Review: Herblock: The Black and White
Back in the 1940s, the United States never had a Jon Stewart or a Stephen Colbert. But, I imagine if those two fellas were around then, they still wouldn’t have had half of the career that Herb Block had. Widely regarded as the best political cartoonist of all time, Herb truly proved that the pen is always mightier than the sword by concocting clever but usually foreboding illustrations that were used as a mirror for the US government. During the majority of his career, I imagine Herb standing on the biggest life guard stand anyone could find, and constantly egg the White House, only to chastise whomever had to walk outside and clean it up.
In terms of cartoons, nowadays you either are on one side or the other, but in Herb’s day he made sure to light up on both the asses and the elephants in the room which out a flinch. This documentary directed by Mike Stevens did a great job to convey that, however that concept would look awfully murky whenever he had asked opinions on current day politics, journalism, and the like. Don’t get me wrong, I think 95% of all TV journalism died with Peter Jennings, but when I turn on a network that already harps on that point with the brilliant Newsroom, I couldn’t but think certain portions could not have been re-written to NOT make it sound so ‘liberal vs conservative’ or ‘democrat vs republican’ mostly due to the fact that I could care less on either points what anyone really thinks of the current state of the US government, and from where I sit both would be wrong. Featuring an eclectic group comprised of Jon Stewart, Tom Brokaw, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Jules Feiffer, Ted Koppel and Ben Bradlee, the producers did a great job of getting enough interesting subject matter from a bunch of people I truly admire, even if at times a tad one-sided.
That said, Herblock does a fabulous job of getting red and blue opinions on Herbert’s influence on American politics and I was truly enamored by the Nixon and Johnson pieces, but the poor depiction of Herb done by Alan Mandell certainly did a lot to creep things up a bit. Seriously, I thought every part of this doc could have done without that old guy as I really don’t think Alan brought any legitimacy to his pieces and as such came off as more of an annoyance for the overall presentation.
HBO puts on another fabulous doc which continues the network’s trend at dangerous journalism with programming like Bill Maher and Vice, but a little better direction and more responsibility in managing your talent could have made this one a classic.
