3 Movies | October 7th
The 1970s, particularly the first half of the decade, were ripe for paranoia. The accumulated events and revelations of the preceding years brought a pervasive sense of dread and mistrust out of society’s fringes, those darker places where conspiracy theories thrive and into the mainstream. The Warren Commission report on the JFK assassination only stoked greater speculation and doubt about its lone gunman findings; Charles Manson and his murderous “family” put an evil grin on the communal love-and-peace face of the counterculture; the Pentagon Papers shed light on deceit and malfeasance in our highest halls of government during the Viet Nam war. And this was all before President Richard Nixon launched a criminal cover-up that led to his downfall.
Historian Richard Hofstadter published an essay in 1964 on “paranoid style” to describe “the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” in American politics (an environment discernable in the Goldwater era and even more magnified and mainstreamed in the 21st century). Although not noted in Hofstadter’s influential work, the term could also be applied to the cultural landscape of the time. In Thomas Pynchon’s groundbreaking novels “The Crying of Lot 49” (1966) and “Gravity’s Rainbow” (1973), we get a wild, comic picture of a world in which, according to William Burroughs, paranoia is simply having all the facts. Or as Joseph Heller, in his novel “Catch-22,” declared, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
The same creeping dread found its way into the films of the era, reaching its apex in such popular features as The Conversation (1974), Chinatown (1974) and Three Days of the Condor (1975). And, of course, in what has come to be known as Alan J. Pakula ‘s “Paranoia Trilogy,” a trio of films perfectly timed for “a decade defined by mistrust, cynicism, and crumbling faith in American institutions” (Tyler Aquilina, Entertainment Weekly, 2021).
Klute (1971) is a psychological thriller and a dark study of the unlikely relationship between a New York call girl (Jane Fonda, in her first Oscar-winning role) and a small-town detective (Donald Sutherland) investigating the disappearance of his friend. Pakula fills his frames with paranoid style, beginning with the very first shot of a tape recorder, a potent signifier of spying and invasion of privacy. Fonda’s Bree Daniels has been getting disturbing anonymous calls and “sick” letters from a former client, and her behavior from the beginning, even before she or the audience fully grasp the danger she’s in, betrays her fear and paranoia. She frequently checks her surroundings before she moves ahead, whether on the street or in the hallway leading to her apartment. She admits to being afraid of the dark, of thinking she hears or sees things, but as she tells Sutherland, “Okay, yeah, I get these feelings, but they’re just feelings. That’s just me.” Except they’re not just feelings: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
The character is often glimpsed through windows and doorways, from neighboring rooftops. Even her potential protector, Sutherland’s Detective John Klute, is following her, watching, taping her phone calls and he in turn is also being followed and watched. Elements of the backgrounds and edges of the frame contribute to the paranoia: a funeral home sign, an image – more like a police sketch – of JFK on her apartment wall.
Then there is the distinctive lighting style of one of the period’s most influential and respected cinematographers, Gordon Willis, in his first of six collaborations with Pakula, including the other two films in the trilogy. Willis’s work on this picture proved to be game-changing, for him and for the art of cinematography. For the first time, he employed lighting from above to create evocative silhouettes and deep shadows on the actors’ faces. The result was a moody noir-like atmosphere with key elements of some shots partially obscured, earning him the nickname “The Prince of Darkness.” Willis’s technique was bold for its time but the look soon permeated many of the most significant movies of the 1970s and beyond.
The menace in this film goes beyond the stalker-killer trope and deep into the paranoia of a lone woman in a world dominated by predatory men. Even the “happy ending” leaves room for suspicion as she gives up her autonomy, however shaky, and leaves the threatening city for an unknown she dreads, confessing to her therapist that she is ill-suited for a new life that could very well make her go out of mind.
The Parallax View (1974) amps up the paranoia considerably by expanding it from intimate psychological suspense to the broader scope of deadly events happening at the top levels of power and control. It begins with the very title, a phrase associated, quite appropriately here, with both guns and cameras, meaning a change in the apparent position of an object caused by a change in the observer's line of sight. In other words, you can’t quite trust what you see, what you’re looking at may not be where it actually is, there’s more than meets the eye.
In a story inspired by the spate of political assassinations in the 1960s, particularly the killing of Robert Kennedy, Warren Beatty plays a reporter driven by the fate of an ex-girlfriend to investigate the mysterious deaths of witnesses to the murder of a presidential candidate. As he gets further into his quest, he uncovers a corporation that recruits and trains assassins. The movie ends with a chilling facsimile of the Warren Commission concluding that the murder of another senator at a political rally was the work of a lone gunman acting out of paranoid fantasies and “a confused and distorted state of mind.”
Principal photography began before the script was even finalized. Various writers were brought in, including Beatty favorite Robert Towne (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967), and more and more layers of intrigue were added until the picture bore only glancing resemblance to Loren Singer’s 1970 novel, leading New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby to conclude that the central idea was treated “so soberly that they sabotage credulity.” Some critics had a hard time accepting the notion that “the world is changed more by rational planning, however evil, than it is by irrational individual actions” (Richard Schickel, Time). But others from the period saw the relevance of the subject matter, recognizing “what gives the movie its real force is the way its menace keeps absorbing material from contemporary life” (Joseph Kanon, The Atlantic). In recent years, the film has been more widely praised, with many reviews singling out one of Beatty’s career best performances.
The film was released just a couple months prior to Richard Nixon’s resignation and less than a year before the fall of Saigon. America was eager to move past the social unrest of the 60s, the war and Watergate and not ready to embrace a film that was not only about paranoia, but a deeply paranoid film, in the words of one reviewer. As a result, the film struggled at the year’s box office. Perhaps audiences were less inclined to accept a downbeat resolution that offered no light or hope or comfort, and perhaps it did strain some belief, as highly fictionalized and over the top as it may have been. Not so with the third film of the trilogy.
Things get real in All the President’s Men (1976). The paranoia isn’t merely a device or stylistic flourish; it arises from the real-life revelations around Watergate and the subsequent cover-up perpetrated by the Nixon administration that gripped the entire country early in the decade – and continues to resonate in the years since. Not only are the protagonists of this story surveilled and threatened as they work to uncover the conspiracy, but the entire American system hangs in the balance. And because the story is true, it can’t be dismissed as the product of a fevered and suspicious imagination, as “just me,” “just feelings.” Now that’s some paranoia.
William Goldman, who wrote the novel and screenplay for another 70s paranoiac thriller, Marathon Man (1976), adapted the book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) about their dogged pursuit of the Watergate story. What could have been simply a great journalism tale (and it is considered one of the best) becomes on screen a nail-biting procedural, as full of twists and turns and tension as any crime drama or film noir. Pakula is once again aided by the singular approach of director of photography Gordon Willis, whose dark style is a dead-on fit for such scenes as the parking garage conversations with the mysterious and legendary informant Deep Throat.
The film received nearly universal critical acclaim and multiple nominations and awards, including Oscars for art direction-set decoration (for the exacting depiction of the newsroom), sound, Goldman’s adaptation and Best Supporting Actor (Jason Robards as Post editor Ben Bradlee). It was also a big box office success, grossing almost its entire budget in its first week in theaters.
So why were critics and audiences more willing to embrace this story far more than the director’s previous thriller? For one thing, the heroes do not die, they uncover the truth and, by the time the film was released, the “bad guys” had, in the public’s eye, been taken down. As Richard T. Jameson noted in a 1976 Film Comment article, the film “is committed to an infectious celebration of professional diligence and…righteous action.”
Pakula amplified this in an interview in the same issue: “I had just made a film, The Parallax View, which someone... said had destroyed the American hero myth. If that’s true, All the President’s Men resurrects it. One film says the individual will be destroyed, it’s Kafkaesque that way, Central European... The Woodward and Bernstein story is the antithesis of that. Film students have asked me how I could do one and then the other, and I say, it’s very simple: Parallax View represents my fear about what’s going on, and All the President’s Men represents my hope.”
By the time of the film’s release and in the decades that followed, the national mood – thanks in no small part to the events depicted – was increasingly one of cynicism, suspicion, insecurity and mistrust in even the most cherished foundations of American life. One wonders what Alan J. Pakula, who died tragically in 1998, would make of the state of paranoia in the 2020s.
