All the President's Men|The Justice Department on Pennsylvania Avenue — Walking Out With Nothing

Woodward and Bernstein come down the steps of the Justice Department having got exactly as far as a polite refusal gets you, and the camera holds them small against a very large limestone wall. Pakula shoots federal Washington the way he shoots the parking garage: too much space, too few people, and architecture that is clearly not on your side.

The building is the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building at 950 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, finished in 1935 as part of the Federal Triangle and renamed for Kennedy in 2001. It fills an entire block. Milton Bennett Medary designed it in a stripped classical mode with an art deco temper — aluminium doors and lamps, torchères, and a lobby of murals painted under the New Deal art programmes, including Boardman Robinson's law panels and George Biddle's sweatshop scenes. Above the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance, C. Paul Jennewein's spandrels and the aluminium figures of Justice keep watch over the traffic.

In 1975 the reporters walking out of here were being stonewalled by the same department that would, within two years, be prosecuting the men they had written about. The film does not point this out. It just keeps the frame wide.

Come at street level and walk the Pennsylvania Avenue face from Ninth to Tenth. The interior is closed to the public, which is fine — the scene is on the pavement, and so is the point.