Tag: Alan Pakula

Westerns

Review: Comes a Horseman

Written by Robert C. Cumbow January 20, 2010June 9, 2020

[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]

The title of Alan J Pakula’s latest film echoes the old stock melodrama line “Along comes Jones” and that’s no accident. Here we have a tough-but-tender cowgirl working her dead father’s ranch with only a lovable grizzled old coot for a ranchhand; a somber villain moving through his dark house like Dracula in his castle, hatching designs on the heroine’s land as well as her body; a land-grabbing industrialist conspiring with the local banker to turn rangeland into oil wells; a tall, quiet wrangler winning the girl’s heart and saving her land to boot; singing cowboys, fireside heart-to-hearts, a crisis with hero and heroine trapped by villain in a burning building, a climactic shootout, and boy-gets-girl. From the tentative cynicism of The Parallax View and All the President’s Men, Pakula hasreturned with a vengeance to the romantic melodrama of his earlier films, all characterized by essentially corny ideas handled in an utterly uncorny manner. Kluteand Comes a Horsemanare but two special cases of the same basic plot overlay: tough professional man saves woman from villainy and from herself, winning her heart in the process. And The Sterile Cuckoo, Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing, Klute, andComes a Horsemanmay all be seen as variations on the theme of simple, direct man dealing with complex, independent woman.

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Essays

The Pakula Parallax

Written by Richard T. Jameson August 14, 2009June 9, 2020

[originally published in Film Comment Vol. 12 No. 5, September/October 1976]

There is no more classical filmmaker than Alan J. Pakula at work in the American cinema todayâ€”a description that applies at several levels. Among contemporary directorial hotshots he is a comparative veteran, having been employed in one capacity or another in the studio system since the late Forties. The meticulous production values of his films suggest more affinity to the Old Hollywood than to the Age of the Cinemobile, although the seamless fusion of location work and impeccably detailed soundstage recreations (Stroheim could scarcely have improved on stuffing the All the President’s Men wastebaskets with authentic Washington Post trash) sit well with presentday preferences for verismo.

Similarly, the astonishing density of performance he elicits from the merest bit-player yields the kind of behavioral richness associated with the ensemble professionalism of a bygone generation of character actors. Indeed, he goes one better. Even when a performer is trotting out his or her familiar specialty number (William Daniels’ fidgety-smarmy political aide in The Parallax View, Valerie Curtin’s teary collapse when Woodstein appears at her door a second time in All the President’s Men), the character has an edge and validity that suggest Pakula has taken the player back to the origin of the shtik, and beyond.

Another salient element of the director’s “Hollywood classicism” is his almost Hitchcockian shrewdness about tone and pacing. This figures crucially in All the President’s Men‘s success as an irresistibly compelling general-audience picture which neither sacrifices seriousness of purpose nor betrays the attenuated time-and-space conditions of the events it recounts. In fact, in All the President’s Men and its companions in the so-called “paranoia trilogy,” Klute (1971) and The Parallax View (1974), entertainment (suspense, excitement) and art (critical perspective, formal perception, humane comprehension) are served collaterally by way of sheer, goosepimply engrossment. (And even though The Parallax View, for one, failed to dent the box office, every audience I saw it with was riveted to the screen.)

13 Ways of Looking at The Parallax View

Written by Robert C. Cumbow August 14, 2009June 9, 2020

[Originally published in Movietone News 34, August 1974]

1.

parallax_view_poster — The Parallax View

The Parallax View is an interesting suspense thriller with a thin plot involving a newspaper reporter named Frady (Warren Beatty) and his independent investigation of an employment bureau for assassins.

2.

The Parallax View is Alan Pakula’s hommage to Alfred Hitchcock, employing many of the Master’s techniques and devices, particularly his penchant for experimenting with different kinds of suspense and various ways of fulfilling—or not fulfilling—audience expectation. Pakula primes us for Hitchcock allusions with his precredit sequence, a high-altitude assassination and fistfight culminating in a fall from the Space Needle. The Needle is used even more casually than Hitchcock used the Statue of Liberty (Saboteur) and Mount Rushmore (North by Northwest).

3.

Like much of Hitchcock’s best work, and like Truffaut’s La Mariée était en noir, The Parallax View works consistently against its soundtrack. The film’s most arresting sequences take place while the track booms away irrelevantly with parade marches, political speeches, patriotic music. There is almost no crucial dialogue, and whole scenes—most notably one aboard an airplane threatened by a bomb—are played out against a subdued jumble of background noise. Later, a politician is murdered while his pre-recorded speech drones on. But while a blind person could not begin to follow the film, neither could a deaf person fully grasp its impact; for the ironic contrast between sight and sound in The Parallax View significantly amplifies the film’s theme of deliberately deceptive appearances. Michael Small’s sparse music score nicely reflects this irony in its use of a quick series of falling notes for solo trumpet. At its best moments, it calls to mind heroic aspirations echoing ineffectually off the spacious, sterile architecture that becomes the film’s principal and most memorable visual image.

Essays

The Parallax View: An Introduction

Written by Sean Axmaker August 14, 2009June 9, 2020

[Originally published on the Turner Classic Movies website on March 2009.]

Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View, a political thriller with an unmistakable resemblance to the Kennedy assassination, was not the first conspiracy thriller to emerge from Hollywood – you can trace the lineage back to The Manchurian Candidate in 1962 – and it was not a hit when it was fitfully released in 1974. But its reputation and stature has only grown in the years since and it is arguably the definitive conspiracy thriller of the seventies.

Warren Beatty as investigative reporter Joe Frady

Warren Beatty stars as investigative reporter Joe Frady, though when we first glimpse him in the film he’s merely a face in the crowd around Senator Charles Carroll (William Joyce). He tries to bluff his way into an exclusive gathering for the Senator at the top of the Space Needle in Seattle but is rebuffed and thus left on the ground when the Senator is shot and the gunman killed in an escape attempt. “There is no evidence of a conspiracy,” concludes a panel of judges, who proclaim it the work of a lone gunman. (We, of course, know there was at least one accomplice who slipped to safety.). It’s the film’s answer to the Warren Commission and Pakula shoots the tribunal floating in a sea of shadow, a tiny image that slowly, ominously grows larger as the credits roll. By the end of the sequence, they fill the screen with an image as distorted as their conclusions.

In those first few minutes, Pakula establishes an atmosphere of unease and a distrust of authority that never lets up. When we catch of with Frady three years later, being hounded by the police for his investigations into drug crimes and enforcement, he comes on like a dogged reporter from a thirties newspaper drama with seventies style, a mix of old school and modern sensibility. But even he is dubious of conspiracy claims until fellow reporter and ex-girlfriend Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) turns up dead (a suicide is the ruling, but Frady doesn’t buy it). She’s the seventh of twenty witnesses to the Senator Carroll shooting to die in the three years since, and once Frady takes up the case, he discovers that he is also now a target. With the tacit support of a paternal editor (Hume Cronyn), Frady follows his clues to the mysterious Parallax Corporation and, with the help of a former FBI agent (Kenneth Mars) and a psychologist (an uncredited Anthony Zerbe), catches the interest of a sinister recruiter (Walter McGinn). “If you qualify, and we think you can, we’re prepared to offer you the most lucrative and rewarding work of your life.”