(The launch of Capricorn One, we are told, has cost four billion dollars.) Peaker’s anger is piqued at the absence of the President. The film makes an attempt to engage with the politics of investing in a space programme. They are chased by faceless agents of the conspiracy, in black helicopters, but Caulfield deduces what has happened and hires eccentric crop duster Albain (Telly Savalas) to help him scour the desert for signs of the astronauts. NASA declare the astronauts dead, and fearing for their lives Brubaker, Walker and Willis stage an escape from the facility in which they are being held, fleeing across the Nevada desert. Meanwhile, the re-entry shields on the real spacecraft malfunction, causing the capsule to vaporise. A comment by Brubaker, who struggles with his involvement in the conspiracy, to his wife (Brenda Vaccaro) during one of the astronauts’ transmissions, makes Caulfield even more suspicious, and he decides to investigate. Caulfield attempts to investigate, but his friend Whitter soon disappears, and the woman who now inhabits Whitter’s apartment claims to have lived there for a number of years – something which Caulfield knows to be false. However, Whitter conducts some experiments in his own time, which verify his findings, and relays this information to a friend, journalist Robert Caulfield ( Elliott Gould). When Elliot Whitter ( Robert Walder), a NASA technician, notices that the transmissions from the astronauts seem to be coming from somewhere in the United States, he is told by Kelloway and another senior staff member that his monitor is malfunctioning. (The President and Vice President are unaware of Kelloway’s scheme, and it is ambiguous as to whether Governor Peaker, an ardent proponent of the space programme, is involved in the conspiracy.) The conspiracy is limited in scope: only a handful of people seem to know about Kelloway’s plan. Kelloway instead intends to fabricate the landing on Mars, using a carefully-built set on a sound stage the astronauts will film their scenes on this set, and these will then be broadcast to an unknowing public. They are told by Dr Kelloway ( Hal Holbrook), the scientific overseer of the Capricorn One mission, that owing to a faulty life support system, the mission was doomed to failure. At the last minute, the crew of the spacecraft – Charles Brubaker ( James Brolin), John Walker ( O J Simpson) and Peter Willis ( Sam Waterston) – are ushered out of the craft and removed from the site. The film opens at the launch of Capricorn One, which is attended by Governor Hollis Peaker ( David Huddleston), a supporter of the space mission, and Vice President Price ( James Karen). In his discussion of American cinema ‘in the shadow of Watergate and Vietnam’, David A Cook suggests that in its exploration of a plot to deceive the public using the medium of television, Capricorn One was also one of a spate of films that evidenced the fact that ‘the public was becoming as cynical about the media as it was of other national institutions’ other films which focus on this theme include Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976) and The China Syndrome (James Bridges, 1979) (Cook, 2000: 201). In examining these issues, the paranoid conspiracy thrillers also marked themselves as different from the ‘Spielberg-Lucas feel-good science fiction and fantasy’ pictures that were becoming dominant during the late-1970s ( ibid.).Ĭapricorn One’s narrative focuses on a manned landing on Mars which is revealed to be a hoax, with the landing simulated on a sound stage in a television studio, and the crew of the craft coaxed into taking part in the conspiracy after threats are made towards the lives of their families. The films foregrounded ‘governmental corruption and conspiracy’, and the stories they told offered ‘parables of defeated heroes in which shadowy cartels and power brokers maintained pervasive social control’ ( ibid.). These films, Stephen Prince has suggested, offered a turning away from ‘the celebration of outlaw heroes in late-sixties’ pictures such as Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), and were ‘ore despairing about the prospects for democratic society’, marking them as ‘films in the shadow of Watergate’ (2000: 64). One of the wave of paranoid conspiracy thrillers that proliferated after the breaking of the Watergate scandal (along with films such as Alan J Pajula’s The Parallax View, 1974, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, also 1974, and Three Days of the Condor, 1975), Peter Hyams’ Capricorn One( Peter Hyams, 1977) tapped into the zeitgeist of government conspiracy and the waning interest in the lunar landings (the last of which took place in 1972).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |