Sydney Pollack: Three Days of the Condor

Note #1: Throughout this retrospective I’ve referenced this interview with Pollack. I couldn’t find a place to reference it in this piece, so I figured I would put it up at the beginning. 

Note #2: Many, many thanks to Odie, whose fresh look at this piece helped trim a lot of the fat. This was one of the first pieces I actually started working on when I decided to do a retrospective on Pollack, and I was dreading the due date because I knew I was nowhere close to finishing it since I found myself adding more and more every week. If I were rich, I would hire an editor for this blog because god knows I often need one. Thanks, Odie!

In 1975, Sydney Pollack released two movies that were polar opposites in tone and style. His first release that year was the Paul Schrader-penned The Yakuza – a violent tale of a begrudging partnership that was new territory for Pollack – and the second release was yet another vehicle with his favorite star (to that point) Robert Redford that tackled a popular theme of the mid-‘70s (paranoia), Three Days of the Condor. The former is something of a cult classic now and thought fondly by those that like the divergence in style and tone Pollack took in directing that film; however, the latter is the more popular (and one of the most popular of Pollack’s oeuvre) and the film that stays with me much more so than the former. Three Days of the Condor is not Pollack’s best film, but it’s one of my favorites  in the way it sets up themes and tropes he would later tackle in films like The Firm (and in the films he acted in like Michael Clayton and Changing Lanes) and for what is probably my favorite performance that Redford gave Pollack.

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Summer of Slash: Evilspeak

Like The Bogeyman and Superstition, Evilspeak was another example of the popular tendency around the early ‘80s to mix slasher elements with supernatural horror – thanks in part to the financial success of films like The Exorcist and Carrie as well as the advent of the commercially successful slasher template created by Halloween and taken to new heights by Friday the 13^th. This was an interesting time to be a horror fan because you would get odd little hybrid movies like Evilspeak; yeah, it might be a bit of a cheat to feature this film in a series on the slasher film, but as I’ve stated numerous times: if I weren’t able play fast and loose with the format of this series, I’d probably go crazy. So it is with Evilspeak: a film that is mostly a knock-off of Carrie that has some of the clichés made famous by the slasher subgenre.

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Summer of Slash: Communion (AKA Alice, Sweet Alice)

More like a Hitchcock film or the British exploitation film Frightmare, Communion is nothing like what I’m sure those coming to the film late – with the idea in their head about what a slasher movie is supposed to be – think it is. In fact, the best way to describe Alfred Sole’s horror film (which is very good, by the way) is that it’s probably the closest thing America ever got to an honest-to-goodness giallo. The reason it feels more like giallo – which were essentially Italian slasher movies before we knew what slashers were (or, more specifically, before John Carpenter decided that it’s more effective – and more profitable – if teens are in peril instead of grown women) – is due to the tone and the pacing of the film which is very much of its time and perfectly encapsulates ‘70s, pre-Black Christmas/Halloween horror). Communion may not be as influential as Bob Clark’s film or John Carpenter’s film (or, if you want, Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre), but it’s one of the true hidden gems of 1970’s American horror and arguably (and it’s an argument I would be willing to make) deserves to have a spot at the table of those two giants of the subgenre.

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Sydney Pollack: The Yakuza

Before I get started with The Yakuza, I should point out that two things have been very clear in the three films – They Shoot Horses Don’t They?, Jeremiah Johnson, and The Way We Were – I’ve covered in this retrospective so far: one is that more than anything else, Sydney Pollack is a director that makes no bones about the fact that he is more interested in the performance of the actor than the art of the director; the second thing is that no matter what kind of story he is telling – be it Depression-era drama about dance marathons or Transcendentalist westerns or political thrillers (more on that next week) – he’ll always make time in his films for human relationships, specifically the relationships between men and women.

I bring this up because in 1975, Pollack released two genre films that seem like departures for the director and the very thing he values most in film; however, if you look closely at both The Yakuza and Three Days of the Condor, you’ll see that even amidst the action and chases and confusing screenplays, there’s always a languid moment here and there – despite what the film is really after – to connect lonely, singular individuals. There’s always a goal to connect the protagonist with something – women/men, nature, vocation – of meaning (so I guess it’s safe to call Pollack an Existential filmmaker of sorts). The reason for this is simple: Pollack claimed once in an interview that the relationship between humans (men and women especially) interests him more than anything else because “it’s a metaphor for everything else in life.” So even The Yakuza, a Sydney Pollack film that doesn’t really feel all that much like a Sydney Pollack film (it’s more of a genre film), there are quiet moments where the characters are allowed to talk and exist, however briefly, in a less chaotic world than the one they normally inhabit. 

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Summer of Slash: Further Thoughts on Friday the 13th Series

I'm taking the week off from Summer of Slash after too much Jason Voorhees. So, in lieu of my own horror content on the blog this week, I will gladly point you towards the gracious Michael Grover of the blog Filmiliarity who has taken it upon himself to finish the Friday the 13th series with more in-depth reviews. His first entry, A New Beginning, is up and can be found here. Enjoy. The Slash will continue next week.

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Summer of Slash: Friday the 13th Wrap-up

Frequent commenter Michael Grover has graciously offered to write up more in-depth reviews at his blog Filmiliarity, so click on that link and check for updates on his blog if you’re interested in more than the pithy way I blitzed through these final six entries in the series.

In my last edition of this series on the Friday films, I mentioned that after The Final Chapter was released in 1984 the series took on a different gimmick with each subsequent film. The series would never be the same; it would never look like what we thought slashers were supposed to look like. After 1984, the slasher genre changed thanks to upstart New Line Cinema and the movie that revived horror maven Wes Craven’s career, A Nightmare on Elm Street. Because of this shift in the subgenre, the likes of Jason just didn’t seem to cut it anymore. Sure, people were still paying money to see these movies (they would always be profitable, even until the horrible tenth installment which just barely made its budget back, a first for a series that usually had no problem making three-to-six times what they put into it), but it seemed that the slasher landscape had changed. Part of this is due to New Line’s popularizing of Freddy Krueger by turning him from a scary boogeyman to a murderous quipster. Obviously Jason Voorhees couldn’t compete with this (nor could Michael Myers, probably the most inert of all slasher series), so the producers decided to try and keep with the times by placing him in wacky situations.

As I think about the subsequent films, only one stands out. The series devolved into an even more frustrating template and malaise than the first three sequels. Whereas the early sequels (2-4) seem somewhat of a piece (interestingly, Part 2 and Part 3 were the only sequels not assigned a subtitle) since they were rooted (or, they were supposed to be, but Part 3 seems to exist in a vacuum) in exploitation, the subsequent films adopt the feel of the more postmodern, detached slasher film of the post-1985 horror era – a slasher that is too self-reflexive and almost mocking the audience paying money to watch it. It was an interesting era for the slasher because so much nothing came from it; the only thing worthwhile being released that even resembled the early slashers were coming out of Italy. It was not the best time to be a horror fan, and I think that people tend to forget just how close the slasher subgenre was to being completely dead by the time Jason took Manhattan and Paramount sold the rights to their most profitable film series to New Line.

Here are my thoughts on the rest of the series (I will not be including the abomination that is Freddy vs. Jason or the 2009 remake of Friday):

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Sydney Pollack: The Way We Were

The Way We Were is everything its title song suggests: capital “d” dramatic and capital “r” romantic. In other words, it’s not subtle at all. It’s not even close to my favorite of Pollack’s films (Pollack himself didn’t seem to care all that much for the film, stating that his biggest accomplishment was merely, “getting the thing made”), but there’s something classically deliberate and endearing about the tone of the first half of the film: an hour that knows exactly the kind of film it is and executes the romantic melodrama perfectly. It’s in the second half of the film that story becomes problematic as Pollack and his screenwriter Arthur Laurents try to cram too many topical, political subplots into the film. The effect is a film that starts off earnest in its romantic schmaltziness but devolves into a film totally unable to shift tones.

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