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I cannot get past the message of this movie. It's laid out much too clearly to ignore, and it is obscene because it has lost its sense of what it's about. I haven't read the novel, but Pollack's film opens with a scene at a CIA-front organization in New York, which is broken into by two professional assassins, headed by Max von Sydow, who proceed to brutally slaughter the half dozen quirky staff members we've come to know and understand. The staff include an elderly female receptionist, a fussy elderly professorial guy who's toupee falls off when he is machine-gunned (is that a joke?), and, last, the beautiful Tina Chen who looks up from the copier, realizes she is about to be murdered, and says, pitifully brave, "I won't scream." Von Sydow replies sympathetically, "I know." These murders are completely unexpected, savage, unmotivated by anything that we are aware of, and graphic. It is a brutal scene.
There is absolutely no way in which von Sydow and his henchman can be redeemed. And yet that is exactly what Pollack tries to do towards the end.
After having killed these innocent good guys, von Sydow switches sides (because the other side is willing to pay him) and assassinates the evil mastermind behind a complicated intramural CIA plot. The script then turns him into a perfectly reasonable, sensitive human being. "It is better to live in Europe. Things are not so rushed." Or whatever. I swear I'm not making this up. Pollack wants us to believe that it is better to be an honest mass murderer than a crooked bureaucrat. That's the message. You should write it down in case you forget. Just exactly what kind of psychiatric shambles do you have to be in order to turn ordinary values, not to mention common sense, upside-down like that? I understand that there are thoughtful adults who dislike the government of the United States, even hate it, and who see conspiracies just about everywhere, providing a knee-jerk explanation for otherwise unexplainable events. I know that people who think this way exist because I number some of them among my closer friends. Nevertheless, at some point this dislike, this hatred, if it increases in intensity, must pass beyond politics or ethics and into the realm of the psychiatric. I don't for a moment believe that a man who murders people for money is better than a sinister government official. I don't care how suave and cultured the murderer is or whether he knows how to reach the Louvre on the Metro. Whoever is purveying that message needs either medication or meditation.
I'd like to be able to argue that the production is as thoroughly rotten as its message, but I can't. It's quite well done. (In some ways that's worse, because it makes the film less dismissable.) Even New York City looks photogenic on the screen. And it's been a long time since I've thought of New York as photogenic. Robert Redford does an admirable job of projecting his character's initial shock and confusion, but then turns into a telecommunicational semi-genius. And, man, he looks just fine! His wardrobe is just right. Even his rimless glasses are becoming. And his peacoat. It's not everyone who can make a navy pea jacket look glamorous. He seems extremely handsome too, the swine. I want to look like that. I want to wear a denim shirt and a tie with such panache. Faye Dunaway is alright in her role but it's not too believable a role. Would anybody eagerly sleep with a guy who has just kidnapped her and is holding her at gunpoint? Even if he did look like Redford? Would anyone be emotionally wounded if, when this ambivalent relationship is about to end, Redford asked her not to tell anybody about what happened? Cliff Robertson is surprisingly good. He does one or two extremely good double-takes. The mailman is superb. The fight between him and Redford in a crowded apartment is exquisitely choreographed and, for once, we really don't know for sure how it will turn out, because Redford (a book reader after all) seems mismatched against the brute cunning of this hired assassin. This is one of John Housemann's final roles. A shame. He's a magnet on screen. And what an end to his life: a friend finds him lost, wandering the streets of New York, in a neighborhood he'd been familiar with for most of his life.
Yes, the movie is very well executed, but I can't ignore that vicious, paranoid message. I have the same problem with Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will." Or her Olympic documentary in which the announcer is watching a foot race in which Jesse Owens is pulling into the lead and says ominously, "This Negro is dangerous."


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