A drifter named Rheinhardt arrives in New Orleans. Seeing a familiar name on a shelter, he goes inside and sees that his old acquaintance Farley is running a scam as a preacher. Farley owes Rheinhardt money and pays some of it. Rheinhardt goes to a bar, where he sees a woman named Geraldine threatened by a pimp who thinks that she is trying to turn tricks on his turf.
Rheinhardt and Geraldine move in together, living in cheap housing surrounded by hippies. He gets a job at a conservative talk radio station called WUSA. The owner, Bingamon, is a white supremacist. He uses the station to spread propaganda, with the constant refrain that something is wrong in the country and that things were better in the past.
Rheinhardt reads the station's reactionary editorials while he socializes with hippies who detest it. One of his neighbors is an earnest man named Rainey, whose job is to survey welfare recipients. Rainey relies on a wealthy man named Clotho to guide him to beneficiaries. Clotho introduces Rainey to several people who are scamming the welfare system.
Rainey eventually discovers that Clotho is working for Bingamon, making sure that Rainey's survey find rampant fraud. WUSA will then use that fraud as content for their editorials. The more that Rainey learns about Bingamon's machinations, the more horrified he becomes. When Bingamon hosts a hate rally, Rainey tries to assassinate him. During the ensuing chaos, Rainey attempts to flee with his gun, but the crowd beats him to death.
Rheinhardt is ordered to the lectern to calm the crowd, but he makes a speech that only adds to the din. As Geraldine flees the rally, she is arrested and found with marijuana. Threatened with years in jail for felony possession, she hangs herself in a cell. Rheinhardt visits her grave before leaving town as cynical as he was when he arrived.[1]
Anthony Perkins was nominated for best supporting actor of the year by the National Society of Film Critics. In the 1970s, Paul Newman called it "the most significant film I've ever made and the best".[2]Roger Greenspun, reviewing the film for The New York Times, wrote: "If it were an ordinary bad movie (and it is a very bad movie), WUSA might, in spite of the distinguished names, and less distinguished presence, of its leading actors, be dismissed with no more than a nod to the tension between Rosenberg's ponderously emphatic direction, and Robert Stone's ponderously allusive screenplay. I suspect Stone wins out, for WUSA feels more like poor theater than poor moviemaking—so, that it continually suggests a failed version of The Balcony, even though it strives to fall short of The Manchurian Candidate...Despite its obsession with collecting evidence, and its handy school of pseudo-documentary, WUSA fights unreal battles with an unseen enemy. Lacking either the grace of art or the vitality of guerrilla theater, it can offer only the coarsest nourishment—and only to the elaborately self-deceived."[3]
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