliant direction, which, with the help of Gordon Willis’ noirish cinematography, turned it all into a taut, suspenseful, gripping drama, even though moviegoers knew the ending in advance.

Then consider the top-gun leads, with Robert Redford as conservative WASP Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Jewish liberal Bernstein, playing off each other perfectly as polar opposites who come together as a well-oiled journalistic machine, with Jason Robards Jr. rock solid as boss Ben Bradlee, and Jack Warden, Jane Alexander, Martin Balsam and shadowy “Deep Throat” Hal Holbrook rounding out a super roster of supporting players.

The Blu-ray package includes such revelatory extras as the vintage featurette “Pressure and the Press: The Making of ‘All the President’s Men,’” “Telling the Truth About Lies: The Making of ‘All the President’s Men,’” “Woodward and Bernstein: Lighting the Fire” and a 40-page book with an investigative timeline.

Here is a must-see, or must-see-again about a crowning moment in the history of investigative print journalism that probably couldn’t happen again in a new age of crackpot Internet misinformation overload.

— Gene Triplett