Word: killer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Hollywood again until 1976. It's good to have you back, Jane, but Klute almost sustained us through those barren years. Somehow thrillers where the characters matter seem richer in atmosphere and tension--and Fonda's Bree Daniels, the call-girl who is the object of a shadowy killer, involves us so totally that the girl-in-the-abandoned-warehouse routine at the end doesn't even appear schematic (well, it does, but we're still scared to death). You gotta credit Alan J. Pakula though, who here, as in All the President's Men and the Parallax View, conveys...
...approved new capital punishment laws designed by individual states to be less arbitrary. Typically, the laws allow juries to hand down a death sentence only after weighing "aggravating circumstances," such as the murder of a police officer or the torture of a victim, and "mitigating circumstances," such as a killer's age or emotional state. Now 35 states have the death penalty, and death row, emptied by Furman in 1972, has a population of about...
Halloween, while still cheaply made, is a much slicker, more flagrantly commercial movie than Assault, and it has been grossing big money. Carpenter employs a gliding subjective camera throughout, alternating between the killer's and the victims' points of view, producing a continual, stomach-tightening sense of menace. There is surprisingly little blood in the movie, scarcely any nudity, and, considering the story it comes out of, and the opportunities available for flat-out ghoulishness, Carpenter has produced a tame and tactful film. However, most of Assault's quirky humor and antic allusiveness have been rubbed away, and Halloween...
...should move. Such ingenuity and control displays itself in ways that are embarrassing to name: the breathtaking efficiency, for instance, with which one character in Assault snaps a man's arm at the elbow; or the startling, gimmicky appearance, time and again, from out of nowhere, of the masked killer in Halloween, whose presence is signalled by an amplified breathing sound and a supernatural thrum. Carpenter's action sequences are especially resourcefully engineered. There is one virtuoso scene in Assault on Precinct 13, in which the station office room receives an intensive barrage from outside: the street gang is equipped...
...Super's upper lip remains stiff until, on the trail of a London killer, Doug las locates a clandestine German atomic installation on England's south coast. Struggling to find his bearings in a maze of intrigue and counterintrigue, Archer joins a Resistance conspiracy to spirit the King out of the country and the atomic secrets into American hands. Things do not work out that simply. No Len Deighton plot ever does. In his unraveling, the au thor of The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin produces a series of memorable set pieces. In one celebrating German-Soviet...