Just Because You're Paranoid...

Three Days of the Condor. Always use the back door. You never know, you may slip out for lunch one minute and return the next, pastrami and mustard in hand to find all your office mates spread across their desks, covered with blood. Meek and mild-mannered Robert Redford, who translates Russian novels for U.S. intelligence, came home to just such a spread, and leaving lunch aside, stepped into a phone booth and became "The Condor." The transformation is not complete--Redford is rather mild-mannered as a hero, too. When he calls into Central, he becomes a critical cog in the intelligence machine, but he spins a little out of synch. Trying to be his own man, Redford holes up in the apartment of a woman he kidnapped in a sporting goods store (didn't your always hope the man holding a gun in your back was Robert Redford?). Two world powers battle for the Condor, while he humps with a temperamental photographer. Once they catch up, Three Days of the Condor is a face-paced, carefully calculated thriller. Even Redford is convincing half the time.

On the Waterfront. You've heard all those "I cudda been a contenduh" imitations over the years, so you might as well take in the real thing. Marlon Brando predictably dominates this tale of corruption on the docks of Hoboken; his amoral, streetwise Terry Malone will always be remembered in the same breath as his Stanley Kowalski, and last tangoer in Paris. The portrayal of Brando's relationship with Eve Marie-Saint's paragon of prudery rankles a bit, sugary in a few embarrassing moments. Yet Elie Kazan's otherwise slick direction salvages the plot, wisely allowing Brando to showcase his still developing talents and heart-melting looks. Studded with a brilliant supporting cast, that featured Lee J. Cobb as a tyrannical union boss and Karl Malden as a crusading priest, On the Waterfront remains a prototype of Movies the Way They Used to Be: a crisply paced, moralistic film that uplifts and, above all, entertains.

The Conversation. Gene Hackman turns in a masterful portrayal of a plodding, quiet and eerily suspicious bugging expert who is hired by he's not sure whom to spy on a couple that might be the victims (or the perpretrators) of who knows what hideous crime of romantic vengeance. This Francis Ford Coppolla movie--made back when he still had money troubles--works hauntingly on at least three levels. Metaphorically, it serves to highlight the pathologically paranoid mood of the last years of the Nixon administration and the Watergate coverup. Intellectually it goes deeper than this; Hackman pain-stakingly and convincingly becomes a man who just can't handle the perversity and technical inhumanity of his occupation, and who begins to fathom the horror of people like him turning around and persecuting people like him. Dramatically, its suspense becomes brilliantly tense (in the sanitary paper wrapped around the motel toilet seat scene, for example). A good film, more disturbing the second time around.

Network. This film grabbed three Oscars for best actor, best actress and best screenplay in 1976, but it wasn't much of a year. The best thing about this movie about the shenanigans behind the evening news at UBS is commentator Peter Finch's letter-perfect imitation of Eric Sevareid. But once you get over your amusement at that stentorian phrasing you find nothing. This film is as sterile as a 30-second clip of Amy Carter walking to her integrated school. Faye Dunaway won her Oscar for Chinatown, not this lemon. Peter Finch is dead, and far be it from me to talk about the dead. A dignified William Holden as network news chief comes off rather like a Shetland pony in an 8 x 11 porno still--he looks more dignified than the questionable debutantes around him. Paddy Chayevsky's script is polemical, cliched, and like most tracts, boring. Watch Cronkite.

Picnic At Hanging Rock. Peter Weir's metaphysical mystery about the disappearance of several adolescent girls from a Victorian boarding school is often hilariously overdone, but the subject is eerie and the idea has potential.

The beginning is obvious but fun. There is no doubt as to what happens to the girls, but there follows more than an hour of ponderous, redundant "evidence," the result of an Agatha Christie-type structure which, Weir irritatingly enough, never fulfills. Weir may be an artist--he certainly makes films that proclaim their profundity--but he seems grounded in camp, and the movie stays shallow.

Norma Rae. When Sally Fields dropped from "The Flying Nun" into Burt Reynold's lap, a teen angel was despoiled, but no one took much notice. Martin Ritt, however, kept an eye on Fields, and plucked her from the backseat of Burt's van, where she last displayed her talents--prone--in Smokey and the Bandits. In Norma Rae, Ritt allows Fields aging starlet cuteness to work for her. A sassy, kick-around mill worker, Norma Rae is a woman cashing in on the vestiges of squirrel-mouthed, cheerleader prettiness. The story is hockey, but it plays. Widowed by a beer brawl and left with two children, one illegitimate, Norma Rae is trapped in a one-industry, two-bit, sexist little town. She marries a muscle-bound teddy-bear, but she only comes to value herself through a friendship with a New York Jew labor organizer. There's no sex, no racial problems, and pretty simple politics--it sounds like "Gidget goes to Harlan Country"--but thanks to some good acting and direction, it is much more effective than feminist self-discovery movies in the vein of 'An Unmarried Woman or One Sings the Other Doesn't.

Get Out Your Handkerchiefs. Named Best Film of 1978 by the National Society of Film Critics, this film is a big hit with the Perrier Crowd, and it's packed the Welles since the opening. Reminiscent of Cousin, Cousin in its playful attitude toward sexual improprieties, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs fails to develop its characters much behind their pretty faces. Solange, the heroine, has three lovers: two are buffoons, her husband and a stranger he recruited to cheer her up, and one, a thirteen-year-old boy, is sensitive to her need for friendship. The plot is inconsistent, the jokes are obvious, and the direction is heavy-handed. You might find this film a clever and copy French farce--if you're drunk.

Murder By Decree. Fog, dense and lush, curling its way through London alleys and along seedy docksides, obscuring the face of Big Ben himself, and wrapping around the skirts of chilled and hapless prostitutes...A sinister black coach drawn by sinister black horses into a sinister black night...Inside, one of Britain's most famous Victorians slowly savors the edge of a jeweled dagger, and waits...A delicious setting for first rate sherlock holmes sleuthing, but unfortunately Sherlock Holmes never shows up--Christopher Plummer does. Dressed in the right clothes, and equipped with the best Dr. Watson ever, Plummer has potential, but he never forgets about that charming scar on his lower lip, that little half-smile, that direct and demanding gaze. Who ever heard of a sexy, suave, passionate Holmes, with blow-dried hair and visible muscles? A new modern Holmes might have worked, but the screenplay stops far short of Conan Doyle's stories, and Bob Clark's heavy-handed direction relies too much on weird music, heavy breathing, and heartbeats to create an atmosphere of horror and anticipation. A lot of vintage detail, but very little substance betray Clark's B-movie origins. It's not all that bad but it's not Sherlock Holmes. As the master sleuth himself would have said. It's elementary, my dear Watson. What we have here is an impostor. Would the real Sherlock Holmes ever stoop to such depths of passion? Never, sir."