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It opens with what Dreyer once called "a feeling for the strong vertical," the Seattle Space Needle hiding behind a totem pole in a preamble to a Fourth of July killing. "No evidence of any wider conspiracy" is a dubious verdict in the wake of Watergate, Alan J. Pakula offers his inquiry as a necessary act of "irresponsible speculation." Three years and six dead witnesses after the murder, the shaggy muckraker (Warren Beatty) gets on the case following a brush with the seventh victim—one moment consumed by sunlight behind a motel curtain, the terrified reporter (Paula Prentiss) is next on a morgue slab under blue-green phosphorescence. Fake identities on a fake train, the Shane brawl at the tourist lodge, fishing-rod lacerations by the roaring dam lend an air of Out of the Past. "They don't want to answer questions." "You damn right they don't!" A homegrown Mabuse, and there's Lang's paranoid dictum ("Someone is out to get me") right on the questionnaire for the eponymous organization, "the business of recruiting assassins." At its center is the Parallax indoctrination collage, images and words in meteoric montage (The Ipcress File and Le Gai savoir are paramount models) from harmonious to alarming and back. Ominous forms foregrounded for the bravura Pakula grid, a typical gag has "security" spelled backwards on a glass pane. Rattling in the maze are Hume Cronyn's skeptical editor, William Daniels' fidgety aide in hiding, Kenneth Mars' former FBI agent, and others perpetually on the verge of being engulfed by steely architecture. Hitchcock aboard the airliner, Frankenheimer at the rally rehearsal, a decade's worth of distrust funneled into a cavernous Gordon Willis panorama and set to "Three Cheers to the Red, White and Blue." Illumination at the doorway turns out to be a shotgun blast, the official story slams it shut. With Walter McGinn, Earl Hindman, Bill McKinney, Kelly Thordsen, Jim Davis, and Anthony Zerbe.
--- Fernando F. Croce |