The Parallax View (1974)

          Starring Warren Beatty as a reckless reporter who stumbles into a nefarious scheme involving political assassinations and governmental cover-ups, The Parallax View is the quintessential ’70s conspiracy thriller. With its heavily metaphorical images of people dwarfed by gigantic structures, its insidious musical score that jangles the nerves at key moments, and its sudden explosions of violence, director Alan J. Pakula’s arresting movie set the template for decades of imitators. More importantly, it set the template for Pakula’s next movie, the exquisite journalism drama All the President’s Men (1976). Working with the same cinematographer (Gordon Willis) and the same composer (Michael Small) he used on Parallax, Pakula sharpened his conspiracy-thriller style to absolute perfection while telling the story of how reporters uncovered the Watergate scandal. In sum, The Parallax View is required viewing for anyone who wants to understand ’70s cinema, even though the picture is far from perfect.

          Based on a novel by Loren Singer and written for the screen by the formidable trio of David Giler, Lorenzo Semple Jr., and Robert Towne, the movie begins with an assassination inside the Seattle Space Needle, then continues with a grim scene of a Warren Commission-type panel issuing a “lone gunman” explanation for the killing—even though we, the viewers, saw more than one person collaborating in the murder. The movie then cuts three years ahead. Seattle-based Joe Frady (Beatty) is an unorthodox reporter with a nose for conspiracies. His friend Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss), who witnessed the Space Needle assassination, is terrified because she believes witnesses are being systematically killed. Joe is skeptical until Lee herself dies under questionable circumstances. Then Joe asks his editor, Bill (Hume Cronyn), for permission to investigate. The doubtful editor says okay, but gives Joe a short leash. Soon, however, Joe uncovers clues leading him to the Parallax Corporation, which appears to be in the business of recruiting assassins. Obsessed with following a hot story, Joe endangers himself and everyone he knows by trying to infiltrate Parallax.

          From start to finish, The Parallax View is exciting and tense. Pakula and Willis shoot the picture masterfully, using creative foreground/background juxtapositions, deep shadows, and long lenses to evoke disturbing themes. The movie also employs an effective trope of portraying villains as even-tempered men in suits, rather than hysterical monsters, and the notion of business-as-usual murder is chilling. The acting is uniformly great, with Cronyn a dryly funny standout among the supporting cast and Beatty putting the self-possessed diffidence of his unique screen persona to good use.

          All that said, the story hits a few speed bumps along the way. An extended sequence in a small town called Salmontail includes scenes one might expect to find in a Burt Reynolds romp, from a bar brawl to a comedic car chase, and some stretches of the movie are so subtle they’re actually difficult to parse. The finale, in particular, is clever but needlessly convoluted and sluggish. Throughout its running time, the movie waffles between taking itself too seriously and not taking itself seriously enough. Yet all is forgiven whenever The Parallax View hits the conspiracy-thriller sweet spot. For instance, consider this exquisite dialogue exchange between Brady and ex-spy Will Turner (Kenneth Mars). Turner: “What do you know?” Brady: “I don’t know what I know.” That’s the stuff.

The Parallax View: GROOVY

Klute (1971)

          A character piece disguised a thriller, Klute has so many extraordinary elements that it’s silly to complain about the movie’s shortcomings. For while Klute is not particularly effective a whodunit, it soars as a probing investigation into the sexual identity of a complicated woman. Klute is also a great mood piece. The picture earned leading lady Jane Fonda the first of her two Oscars, and it’s the project on which director Alan Pakula and cinematographer Gordon Willis perfected the visual style they later used on two classic conspiracy-themed films, The Parallax View (1974) and All the President’s Men (1976). In fact, Klute is often cited as the first entry in a trilogy comprising Parallax and President’s, because themes of duplicity, paranoia, and surveillance pervade all three films.

          Set in New York City, Klute concerns the search for a missing business executive from the Midwest. Laconic heartland cop-turned-PI John Klute (Don Sutherland) travels to the Big Apple to look for the missing man, and his best source of information is call girl Bree Daniels (Fonda). As John pressures Bree for information, the movie examines her intricate personality. Pakula features several insightful scenes of the call girl speaking with her therapist, and it’s fascinating to watch Bree waffle between justifications (exercising sexual power over men validates her self-image) and recriminations (for her, prostitution is a sort of addiction).

          As carefully sculpted by Fonda and Pakula—who presumably used the script by the otherwise undistinguished writers Andy Lewis and David P. Lewis as a jumping-off point for elaborations and improvisations—Bree Daniels is one of the most textured characters in all of ’70s cinema. Among the unforgettable moments during Fonda’s scorching performance is the bit when Bree seems to experience a massive orgasm with one of her clients—until she “breaks character” by checking her watch. Truth be told, Klute almost delves too deeply into Bree’s personality, because the unveiling of her soul pushes the actual plot of the movie into the background. Even Sutherland, very much Fonda’s equal as a performer, falls into his costar’s shadow.

          Nonetheless, Pakula occasionally remembers that he’s making a thriller, and the movie features a handful of strong suspense scenes. Especially during these fraught moments, Willis uses deep shadows to convey a sense of ever-present danger; the artful silhouettes he creates during the climax are particularly memorable. Actually, it seems that nearly everybody involved with Klute treated the project like high art, thereby elevating what could have been a pulpy story into something special. For example, supporting players including Charles Cioffi and Roy Scheider give their small roles depth, and composer Michael Small adds to the ominous mood with eerie musical textures.

Klute: GROOVY

Starting Over (1979)

          James L. Brooks was at the apex of his spectacular run as a TV showrunner when he penned his first theatrical feature, Starting Over. Adapted from a novel by Dan Wakefield, the movie is shot through with the same funny/sad humanism Brooks brought to his award-winning TV shows—The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, etc.—so even though Starting Over features a trio of brand-name actors and was helmed by A-lister Alan J. Pakula, the movie is primarily a showcase for Brooks’ sharp observations about human frailty. (Brooks and Pakula co-produced the picture.)

          Stepping way outside his comfort zone and scoring with a charming performance, Burt Reynolds plays Phil Potter, a magazine writer who is abruptly dumped by his wife, Jessica (Candice Bergen), a beautiful narcissist embarking on a new career as a singer-songwriter. Suddenly thrown back into the dating scene, Phil takes solace in the company of his amiable brother, Mickey (Charles Durning), a touchy-feely psychiatrist. Mickey introduces Phil to divorced schoolteacher Marilyn Holmberg (Jill Clayburgh)—this happens during a funny scene involving mistaken identities and foul language—and they become a couple after a few false starts. However, their second-time-around romance is complicated when Jessica decides she wants Phil back.

          Sensitively examining the complexities of relationships during an era of shifting gender roles, Starting Over is smart and touching, with likeable people riding the amusing currents of confusing situations. Brooks’ dialogue is incisive, and his ability to shift the tone of a scene from ominous to promising and back again is spectacular; although Starting Over is one of Brooks’ lightest efforts, essentially just a romantic comedy made with exemplary skill, the movie is filled with insights and wit.

          It’s also filled with great acting. Reynolds ditches his usual macho swagger to play an everyman trying to find his way through life without hurting anyone—thereby ensuring he causes lots of inadvertent damage—while his female counterparts play to their respective strengths. Bergen revels in humiliating herself for the sake of a joke, especially when giving cringe-inducing performances of her character’s songs, and Clayburgh takes neuroticism to a Woody Allen-esque extreme. The women also create distinctly different personas, so it’s easy to see why Phil’s torn. Durning makes a great foil for Reynolds, and supporting players Frances Sternhagen, Mary Kay Place, and Austin Pendelton enliven minor roles.

Starting Over: GROOVY

Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (1973)

          Best known for the Oscar-winning adapted screenplays of Julia (1977) and Ordinary People (1980), Alvin Sargent has spent his career writing stories about troubled characters. Some of these stories hit a perfect target of idiosyncratic sensitivity, and some of them, well, don’t. An example of the latter circumstance is Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing, the tale of an emotionally disturbed American youth and an uptight middle-aged Englishwoman who fall in love while traveling through Spain. The story is reasonable enough, since we discover why each character has fled home and why each character feels sufficiently adrift to latch onto an unlikely paramour, but the execution is awkward.

          As directed by the venerable Alan J. Pakula, who specialized in heavy drama, Love and Pain has an oppressive seriousness that inhibits Sargent’s attempts to blend comic and dramatic elements. Pakula anchors shots in deep shadows that create distractingly ominous portent, and his handling of performances is almost too sensitive: Pakula lets Bottoms and Smith go so deep into their characters’ traumas that viewers are more likely to be frightened for these people than to root for them. It doesn’t help that vignettes in Sargent’s script range from generic to silly.

          On the generic end of things are many aimless scenes of the couple walking around historical sites, and on the silly end is the sequence in which the guests encounter a strange duke (Don Jaime de Mora y Aragón), who literally rescues Smith on horseback after she suffers a fall. Sargent also occasionally succumbs to hippie-era psychobabble, like this speech delivered by Bottoms: “We’re free, we’re coming alive, we’re talking to each other—what do you want to go back to crying in the dark for?” Complicating matters further, the picture features dissonant moments of lowbrow physical comedy, like the bit of Smith tripping on her panties while fleeing an interrupted sexual liaison.

          Ultimately, Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing is an extremely odd movie, with a jumble of erratic tonalities and fleetingly touching performances; though the picture has such admirable intentions and genuine feeling that it can’t be dismissed, it’s an aesthetic hodgepodge.

Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing: FUNKY

Comes a Horseman (1978)

Director Alan J. Pakula took a massive misstep after helming the Watergate-themed masterpiece All the President’s Men (1976), venturing into the world of cowboy drama for the pretentious and unsatisfying Comes a Horseman. Yet even with its profound shortcomings, the picture is interesting because of the caliber of talent involved, and because it’s fascinating to watch Pakula try to blend his dark, meditative style into the vibrant milieu of the revisionist Western. So even though this director and this genre aren’t even remotely a good match, Comes a Horseman boasts powerful moments thanks to rich atmosphere and strong performances, two qualities that distinguish all of Pakula’s films. Jane Fonda stars as a second-generation cattle farmer under pressure from a powerful rancher (Jason Robards) to sell her struggling operation so he can expand his empire. Into the story comes a horseman, obviously, who’s played by decidedly Eastern tough guy James Caan; casting city slicker Caan as a cowboy is one of the movie’s many bold stylistic experiments. Caan helps Fonda turn her farm around, leading to a violent confrontation with Robards and his operatives, since the villain is an omnivorous monster who won’t take no for an answer. Fonda is perfectly cast and quite convincing as a child of the frontier, Robards is entertaining if a touch cartoonish as a megalomaniacal baddie, and Caan struggles valiantly to blend into a genre that doesn’t suit him any more than it suits Pakula. All three leads, however, are upstaged by former stuntman Richard Farnsworth, who scored the first of his two Oscar nominations for his gruffly authentic performance as a wise old cowpoke named Dodger. He’s such a strong presence that scenes without him feel insufficient. Pakula benefits from moody photography by cinematographer Gordon Willis, and though neither Pakula nor Willis are particularly adept at shooting action—Willis is one of the great atmosphere guys, not a run-and-gun shooter—they create several memorably stark moments, like the film’s apocalyptic finale.

Comes a Horseman: FUNKY

All the President’s Men (1976)

          Easily one of the most important American films of the ’70s, this spellbinder about the Washington Post reporters whose coverage of the Watergate break-in helped topple Richard Nixon works as an exciting character piece, a meticulous journalism procedural, and a taut political thriller. Producer-star Robert Redford, deep into a run of great movies that proved he was more than a pretty-boy leading man, nurtured the project from day one. He prodded real-life Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward to adapt their Watergate stories into the nonfiction book All the President’s Men, which was released in 1974, and coached them through shaping the book’s narrative. For the film adaptation, he recruited screenwriter William Goldman (who won an Oscar for his work) and director Alan J. Pakula, both of whom contributed enormously to the magic act of generating suspense even though everybody already knew the ending. The development of the picture was rocky. At one point the real Bernstein and his then-girlfriend, Nora Ephron, wrote a draft of the script without Goldman’s knowledge, fabricating a scene portraying Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) as a kind of journalistic secret agent who worms his way past a secretary to reach an elusive source. The scene made it into the final picture, and Goldman has lamented that it’s the only made-up moment in the story.
          Despite the offscreen intrigue, All the President’s Men is a watershed moment for its participants. From Redford and Hoffman to Goldman and Pakula to composter David Shire and cinematographer Gordon Willis, everyone involved does some of their best-ever work. Beautifully capturing the haphazard beginnings of the investigation, when Woodward (Redford) wasn’t even sure he’d found a real story, and frighteningly depicting the private conversations among men who realized they were about to take down a commander-in-chief, the movie is as fascinating about process as it is entertaining. Among the spectacular supporting cast, Jason Robards is the Oscar-winning standout as gruffly principled editor Ben Bradlee, and Hal Holbrook is chilling as government informant “Deep Throat,” who meets Woodward a series of shadowy parking garages. Jane Alexander, Martin Balsam, Stephen Collins, Nicholas Coster, Robert Walden, and Jack Warden all excel in smaller roles. As for the above-the-title players, Hoffman and Redford generate palpable oil-and-water friction. Among the many great things this movie offers, perhaps most impressive is the fact that the film never forgets—or overplays—the importance of the history it depicts. Not exactly the easiest needle to thread, but All the Preisdent’s Men accomplishes the task gracefully.

All the President’s Men: OUTTA SIGHT