The other night we watched one of the greatest American films ever made. Network was directed by Sidney Lumet to a staggering script by Paddy Chayefsky. It won a posthumous Oscar for Peter Finch as the broadcaster who goes mad on air and has the whole of America chanting that they’re ‘mad as hell’ and this 1976 film has William Holden in the performance of his career as an old TV executive and Faye Dunaway as the shapely snake who sees the potential of existential and political rage as a way of maximising the network’s power over the captive audience.

She has an affair with Holden and explains to him that she has a masculinist set of disabilities: comes too soon, is full of the legend of herself. She’s deadly in her feasibility and she goes on to enlist an Angela Davis-type leftist as well as some kind of terrorist group. The effect is dazzling. There is even a direly nihilistic speech in which Ned Beatty – a famous Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – talks with impassioned blackness about the stranglehold the Saudis have on the world economy.

It all comes across as an impassioned and eviscerating play script for a hypothetical cinema and it is staggering how arresting it is and the way Chayefsky’s satire is so close to the knuckle of realism. Everyone in sight was nominated for an Oscar and in the case of Beatrice Straight as Holden’s wife actually won Best Supporting Actress for five minutes of screen time.

It’s strange to think that William Holden was in another legendary film, Sunset Boulevard by Billy Wilder in 1950, decades before.

The Chayefsky/ Sidney Lumet vision is an angrily liberal one – and it tallies all too well with the image of America as the once and future greatest nation on earth – but the sense of substantiated grandeur is curdled by the cynicism at the heart of what is perpetrated in this wildly nihilistic film which is at the same time radiant with whatever the city of New York represents and the liberal democracy it feeds off.

If Hollywood consistently – or even occasionally – made films which came within cooee of Network it would be the wonder of the earth. Chayefsky’s script is such an exact replica of a world gone mad with media that it only takes an inch of caricature – a touch of the unthinkable – to hurl us into a world of nightmare.

There was speculation at the outset that Peter Finch’s Australianness might introduce a foreign note but in fact his voice gives him a very distinctive edge that tallies with the fact that he is the ruin of a very great broadcaster. In his British films – none better than Sunday Bloody Sunday with Glenda Jackson – Finch always kept a hint of the Australian accent but it’s not there at all in Network.

Network is a film everyone should see and it repays revisiting partly because the vision of the film is so scarifying that we forget everything except the central verbal hand grenade from Finch.

It’s funny to think – and a bit sad – that the only other posthumous Oscar was for another Australian, Heath Ledger. It was ostensibly for his Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight though the real rationale was the one he missed out on for Brokeback Mountain.

The Belgian director Ivo van Hove likes the idea of doing stage versions of film scripts and perhaps you can see the point with All About Eve. In 2017 he did Network with Bryan Cranston (of Breaking Bad fame) in the Peter Finch role where he might have been better suited to the William Holden part, but Ivo van Hove is a man whose intuitions run counter. He cast the diminutive Ben Whishaw as that oak of a man John Proctor in The Crucible. He also told me, with awe, that Saoirse Ronin (Abigail in that production) had an instinctive sense of stage technique – projecting, pitching your voice – which he had assumed she would have to be taught.

It was sad to see that the actor Julian McMahon had died last week. He was a very dashing variety of morally ambiguous demon in Charmed in its Shannen Doherty heyday and he was an actor with effortless understated charm.

Then he was dazzling in Nip/Tuck that black comic super soap about a couple of Miami plastic surgeons that came to cover the spectrum of weirdness and moral indeterminacies. Julian McMahon captured every kind of complexity in the role of a likeable womanising cad who also had a conscience if need be.

Nip/Tuck was certainly classy soap – like Brothers & Sisters – but it showed how prepared in its way the world was for the streamers.

This was, after all, a series with a weird subject which also used to bring us at regular intervals guest appearances from the great Vanessa Redgrave.

Recently we had occasion to watch Surfer in which Nicholas Cage plays an Australian-born American who wants to return to the seaside playground of his youth. He is treated with maximum and inexplicable brutality by the entire town, not least by the surf gang leader, an Australian-accented Julian McMahon.

It’s an icy, terrifying performance. It’s interesting to see that in The Residence, the new series about the US President Julian McMahon plays a visiting Australian prime minister. He was in fact the son of an Australian prime minister, Billy McMahon, and that glimmering lady of the social world, Sonia McMahon.

Randall Jarrell said once of Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children that it was as unambiguously a good book as another might be a literary classic. Well, recently we stumbled on a film which was as unambiguously good as Network is great.

We were fascinated by Jessica De Gouw because she is so vibrant in The Survivors and so we watched her in Cut Snake (2014) and the effect was riveting. The film is directed by Tony Ayres and set in the 1970s. Likeable and attractive girl is set to marry decent-looking guy. Then a figure from his past emerges, in fact the guy whose lover he was during a stint in prison. Jessica De Gouw freaks out in an understandably total way. Cut Snake is a relatively small film but it has perfect pitch. It was written by Blake Ayshford and anyone who wants to tell a story dramatically should study his work.