Left Field Cinema

American Director Peter Hyams has a fairly ghastly track record, after being given the unenviable task of directing 2010, the follow-up to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, he went on to make uninspired and sometimes downright awful Actioners like Timecop in 1994, Sudden Death in 1995, The Relic in 1997, End of Days in 1999, and The Musketeer in 2001. Other lesser known works in between have never made a massive splash in the box office or in critical circles. Where and why Hyams’ career went so drastically wrong is not clear, but his fourth feature film as director showed much promise for the man in years to come, that film as produced in 1977 is Capricorn One. Written by Hyams as well, it is a solid 1970’s conspiracy movie which although not perfect in every detail, certainly deserves to be more widely seen. If nothing else it succinctly illustrates Hyams potential as a writer/director, potential which would later be squandered and wasted with the aforementioned features.

Coming a year after the release of Alan J Pakula’s seminal real-life conspiracy movie All the Presidents Men, Capricorn One is very much a product of 1970’s American paranoia; Hollywood films of this time are often filled with a view of authority and government as corrupt, unjust and deceitful at best, treacherous, dishonourable and homicidal at worst. The conspiracy thriller was all the rage and this one combined its outlandish conspiracy with Science Fiction to great effect. The plot follows a group of NASA astronauts as they’re about to break the next great frontier and be the first men to land on Mars. But before their rocket blasts off on its lengthy voyage, the three astronauts are whisked away and flown in secret to a unknown military installation. There it is explained to them by the head of NASA operations that the rocket (the titular Capricorn One) would not have supported them, they’d have been dead three-weeks into the flight, but big business investment in the project and the threat of the US government pulling funding from the programme means that failure is not an option. Instead the Mars landing will be faked, the real Capricorn One will travel to Mars and back unmanned, the transmissions of the Mars landing will be sent from a very earthly bound soundstage at the military base. The reluctant Astronauts decide to go along with the plan because of threats against their families, although as time goes by they become less and less comfortable with the plan. Meanwhile a journalist Robert Caufield (as played by Elliot Gould in arguably a career best performance) becomes suspicious of the entire operation when his friend, a technician at NASA, mysteriously disappears and two attempts are made on his life. As Caufield goes about unravelling the mystery on his own, disaster strikes when Capricorn One burns up upon re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere. The astronauts realise what has happened, in the eyes of the public they’re dead which means the conspirators can’t afford to keep them around, fleeing into the desert they split up, attempt to elude detection and get to safety. In the first half the tone of the film seems to be emulating the look and restrained feel of All the Presidents Men. Wide angle new room scenes, smoking reporters at every turn, characters in the film even reference Woodward and Bernstien in the dialogue. With only a year between this films release and the release of Pakula’s film it’s not entirely certain how much of an influence it could have had, but it’s hard to believe there was no influence whatsoever. The slow burning but very deliberate escalation in tension and danger is magnificently done, the stakes are continually raised, at first it’s about saving the space programme, this is soon elevated to saving the morale of the American people which has recently been crippled by Watergate, later it is elevated to saving the lives of those who threaten to expose this terrible deception. In the second half, as the action is amped up, the All the President’s Men comparisons come to an abrupt end, the restraint that Pakula endowed his classic with is absent from Capricorn One but what it is replaced with is entertaining for completely different reasons.

The cast is of an intermediate value and ability with the likes of James Brolin, Sam Waterston and O.J. Simpson playing the astronauts, a guest appearance from Karen Black as Caufield’s reporter colleague and relatively unknown actors making up the remaining cast. Elliot Gould is possibly the most famous actor in the cast but he was far from a heavyweight A-lister, Gould shines here as the reporter no one believes in, getting most of the best lines, he is the closest the film has to a central character. The division of screen time between the astronauts and the lone reporter is one of the films minor flaws as the audience are never given enough time with either to be certain of whose story the film is attempting to focus on. The reporter Caufield has the most interesting part and is the one with the most to do but he doesn’t appear on screen until twenty-odd minutes into the film, meanwhile the astronauts have simplistic character arcs which lack any murky morality that might have made them more interesting protagonists, the threat of violence against their families ensures that we root for their survival and reunion with their loved-ones, but one can’t help but be curious as to what the film would have been like if they’d gone along with the plan willingly and then began having doubts as the story went on. They are blackmailed into the lie, they are not party to it, meaning that the films potential impact is softened as the burden of immorality is lifted from our intrepid adventurers.

There are other faults, a key sequence that involves slow motion running towards the end of the film was a particularly poor choice, another sequence when the conspirators attempt to kill Caufield by severing his car brakes is frankly preposterous, Caufield desperately attempts to avoid crashing into other cars and pedestrians only to drive head first off a raised bridge into the water at 100mph, it is a virtual impossibility that Caufield would have survived such a crash, but not only does he survive, in the next shot he swims away from the wreckage as if nothing has happened, the next day he doesn’t have a single scratch or broken bone to prove it ever occurred. Later in the film when an unknown sniper takes pot shots at Caufield the attack is believable and menacingly understated, Caufield’s crash into the river by comparison appears completely out of place in the first half of Capricorn One. Some of the dialogue is on-the-nose as well with needless exposition for the truly moronic audience members who need everything spelling out. But these are rare occurrences and the films dialogue on the whole is one of its biggest selling points with a consistently pithy and witty screenplay. Hyams superior ability as a writer of dialogue is no more apparent than during a brilliant monologue where the head of NASA explains why they’re faking the Mars landing, he describes with disgust how viewers rang in to complain during the televising of the latest Lunar landings because re-runs of I Love Lucy were cancelled, “if it were new episodes I’d understand, hey what’s a walk on the Moon, but re-runs!” The scene is perfectly balanced as the three astronauts listen intently; the lack of interruption from them seems believable because the content of the monologue is so excellent and personalised, as a prelude to the conspiracy it acts as a prolonged justification as well as providing a valuable context (The United States of America’s current apathy towards the space program). In some respects the film mirrors the ethos of Sidney Lumet’s film Network from 1976. The head of NASA goes on to justify their radical and criminal approach: “the people are even afraid to turn on their television sets for fear of what they might find out on the evening news. There’s nothing more to believe in.” He believes that a Mars landing is something to unite the American people in the wake of the Nixon Watergate scandal, the irony being that in doing so he’s creating a potentially far greater and more humiliating scandal in the process. This justification is as vacuous as it is transparent, through history men have often justified selfish actions as selfless causes, and this instance is no different.

Much of the dialogue throughout the film by contrast is made up of sharp one line banter rather than grand speeches, when the astronauts realise that they’re officially dead, one of them replies “shit and I was such a terrific guy”. Likewise the banter between the reporter and his assignment editor is fantastic as well as Elliot Gould and Karen Black’s chemistry as Caufield attempts to make himself seem deeper and broodier than he really is and she responds to him by expressing a desire for a guy just to come out with it straight and say he’d like to jump her: Caufield responds: “I’d like to jump you.”; she immediately retorts “Go jump yourself”. She thinks he’s being insincere, he bites at her: “You wouldn’t know sincerity if it ran over you” she snaps back: “not if you were driving”.

Hyams seems far more comfortable as a director when words are not involved, although sometime his directorial choices are poignant, when the Mars landing is eventually faked for example the camera draws back from two of the astronauts to reveal the camera recording them in the foreground and the spotlights above them whilst a pre-recorded speech from the President plays over the top talking about how great their achievement is. During this single uninterrupted shot we can almost taste the hypocrisy of it all! But other choices are less inspired, as the astronauts make their daring escape the sequence is intercut with the head of NASA eulogising the dead men to the press. Although the events are linked by time frame, the choice to intercut them seems without justification. Once we get going Hyams comes into his own, the escape experience is horrendous; all three men are stuck in the desert with no food or water in a bracingly dangerous landscape. One astronaut is so desperate for fluids and food that he kills and then eats a snake. In another instance a scorpion is seen crawling over his face in a merciless close-up. The restrained visual style is also note worthy, the willingness to just let the camera sit and view an entire scene from one angle is something of a lost art in modern action sequences. If we were to compare this to the works of Tony Scott and Michael Bay, oh-so-fashionable constantly rotating cameras, shaky camera close-up and mixtures of digital effects and restless sonic landscapes, then the distinction is clear to see. Watching a film like Capricorn One is like a breath of fresh air compared to films like Deja-vu or Transformers, this is no more evident than in the films jaw-dropping final action sequence which ranks amongst the best if not the best aerial stunt work ever committed to film. The stunt work in the last act is enough to make the Bond producers of the 1970’s feel humbled and embarrassed by their mediocre output. A chase sequence featuring a crop dusting plane and two military helicopters is the sort an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride that is sadly absent from modern cinema. As one astronaut holds onto the wing of the plane for dear life, the plane speeds past the Rocky Mountains, rushing up and down at unbelievable speeds, it doesn’t matter that by this point the astronaut has clearly been replaced by a dummy as we know that the pilot of the plane is very much alive (and risking that life in the process). The stunt pilot said it was the most dangerous job he’d ever done, he was killed in a crash shortly after filming concluded. Today they’d do it with CGI and it would be all the worse for it, the tangible nature of watching real stunt work enriches the entire experience. Hyams never resorts to shaky camera work or rapid editing, instead he relies on the tangible danger of the situation and events in this chase can be clearly seen from first to last. The Scott’s and Bay’s of this world often sacrifice geography for style – Hyams makes no such sacrifice. Holding most of these action sequences together is one of Jerry Goldsmith’s finest scores, along with Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture this is Goldsmith’s best work.

Perhaps there is good reason that Capricorn One is overlooked in the annals of 1970’s American cinema, it is far from perfect. The dichotomy of tone and tempo being a fundamental flaw in its cinematic make-up, is it a slow burning suspense thriller or a high octane action movie? It’s a bit of both and not enough of either, this coupled with the lack of a clear main character and several severe lapses in realism combine to harm the films overall impact and its chances of being revered as a classic. However well the two incongruous halves of Capricorn One do or do not harmonise is of course dependant on the individual audience members’ perceptions. Younger audiences may not notice the problem at all; where as older more seasoned viewers with knowledge of film structure may not be capable of uniting these disparate components. For myself, the film amounts to a highly entertaining conspiracy thriller with an action movie tacked on the last act for good measure. It is not perfect, but it is highly enjoyable none the less.

M.Dawson