In short: Ishtar (1987)

A bit of a flop in its time – though not quite the commercial bomb some made it appear to be – this is the film that killed Elaine May’s career as a director, though with a lot of scripting and script doctoring still to come in her career. Some of the stories about the production suggest she’s not completely without fault there, though directors with a penis would probably have survived this film as well as the combination of lack of professionalism on set and utter brilliance she appears to have shown during production, and still gone on to better things. And really, getting any finished film out of this particular tortured production history, with actual politics and studio politics working their hardest to squash the film’s production, it is definitely quite an achievement of May’s to even have managed to get a finished film together at all.

Ishtar as it has come down to us is not as terrible as most critics of the time would want one to believe – why, the first act is even pretty great – though I don’t see as many charms as some of today’s reappraisers suggest in it either. The film is always at its best when it ignores its developing adventure comedy plot with weird racist moments (as were all adventure comedies mandated by law to include) in favour of showing the interactions of its singing songwriter (in the most gracious interpretation of the terms) duo played by Dustin Hoffmann and Warren Beatty. Both are pretty damn funny, playing somewhat against type, spouting May’s lovingly absurdist dialogue, and doing whatever it is they’re doing with Paul Williams’s very funny songs. Of course, after a couple of minutes of this, it’s always back to badly staged adventure movie tropes and flabby jokes, so these parts don’t make the movie good, exactly. What they do indeed achieve is to make this much maligned film worth watching at least once.

In short: The Parallax View (1974)

Small-time, ambitious and pretty lost journalist Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) stumbles onto a murderous conspiracy when his ex-girlfriend (Paula Prentiss) tells him she thinks somebody is out to kill her. According to her, witnesses to the assassination of a liberal politician three years ago are dying in astonishing numbers, supposedly accidentally. Since she is one of these witnesses, she fears for her life. Joe doesn’t believe her but one cut later, she’s lying dead in a mortuary, supposedly killed by an overdose of barbiturates.

While this kind of suicide would fit her character to a degree, Joe doesn’t believe the official story at all, so he begins digging around and is soon on the trail of the Parallax Company who seem to be in the business of political assassination by supposed single gunmen.

This is generally the least appreciated film in Alan J. Pakula’s thematically linked Paranoia trilogy, and it’s not difficult to see why: it doesn’t have a central performance as strong as Jane Fonda’s in Klute nor does its plot rip a trauma quite as directly from the headlines as All President’s Men, a film that also beats it, Woodward and Bernstein be thanks, by featuring a happy end. This one’s more the film that turns the personal disintegrations of the former film and the political turmoil of the latter into a stark – if not lacking in irony – nightmare tale about the USA as a land built on lies that will crush anyone not on board with that particular program. Probably not the sort of thing even a 70s audience was asking for when going into a nominal thriller.

And a nominal thriller this is, given how inevitable everything in the film seems to be, Warren Beatty’s Joseph Frady the only one involved who doesn’t see the ending coming. Pakula’s approach to action and suspense here is abstract, cold and clinical, with a dollop of the plain weird coming into play when he basically stops and smells the talking roses of sort of experimental film to present a brainwashing video Beatty and the audience have to suffer through. All of which is bad for your run of the mill thriller but a perfect fit as well as a logical approach for The Parallax View, a film that feels practically cosmicist in its approach to political assassination and the society that breeds it.