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Quiz Show is Robert Redford's third film as a director. Audiences may find respite from the violence of such current films as Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction in Redford's provocative and thoughtful work. Inherent in the texts of Redford's award-winning Ordinary People , Milagro Bean Field War , and Quiz Show is a common theme. In each film he provides a series of gentle instructions about the world at large, about caring in particular, and about various forms of exploitation. Quiz Show is so far his most ambitious undertaking, and he has crafted a restrained story that is layered with nostalgia, questions of the morality of performance, and issues of historic accuracy. Redford's already complex task is further complicated by our knowing the outcome of the story, as, for example, in another “documentary history” film, JFK.
Quiz Show is the story that holds at its center the real and imagined conflicts between Herb Stemple (John Turturro) and Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes) as their lives cross on the 21 show. Stemple, the neurotic Queens County Jew and reigning champion of the general information Quiz Show, seeks acceptance, money, and recognition; he finds his natural enemy in the well-pedigreed, younger Van Doren. On the surface the film appears to set up a “no contest” between neurosis and aristocratic charm. That is, Stemple must step aside and Van Doren reap the ample harvest of good looks, privilege, and education. Yet there has to be more than this to sustain a movie, and indeed there is.