10 Films That Shaped The Course Of History

This film adaptation of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s bestseller by the same name came at a time when America was healing not just from the defeat in a scandalous war on the far side of the world but also from the first ever resignation of a US president.

All the President’s Men follows the investigation by these two Washington Post reporters that uncover ‘Watergate’: the biggest political scandal in modern memory where the president had illegally wiretapped his political opponents and abused his power to cover up the investigation.

Starring Hollywood royalty, Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, it gave huge fame not just to the scandal worldwide but the practise of investigative journalism itself, something that has remained an attractive profession to date, inspiring many more films in the process.

In the wake of the film, applications to journalism schools and newspaper jobs skyrocketed and the suffix “-gate” would be applied to anything that even remotely resembled a scandal, a practice that endures today.

This was not just the case in the US, but worldwide also where for instance, a scandal involving fraudulent bottles of Bordeaux wine became known as “Winegate” and a scandal involving US members of congress and the South Korean government was dubbed “Koreagate”.