Today I watched Peter Hyams's Capricorn One for the first time, and I was struck by a couple of things. One of those things was not exactly a revelation, but is worth noting anyway (and which will, in any case, lead me to the second thing) and it is that Hal Holbrook is a brilliant actor. He has at least three big scenes in Hyams's paranoid thriller about a faked NASA Mars-landing. In the first one, Holbrook, as NASA bigwig Dr. Kelloway, is laying out the truth behind the Capricorn One mission to the three astronauts (James Brolin, Sam Waterston, and -- ah well -- O. J. Simpson) who, just moments ago, believed that a bomb was going to go off under their asses and blow them clean to Mars, for real. Skipping ahead to the second scene, Kelloway is conducting a press conference in which he announces that the three astronauts were killed on re-entry (they weren't, because they never went to Mars, but Kelloway is working behind the scenes to make them actually dead). Finally, in the third scene, Kelloway is visiting the sort-of widow (Brenda Vaccaro, also superb) of one of the astronauts, hoping to talk her into attending a memorial service for her husband and the other two astronauts. .
In each scene, Kelloway is working towards his only goal throughout the film, one set up in that first scene with the three astronauts: he wants to save NASA. Dr. Kelloway has dreamed of building from the Mercury and Apollo programs for decades, but a series of setbacks have put the space program in jeopardy. In his speech to the astronauts, laying out the conspiracy, Holbrook plays Kelloway's desperation, passion, uncertainty and guilt so beautifully, with such precision, that it's nearly impossible for me to describe what he does, or how he does it. He lives that scene, as he lives the press conference, when Kelloway is hoping his speech, and the press, can somehow save his dreams, which by this point in the film he can sense are collapsing. Later, when he meets with Vaccaro, Holbrook plays this man, who we now know is willing to kill for what he wants, as a genuine old friend to this grieving woman.
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His scene with Vacarro is, in particular, a great one, top to bottom. Though Holbrook commands the other two scenes I've mentioned, he has less to do at the press conference (though check out his look of hopeful, but defeated, weariness as he delivers the "you tell me" section of his dialogue), and is playing off three stiffs in the early speech to the astronauts. The less said about Simpson the better, and, frankly, the same goes for Brolin (though for somewhat different reasons), but Waterston, a fine actor, seems bored. But not Holbrook, and later, not Vaccaro, either. Both of them are playing their roles in full, not caring, or not appearing to care, that they are nailing each moment, and each word, with everything they have, to the benefit of a high-end B movie.
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Which is as it should always be, of course, and that brings me to my second observation: Capricorn One is a movie seriously divided. Holbrook doesn't have a whole lot of scenes, but in the ones he has, he's given a lot of dialogue, and it's generally very well-written. The screenplay is by Hyams, a hugely frowned-upon filmmaker these days, but there are moments in Capricorn One when you sense a true writer, writing. And then you get goofball shit with Telly Savalas towards the end, you get a plot that collapses pretty badly, you get laugh-inducing slow-motion in the last seconds, and you get Elliot Gould, who probably felt as divided filming his scenes as I felt watching it.
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My hopes were not, I must admit, especially high for Capricorn One going into it, despite being praised by my pal Greg Ferrara. I figured it would be a fun, trashy 70s thriller -- effective, but silly. And it was. What I was wholly unprepared for was the untapped potential that's trying to bust out about every ten, fifteen minutes, whenever Holbrook appears as a good man who does evil things, or any time Gould gets a good scene (he also has a couple of real winners with Vaccaro). This should have been frustrating, I suppose, but I was not expecting performance, or dialogue, at this occasionally very high level, and so, finally, I was more delighted than anything else. Except now that I think back on it, yeah, it's sort of frustrating.
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The film Capricorn One most reminded me of -- and, coincidentally, today's Collection Project Film of the Day -- is Three Days of the Condor (d. Sydney Pollack). That's a film that has an absolutely stunning opening chunk, maybe the first ten or fifteen minutes. In that part of the film, Robert Redford, as a bookish, desk-bound CIA operative, leaves his similarly bookish and desk-bound colleagues to pick up lunch. While he's gone, a group of men break into the office and, coldly, efficiently, and wordlessly, gun everybody down. These characters, Redford's co-workers, have been set up just enough for us to buy into the sedentary nature of their positions within the CIA, and to be curious enough about them to wonder how they'll figure into the larger story. And then they're all dead, in a snap. In my view, this opening is so good, so chilling, that Three Days of the Condor never recovers. From that point on, the film becomes rote, and (worse) preachy, and even the appearance of Max von Sydow can't drag it by its collar back into the world of the movie it might have been. It's true that I am perhaps philosophically disinclined to fully embrace this sort of paranoid thriller, but I still think that Pollack and his collaborators front-loaded their film with all their best ideas (which, really, was an idea, singular), and could never match it.
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I wonder if something similar happened with Capricorn One. It's tempting to say that Hyams wasn't taking himself, or his film, as seriously as Pollack, Redford, et al, clearly did with Three Days of the Condor, but I think the film's best scenes indicate that yeah, he did take it seriously, and good for him. It's just that, ultimately, Kelloway was the one guy Hyams, as a writer, really invested in. Then he went one better and, in a masterstroke, cast Hal Holbrook. The result being that I want to see the film again, but this time put Holbrook as Kelloway front and center.
