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A careful work of adjustment and prophecy: The North by Northwest couple is transposed to the year after Watergate, the Middle East debacle is frankly foretold ("Oil. That's it, isn't it?"). The gentle joke is that the secret agent (Robert Redford) is a bookworm at the American Literary Historical Society, who's out to lunch during the merciless liquidation of his colleagues. Unfinished things do not sit well in the corridors of powers, the fugitive takes to dodging bullets and wrestling hit men, a chic photographer (Faye Dunaway) is the gal in the proverbial handcuffs. Crosscuting during their lovemaking extracts a romantic frisson from the heroine's "lonely pictures" (desolate views of park benches and leafless trees), snapshots that intrigue the sad-poet side of Redford ("I don't remember yesterday... Today it rained"). Sydney Pollack's technique has something of these portraits, cool and composed and ineffably vulnerable—if Pakula's The Parallax View is a Jasper Johns, here is the George Bellows of the paranoid Seventies. The presiding image, out of The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse modulated through The Quiller Memorandum, is that of "another CIA inside the CIA," it's finally boiled down to a case for Dick Tracy, "a very underrated detective." Seen in trench coat, fedora and specs reflected on a rain-slicked Manhattan corner, the freelance killer (Max von Sydow) is the character best adapted to the current times, an elegant professional with belief in no cause other than the job's aesthetics and with enough of his soul locked away to calmly tend to his collection of figurines. The capper is that "the business of suspicion" really is a business, even the government honcho (John Houseman) looks back nostalgically at wars fought from without rather than from within: "I miss that kind of clarity." With Cliff Robertson, Addison Powell, Walter McGinn, and Tina Chen.
--- Fernando F. Croce |