Some movies instill complacency in viewers. The filmmakers behind these entertaining distractions want viewers to nestle into their chairs, munch on some popcorn and enjoy themselves.

However, there is another kind of movie. The filmmakers behind this other kind want viewers to get mad. They want viewers to get up from their comfy chairs, to go over to the window, and scream out: "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore."

Few movies do this more effectively, of course, than the movie from which this line came: Network.

The film opens with two old friends getting drunk. Max, a television producer, has just carried out the unfortunate duty of informing his friend, Howard, a newscaster, that he is being fired. The two have a few laughs together and Howard, in his drunken haze, tells Max he's going to blow his brains out on the air during the seven o'clock news.

"You'd get a hell of a rating," Max shoots back, deadpan. "Fifty share, easy."

Thus begins Network, certainly the most stinging, potent satire of television and America's obsession with television ever produced by a major studio. The humor is so dark and the outlook is so cynical that to watch it is to be disturbed to the point of anger. And yet it is unflappably engaging at the same time.

After Howard announces his intentions of public suicide on the air, his ratings shoots through the roof and the fictional network, UBS, exploits his declining sanity for all the ratings points he is worth.

Spearheading what becomes The Howard Beale Show, is Diana, a soulless network executive played icily note-perfect by Faye Dunaway. Max, despite his initial anger towards Diana for annexing The Howard Beale Show and thus pushing him out of a job, soon falls in love with her and an affair ensues.

Meanwhile, Diana manages to turn Howard into a counter-cultural phenomenon simply by letting him spew all his gripes about American society in neat half-hour installments. The viewership doesn't really get him, though. They tune in to his show every day so that he can chastise them for being slaves to television. But, of course, they keep watching.

One of the central messages in Network is that in the electronic consumer age in which we live, even people are reduced to mere commodities -- easily bought, sold and disposed of like tissue paper.

They don't do film stories like this one anymore. And part of the reason is because nobody writes like the late screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky did anymore. The sheer logic of his morbid satiric vision is what makes it all the more haunting.

The performances are bursting with humanity -- except, of course, the ones that purposely aren't. Network rightly won three acting awards at the 1976 Oscars. Chayefksy even has the courage to allow them to occasionally launch into impassioned monologues, the poetry of which is reminiscent of high drama. When is the last time we saw someone do that in a movie?

In our age of "reality" TV and wars fought for public relations purposes, it seems to me that we need Howard Beale, the "mad prophet of the airwaves" even more so now than we did in 1976.