"Mike Wallace Is Here"

We went off our usual move trail on Friday and took in this new documentary about former "60 Minutes" pit bull journalist Mike Wallace.

It covered Wallace's career.  He started in radio and TV reading news, acting in soap operas, and doing commercials for just about anything, including Fluffo shortening.  But when he began doing interviews, he found his niche.  Interestingly enough, when he joined CBS, he was looked down upon as a "pitchman" by the serious newsies like Ed Murrow, Eric Severeid, and Walter Cronkite, but he became a force when the still ratings challenged "60 Minutes" converged with the collective mess known as Watergate, and a legend and a career was made.

The doc shows clips of Wallace's highlights...interviews with people like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, John Erlichman, William Westmoreland, Barbara Streisand, Kirk Douglas, and, perhaps the biggest coup of all, the Ayatollah Khomeini in the midst of the Iranian Hostage crisis.  It tells of Wallace's own battles with depression, and his ultimate impact on his profession.

It is a well done movie about one of the more captivating and compelling journalists in television history.  Wallace, by the way, was still working when he died in 2012, one month shy off his 94th birthday.

As movies in general go, it gets Two and One-half stars from The Grandstander, but in the documentary category, I'll go to Three Stars.