Klute
The joke might
have come out of Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry, “how do
you spell Tuscarora?” The town mouse turns tricks who in their
working hours pass her by for ad jobs and off-off-Broadway.
The great
invention is Klute himself, the cop from Cabbageville unbluffed and undismayed
by slickers of undeniable fascination or arrant squalor.
The true gloss is
Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion with its pendant Whore,
necessary above all as a corrective lens for the purblindness of critics who
found the pornocracy represented so well, all else seemed dross.
The viaticum is
by way of Dr. Strangelove’s Gen. Jack D. Ripper on
“man’s weakness”.
The Parallax View
The tours de force of the
“indoctrination film” and the final assassination show a command of
basic resources and a finished grasp of modern painters (Kline, Johns,
Rauschenberg, Diebenkorn), which is associated with Get Carter and The
Conversation. Generally, as a matter of technique, the style is
akin to The Terminal Man,
with a structure founded in Fritz Lang’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.
There is a
brilliant piece of photography among the tiers and escalators which is
remarkable. As a point of interest, the building used to represent the Parallax
corporate headquarters has been converted into a courthouse, like the Texas
School Book Depository.
All the President’s Men
How two
bottom-rung reporters at the Washington Post stumbled on the Republican
Party’s successful management of the 1972 Democratic campaign under
President Nixon’s personal supervision, financed by campaign donations,
many of them laundered overseas, executed by CIA operatives and covered up by
“the entire intelligence community”.
The beautiful
exacerbation of technique is provoked by analysis or inspiration in a
monumentally slow dolly-in from Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai as
Woodward calls Dahlberg about the check in his name found on one of the
Watergate burglars, and the Midwest Finance Chairman of the Committee to
Re-elect the President replies, “my neighbor’s wife has just been
kidnapped!”
The correct
relationship of the parties is perhaps signified in the give-and-take of
Woodward and Bernstein, who together, as someone has pointed out, make one
great reporter.
The editorial
staff observe the election as spectators unaware the game is rigged, or
unconcerned. There is a curious evocation of 2001: A Space Odyssey in
certain shots, exterior views of Unit 2 in the Watergate Office Building and
Unit 1 across the street, the Post newsroom (which occasionally has a
fast tracking shot between Hawks’ His Girl Friday and
Schlesinger’s Eye for an Eye) in the shot already mentioned, in
the faceless telephone voices and the impending mystery with its attendant
cover-up.
There is ample
groundwork (in Capra, for example) that can be utilized for an understanding of
political corruption, as it is here, but again the curious fact is how much
weight is gradually seen to rest on schoolboy pranks like “the Muskie
Canuck letter” and the bugging of Democratic national headquarters,
always seen from the vantage point of a low-level investigation by a couple of
fairly unversed reporters. The naïveté of politicians, the press and the public
is thoroughly exposed, and an abstract imposition adduced by simple preponderance
of evidence.
The taciturnity
and allusiveness are a Redford hallmark, verisimilitude is the key of his
co-productions. Many inferences can be drawn, not all of them useful, because
there is no political analysis at all, only the historical account. The foreign
editor doubts the story, seeing no motivation, Ben Bradlee is loath to report
that “the Attorney General is a crook”, other editors protest
“we don’t want to bring this country down.”
Bernstein is
somewhat forward in his reporting, he has to go back and polish it, Woodward a
little backward, he doesn’t know who Charles Colson is.
We all know who
Deep Throat was, now, the man whom Colson (after his prison conversion and
ministry) called “a traitor”, the acting associate director of the
FBI, reduced in 1972 to granting secret rendezvous in parking garages so the
story wouldn’t go entirely untold.
The inferences
are, for the great student of Lang that Pakula is, on the order of red herrings
straight from The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse.
Comes a Horseman
ingredients of the classic Western in a new mise en scène that includes the modern
derivations and enhancements.
Thus the large
landscapes and easy tempo with the unexpected, gradually revealing a land
grabber and a girl with a ranch on her own and a cowpoke caught up in it, etc.
Mann, Stevens,
Wyler et al., the Western of the
Thirties now situated where it always was (William S. Hart), in the vast
solitudes.
1945, Russians
heading for Berlin is the news.
A cattle drive,
imperative of the big spread, imperative of oil.
There’s a old hand a-he’pin’
of the lady, and if you don’t know about such things, the world is too
much with us.
The surprising
element is Polanski’s Chinatown,
a tale of the West. This too is a thematic analysis or exacerbation of the
theme (the slant drilling is in Nicholson’s The Two Jakes, from Rosi’s Il caso Mattei).
Variety
as much as said Pakula was screwing like a Chinaman (“you come now, we
look at moon!”), didn’t like Robards’ “black hat”
role, loved Farnsworth (“altogether sympathetic”).
The
Catholic News Service Media Review Office, “somber, slow-moving”.
Time Out
manages to miss the point like the side of a barn, “a doomed
attempt”.
TV Guide,
“offbeat film noir western”.
Film4,
“flies against everything the genre stood for.”
Halliwell’s Film Guide, “portentous and wholly unexciting”, citing Pauline Kael in The
New Yorker, “how can you get involved in the conflict between the
good guys and the bad guys if you can’t even see them?”
Rollover
Oil companies
jack up prices, rake in capital, and drain it from the world of infidels by
secretly buying gold, causing a global financial collapse.
“We are the
Arabs,” says the American petroleum executive in Avildsen’s The
Formula.
The film was
negatively reviewed, having no real interest in the shadows it presents beyond
their impermanence and touching reliance on wheeler-dealers who consider them
anathema.
See You in the Morning
The director with
the finest sense of place, by which is meant his peerless interiors, would be
the one who pitches very correctly his film with reference to Scenes from a Marriage and the Brooklyn
Academy of Music, because each in its own way is ultimately comical.
Call it a sketch
for Pakula’s own information, if not a Haydnesque relaxation. His script
comprehensively addresses a number of irrational qualities (his leading
character is a psychiatrist), and primarily serves him as a vehicle for the
manifestation of those interiors (here verging on the somewhat fanciful, in
keeping with the unfinished state of the film), and, for instance, a superb
long dolly shot on Larry and Beth trundling a luggage cart at the airport, with
dialogue.
As a result, the
film is aimed at a certain rather dull audience, but has plenty of laughs and
pleasures for connoisseurs of Norman Jewison’s Best Friends as well. And those
interiors, which seem so offhand (or composed to look that way), have the
deepest color harmonies...
This is
so much like Fritz Lang’s work in the ‘40s that it obviously is the
fruit of long study. The style depends on plausible realism, and Pakula’s
interiors are so good that his few exteriors are a comfortable fit. What you
want is the mental play Lang pioneered, and Pakula anchors his scenes perfectly
to achieve it.
The Pelican Brief
Sidney J. Furie
gives the best analysis of this film in The Circle (The Fraternity),
Pakula having been obliged to rethink All the President’s Men in
the light of subsequent events.
The Pelican
Brief opens with shots of the
Louisiana swamps behind the credits, and lest you think this has anything to do
with Nicholas Ray’s Wind Across the Everglades, these shots are
ruddy-tinted both here and when they recur in the recitation of the brief
(Anthony Mann’s Thunder Bay is perhaps more thoroughly invoked).
The Supreme Court
justices are murdered in a strong suggestion of Mackenzie’s The Fourth
Protocol, by an Arab assassin hired by an oil man named Matisse (the Washington
Herald reporter has a little trouble spelling this name, so as not to give
away the game).
Pakula’s
ultimate image is of the squeamishness felt by a Tulane law student faced with
Cocteau’s guardian angel (Blood of a Poet has this symbol, here
suggesting Walter Burns’ “the power of the press”, a slowly
flapping eagle).
This is all very
abstruse and abstract, the way Hitchcock is, and forms the basis of a
Hitchcockian film that audiences flocked to and critics found entirely unworthy
of comment.
There is a fine
strain of Preminger’s Advise and Consent brought to the fore in
the scene with the informant’s widow. Lumet’s Power is the
gag setup here, and it seems evident that Pakula has depicted a quandary, above
all.
The Devil’s Own
The title is a
very pointed reference to Michael Anderson’s Shake Hands with the
Devil. Pakula has found himself in a dilemma also faced by Pollack in Random
Hearts,
critics were unable to follow the construction of his film.
An IRA gunman is
shown to have lost his father to assassination at a very young age. The boy,
now grown up, escapes from a gunfight in Belfast to secure weapons in America.
A judge there finds him lodgings under an alias with a New York City police
sergeant and his family.
The key points of
the drama are presented anecdotally. A rookie patrolman leads a tiring pursuit
of a kid who has stolen a packet of Trojans because he’s too embarrassed
to buy them.
The sergeant and
his partner answer a call, a small child opens the door, they are menaced by
and subdue an angry husband with a pistol.
They stop a man
on the street who is likewise armed, he fires at the sergeant’s partner and
runs down the sidewalk, a long New York block. The sergeant runs after him,
threatening to shoot, the man tosses the pistol down a flight of basement steps
and runs on. The sergeant stops to pick up the pistol, hears his partner
running by and then three shots. The man is dead, the partner drops the pistol
beside the body.
The psychology of
the gunman is at issue, his father’s involvement is not explained, the
series of events is a concatenation of violence that never, to the
critics’ chagrin, really discusses the Irish conflict, rather you have,
for example, the intransigence of an arms dealer who must be paid, no second
thoughts are permitted once a deal has been undertaken.