Alan J. Pakula

The story of two young reporters of the Washington Post who picked up the Watergate story from the beginning and stayed with it through doubts, denials and discouragements.

In a small Alabama town in the thirties, a softly-spoken lawyer defends a black sharecropper against a charge of raping a white woman.

Rusty Sabich's been swept up in an obsessive affair with a coworker in the prosecutor's office. When she is murdered, he's asked to lead the investigation. Then, astonishingly, he's accused of the crime. He's the perfect suspect and his fight to clear his name pulls him into a whirpool of lies and secrets.