The Stalking Moon

Gregory Peck reteams with To Kill a Mockingbird director Robert Mulligan and producer Alan J. Pakula on The Stalking Moon (1968). A unique Western, it falls outside the late '60s revisionist trend, presenting instead a suspenseful cat-and-mouse game.

Aged scout Sam Varner (Gregory Peck) fulfills his last duty to the US Army by rounding up escaped Apaches. Among them is Sarah (Eva Marie Saint), a white captive who's lived among the Apaches for years, raising a half-breed son (Noland Clay). Sam reluctantly agrees to escort them to safety, only to find Apache warrior Salvaje (Nathaniel Narcisco) pursuing, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. Sam joins Indian tracker Nick (Robert Forster) and stationmaster Ned (Russell Thorson) to defend Sarah and her son from Salvaje's wrath.

The Stalking Moon is marvelously pared-down. Superficially resembling the previous year's Hombre, it jettisons that movie's oversized cast and racial posturing. Alvin Sargent's straightforward script proves sparse on dialogue and elliptical in motivation. Characterization rests on small moments, like Sam and Sarah's awkward supper or Nick teaching the boy poker. Stalking Moon knows where it's going and doesn't dawdle unnecessarily.

Mulligan handles the plot efficiently, more taut thriller than traditional Western. Charles Lang's beautiful photography only enhances the story's dread: Salvaje appears as an elemental, remorseless Fate, his motivation chillingly indistinct. The ultimate siege proves familiar, with characters whittled down through stupid mistakes. (Would you feed your dog with a murderous Apache outside?) But the climax pays off when Sam and Salvaje go mano a mano in decidedly brutal fashion.

Gregory Peck plays Sam like a more grizzled Hondo Lane, tough, weather-beaten but good-hearted. Eva Marie Saint (North by Northwest) adroitly handles a role requiring little dialogue or overt emotion. Robert Forster (Jackie Brown) makes a likeable sidekick, charm overcoming a poor makeup job. The supporting cast gets less chance to shine, with James Olsen, Frank Silvera, Lonnie Chapman and Russell Thorson reduced to bit parts.

The Stalking Moon is an underrated Western. Made when most Westerns went for graphic violence or liberal preaching, Robert Mulligan's economical storytelling stands out.

The Parallax View

This flaky piece of paranoia is a time capsule glimpse at the uber-paranoid '70s, when no conspiracy theory seemed too outlandish. In simplest terms, The Parallax View (1974) is a well-crafted thriller that's impossible to take seriously. To think it came from the man who made the sober, fact-based All the President's Men (1977) is disheartening.

Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) is a newspaper reporter who witnesses the assassination of liberal Senator Charles Carroll (Billy Joyce). A fellow reporter, Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss), approaches Frady several years later, claiming that despite the official ruling of a lone gunman, she believes there was a conspiracy to kill Carroll - and that the conspirators are bumping off witnesses. Frady brushes Lee off, but she soon turns up dead under questionable circumstances. Soon Frady is on the trail of the assassins, a mysterious corporation called Parallax, and infiltrates the group to save another politician (Jim Davis) from termination.

Among the most traumatic aspects of the '60s was the wave of assassinations (the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X). Refusing to believe that nobodies with guns could kill great men, a great many believed that vast conspiracies involving some combination of the Government, Big Business, the CIA, the Mob, right-wing nuts and space aliens did away with Kennedy and King. This trauma proved potent enough to spawn an entire subgenre of films - the conspiracy thriller - that still crops up, albeit less frequently, to this day (The X-Files, The International).

Oddly enough, the interesting Spaghetti Western The Price of Power (1969) may be the first film to tackle the Kennedy Assassination, albeit allegorically. The year before Parallax View saw Executive Action, a cheapjack "docu-drama" that plays like a rough draft of Oliver Stone's JFK. The best of these films (Z, All the President's Men) benefit from remaining grounded in reality, however angry their message and tone. None of these films, however, has the full-bore insanity of The Parallax View, perhaps the most cartoonish example of Watergate-era paranoia.

To say The Parallax View strains credulity is like calling the sun hot. This film assumes the conspirators have an infinite capacity to cover up and "silence" witnesses, able to simulate heart attacks and sneak assassins into the most isolated hick town. That's not even the biggest problem: there's no real motive presented for these assassinations. At least JFK posited a (inaccurate and silly) reason why the Powers That Be wanted Kennedy dead. Vaguely-liberal politicians everywhere are fair game in this universe, I guess. I'm sure others can stomach this nonsense, but I find it hard to accept Parallax even on its own wacky terms.

Then there's the celebrated montage halfway through the film. It defines pretentious: mashing idyllic photographs with images of '60s violence, it exists merely to call attention to itself, doing nothing to advance the plot and bogging down an already-draggy narrative. It's easy to "shock" viewers by cutting between a portrait of George Washington and a still from Triumph of the Will ("Washington! Hitler!"), but what does it actually mean? American culture is violent and the government lies? Stop the presses.

Alan J. Pakula does a fine job directing the film. Aside from the above montage, Pakula is a solid craftsman, even if his docudrama stylings occasionally clash with the commercial need for sensational action. The movie is beautifully filmed by Gordon Willis, especially the climactic assassination, which makes fine use of wide-angle shots and Dutch angles. And the opening scene is superb, its chaotic staging closely echoing Bobby Kennedy's shooting. There's nothing much wrong Parallax aside from its story, but sadly the story matters a great deal.

Warren Beatty makes a perfect Liberal Hero, the long-haired handsome journalist who single-handedly takes on the System and (almost) brings it down. Hume Cronyn (Shadow of a Doubt) gets a thankless role as Beatty's long-suffering editor. Bill McKinney (The Shootist) is creepy as a nameless assassin and Paula Prentiss (The Stepford Wives) makes a strong impression with minimal screen time. Walter McGinn (Three Days of the Condor), Kenneth Mars (Young Frankenstein), Jim Davis (El Dorado) and William Daniels (The Graduate) are fine in supporting roles.

The Parallax View is laughable, badly dated junk. It may well have been "provocative" at the time, and certainly has technical merits, but it comes off as juvenile today, a scary bedtime story for '70s liberals.

All the President's Men

Easily the best of the '70s anti-government thrillers, All the President's Men (1976) is a gripping take on the Watergate scandal and the reporters who helped bring it to light. Drawing on Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's explosive best-seller, it provides a chilling account of government malfeasance, and a glowing portrait of investigative journalism.

June 1972. Five men are caught burglarizing the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) do a routine investigation, only to find things not adding up: the burglars have their own attorney, and possible ties to the CIA and Richard Nixon's re-election campaign, and interviewees seem to be clamming up. Despite government pressure, skeptical managers and uncooperative witnesses, Woodward and Bernstein receive the blessing of editor Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards) to pursue the story, which threatens to implicate not only Nixon's advisors but the President himself.

All the President's Men unquestionably launched a thousand journalism careers, revising Hollywood stereotypes about reporters. Our heroes are vaguely anti-Establishment as embodied by Redford and Hoffman, but come off as hard-working, honest and dedicated to "getting it right," a counter to the cynical scribes of The Front Page and His Girl Friday. Bradlee lays out the importance of their effort, not to scoop the other guys but to get the truth: the stakes are free press and the rule of law. This may come off as naive and self-important in the era of Fox News, MSNBC and the blogosphere, but it's hard to deny Woodward and Bernstein their place in history.

As bleak as Watergate's messy fall-out was, the Woodward and Bernstein story provided something positive: the "fourth estate" doing its job of checking government excess. With President Nixon rotten to the core, and the subversives and protestors providing little more than incoherent noise, Americans needed somebody to trust. The post-Watergate compulsion for newspapers to uncover major scandals has had mixed reprecussions, but All the President's Men shows that an obsequieous press can be far worse.

Alan J. Pakula previously directed the ultimate paranoid conspiracy thriller, The Parallax View (1974), a lurid, feverish fairy tale that now plays like a bad X-Files episode. His telling of the Watergate story, however, sticks very close to the facts, with William Goldman getting the right mixture of subtle characterization, and telling details. Nixon's low-level thuggery, intimidation and surveillance is more chilling than an improbably-omnipotent conspiracy, as the truth generally is. Pakula provides relatively restrained direction, aside from a few stylish elements: the famous overhead zoom-out in the Library of Congress, the shadowy meetings with Deep Throat, deep-focus use of TV cameras contrasting Nixon with his antagonists, Robert Wolfe's rousing montage of cannons booming while typewriters spell out Nixon's doom.

Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman are pitch-perfect, giving low-key but compelling performances. They're backed up by an equally good supporting cast: Jason Robards (Once Upon a Time in the West) won an Oscar for his portrayal of the crusty Ben Bradlee, Hal Holbrook (Magnum Force) walks away with his scenes as the inscrutable Deep Throat, and dependable hands Martin Balsam (Hombre) and Jack Warden (12 Angry Men) are equally fine.

All the President's Men has stood the test of time, easily besting most of its peers. This isn't a deranged radical fantasy but a very real, gripping testiment to government corruption and the need for a vigilant press.