Word: dalen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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WHAT IS REMARKABLE about this film is that director Zale Dalen manages to sour this entire setting without being too blatant about it. This is Dalen's first feature and it shows--there is the slightest hint of home-movie about this film in the camera placings and the colors. But the pacing is superb and an imaginative use of soundtrack keeps you there. In fact, the home-movie quality--the slight hint of innocence about the film, the complete lack of slickness--actually helps the film. The whole thing looks innocent enough, but what you're seeing is awful...
Even more remarkable, though, is that Dalen actually gets you to care about Collins. When the brass decide to throw Collins out of his private office because he needs motivation, the line between the victim and the victor gets blurred. Seated there in a bright plastic secretaries room, even Collins can't beat out the system he's been enforcing. As Collins tries to work his way back up to his old status, his coldness takes on a different dimension--it's him against you, and neither party can afford to lose. Dalen manages to pull off this shift without...
This entire sequence is an unnerving sojourn into the cost of plastic happiness. Unfortunately, the producers felt compelled to tack a happy ending onto this film--an ending which is so satisfying that it doesn't work. But even this cannot kill what has gone before. Dalen so successfully blurs the distinction between the consumer and the seller (something else) that the disquieting aspects of his film just can't get lost. The happy ending elates for a moment but then in light of the rest of the film it's a bogus note. But aside from this, this...