Movie Details
| Title: | Pendulum | |
| Director: | George Schaefer | |
| Year: | 1969 | |
| Genre: | Thriller | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 12.10.22 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 12.10.22 | Internet | Tonight's double feature is about accused men, and it starts with this 1969 movie starring George Peppard as a cop, Jean Seberg as his wife, and Richard Kiley as a lawyer who gets a rapist out of jail due to Peppard's illegally-coerced confession. This movie has a pretty strange vibe, sometimes feeling more like episodic television than cinema, but the story that it's telling is pretty good. The first act is about Peppard suspecting that his wife is having an affair, but when she winds up dead in Peppard's bed the movie becomes a did-he/didn't-he mystery that doesn't have enough time to really get going. To me, the movie is limited by some things that also make it interesting. For instance, if it didn't take so damn long to get to the part where we're trying to guess whether he really killed his wife or not (the aspect which the poster doubles down on with the line "How far can a policeman go?" writ large), there's really only 2 suspects and all it takes is one line of dialogue to settle the mystery for the audience. However, the detailed, some might argue slow set-up with him following his wife, seeing her in her car through the window, her behavior made me question whether the affair was real to begin with, so something that probably should've been sped through to get to the story wound up being story in itself... so the murder scene is also a reveal which is kinda cool. The bigger example of this is George Peppard's performance, which starts off as terrible then becomes interesting in that you're only unsure of whether he did it or not because his performance is so bad as to be mysterious. It's like the opposite of Ed Norton in Primal Fear. I think if Peppard did a better job, you'd have no choice but to root for him (or against him), but as such you can definitely see it going either way just because he's so bored with the movie that he's in! Unfortunately, once that mystery deflates, it's a pretty unsatisfying climax and winds up feeling uneven and unsure of itself. It's not a super great movie, but it's on the verge. There's some interesting stuff going on here, and it's also an interesting mix of 60s breezy jazzy score and absolutely empty location photography of Washington DC's monuments (the imdb trivia section says this was filmed right after MLK was assassinated while riots were going on. I didn't see the smoke they mentioned but that era of the mall, capital, and the monuments looked so much less cluttered than when I saw it), with a taste of the more gritty anti-hero, bleak outlook, daring cinema of the decade to come. I can't remember in what context this was mentioned in Tarantino's book but I'm glad I noted it and watched it. It wasn't perfect, but it was interesting and I'd never heard of it before and I think/hope it'll pair well with the next one. |
