[Originally published in Movietone News 31, April 1974]
Busting represents yet another casualty of the Butch Cassidy/Sundance Kid syndrome. Telltale symptoms: a wisecracking, ultra-cool male duo (here substitute Elliott Gould and Robert Blake for Paul Newman and Robert Redford) at odds with a world they never made and cannot change, humor and mutual loyalty their only weapons against a graceless, corrupt environment. And it’s so seductive, this syndrome. It’s like being a bright-eyed whippersnapper of a kid set loose among a bunch of dull, dishonest grownups—and with a blood brother to boot! You can play at being a cop (as in Busting) or a robber (ButchCassidy and TheSting)—makes no difference, as long as you do it with the style and verve that makes all those corrupt or rule-bound adults look like spoilsports. Shades of Huckleberry Finn and Nigger Jim, Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook! Leslie Fiedler must be giggling in his beard: “Come back to the raft, Sundance honey!”
[Originally published in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979]
“What if the greatest event in recent history never really happened?” ask the ads, above a shot of astronauts exiting a space module onto an alien surface, surrounded by the lights and cameras of a Hollywood TV soundstage. But Capricorn Oneis at pains early on to establish that John Glenn did orbit the earth, Neil Armstrong did walk on the moon; it’s this trip, to Mars, that’s going to be faked, and all because some nasty politicians threaten to discontinue the space program altogether unless the mission comes off without a hitch. The surprise is that, despite this initial shillyshallying with our expectations and its own intentions, Peter Hyams’s film comes off as a competent, interesting, often nail-biting thriller. The focus of the film is a trio of astronauts forced to compromise themselves by participating in a fake Mars landing—actually staged in an abandoned hangar not far from Houston and televised worldwide—calculated to save the space program (no waffling here: the film actually calls it NASA) by simulating success in a mission that actually could not have worked because of equipment discovered (too late) to be defective. The real twist comes when the unmanned rocket genuinely sent into space loses its heat shield and burns up on re-entry: With the world mourning their deaths, the three astronauts realize that, alive, they are worse than an embarrassment to NASA and the politicos who support it, and so flee their isolated prison in a stolen jet, only to crash-land a short time later in the west Texas desert. They struggle for survival in an environment as forbiddingly alien as any Martian landscape, and the film becomes a space adventure without going into space. There are monsters (a snake, a scorpion, and two helicopters that stalk the fleeing astronauts like birds of prey, their presence as menacingly animate as the snake-headed spacecraft of the Martians in Pal and Haskin’s The War of the Worlds)and even alien-looking villains in the form of two helmeted helicopter pilots who hunt the last astronaut in a tumbledown gas station.
