MovieChat Forums > Capricorn One (1978) Discussion > Capricorn One: A Ton of Fun

Capricorn One: A Ton of Fun

posted 3 years ago by ecarle (14979)
8 replies | jump to latest

SPOILERS

Capricorn One is listed as a 1977 movie, but I think it made its United States debut in 1978.

That's when I saw it at a "Sneak Preview/World Premiere" in Los Angeles near Hollywood and UCLA.

It was one of my great nights at the movies -- but with a catch.

This was a full house and when the film reached its big climax -- the lone suriviving astronaut (James Brolin, currently married to Barbra Streisand) running to catch the crop duster with his rescuer (Elliott Gould, ONCE married to Barbra Streisand) , with villainous government helicopter pilots on the ground with guns drawn -- the audience went NUTS. Everybody rose to their feet, and applauded as the rescuer finally met the rescuer, and everybody yelled "Go! Go! GO!) as the astronaut outran the bullets, hopped onto the wing of the crop duster and started the helicopter versus crop duster chase than climaxes the film.

After that very exciting climax, the movie moves to the funeral for "three dead astronauts" and-- ONE of them comes running in, and..again the crowd went nuts, cheering as the villain(Hal Holbrook) realized that his plan to fake the Mars landing and kill the astronauts after was failing; cheering as the "widow" saw her husband coming towards her(but how sad for the OTHER two widows -- their husbands really were dead); cheering as a happy ending arrived.

The writer-director of Capricorn One was there that night and evidently got lots of high fives and pats on the back from studio folks there -- his life was about to change, they said, he could be the next Spielberg.

Well, it didn't quite work out that way. Capricorn One was a hit that kept Hyams on track to make movies for a long time -- directed and often written by himself, and even with him as the cinematographer. They were "B movies with A stars" -- folks like Sean Connery, Michael Douglas and Roy Scheider would work with him.

I stand by my enjoyment of Capricorn One on that 1978 night but...an article I read some months later revealed something I should have known:

That audience had a LOT of "planted shill" audience members in the audience, people PAID to laugh hard at the jokes, applaud key plot points, cheer and yell.

In retrospect, they HAD been overly excited. When TV star David Doyle (Charlie's Angels) came on screen for a couple of scenes, he was applauded on entrance like he was Laurence Oliver or somebody, his every joke was laughed hard at -- and he got an ovation on his final line in the movie.

When Elliott Gould (as our hero, an investigative reporter out to prove a conspiracy) watches an astronaut's home movie and the astronauts wife says "He said at this movie lot we visited that he was amazed how something fake could be made to look so real" -- the shills cheered.

But here's the thing; the shills shilling worked well enough that a number of us enjoyed Capricorn One for REAL. It WAS exciting when everything came together so that James Brolin was running to his rescue plane. It WAS satisfying when the "dead astronaut" attended his own funeral and blew up the conspiracy(the film ends right there -- we get to imagine the fall out for villainous Hal Holbrook, et al.)

What I liked about Capricorn One in 1978 was that writer-director Hyams seemed hellbent to deliver a suspense thriller without any violence, blood, or gore. 70's thrillers had been getting violent and gory on an ever-climbing basis: Dirty Harry, Straw Dogs, Hitchcock's Frenzy, The Exorcist, Marathon Man(that dental scene!), Carrie...parts of Jaws(Shaw's death) -- and Hyams attempted to do it like it was done in the 50's and 60's...rather like Hitchcock's North by Northwest(which ALSO had a crop duster, yes?)

This approach worked. Funny thing: before the big helicopter versus bi-plane chase, an earlier action set-piece finds hero Elliott Gould in a car with the brakes removed and the accelerator stuck to the floor. Its a "Mister Toad's Wild Ride" through the streets of Houston and..Hitchcock himself had done almost the very same scene(with Bruce Dern and Barbara Harris in the car) in his film Family Plot of 1976. Though there is more process screen work in the Family Plot scene, I do like that one better -- Hitchcock's expert POV shots and montage, Dern and Harris bickering away. But the bottom line is that BOTH Hitchcock(in Family Plot) and Hyams (in Capricorn One) went for this scene in lieu of blood and gore.

Capricorn One really only has two scenes of action -- the runaway car and the crop duster climax - but they are enough(also a Hitchocck trait). The movie spends much of its time making us believe that this conspiracy COULD happen, and sets up a great structure: as Gould tries to find the missing three astronauts, they have split up and are crossing a burning desert to find their way home.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

CONT

I liked this Hitchcock bit: when Gould goes to the apartment of the NASA friend who alerted him to the conspiracy -- he finds the man "has never lived there." A woman lives there,has for years, says her lease. This is a borrow from "North by Northwest" when the Glen Cove mansion no longer has enemy spies in it, but rather a nice lady who swears she owns the place.

I liked this "Hyams bit": Brenda Vaccaro, playing the woman who THINKS she is the widow of a dead astronaut(she and the world were told he died when his spacecraft burned up)...reads a Dr. Seuss story to her kids. And we get THE WHOLE STORY, read by Vaccaro, start to finish, no plot meaning at all. Rather, it is a scene about an astronaut's wife holding up after tragedy for her kids. We want her to find out the TRUTH. (That's a Hitchocck mode, too.)

The casting of Capricorn One was interesting. Elliott Gould is indeed our hero, and he seems "on best behavior" after an early 70's run of "major movies" followed by a breakdown. Gould seems a little "house trained" in this, but he's very sympathetic.

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

The three astronauts. Hyams had a great idea about one of them: the one played by Sam Waterson(long before Law and Order, with thick long black 70's hair and the spring of youth.) The deal with Waterston is that his EVERY line(except about three of them, I counted) is a joke or one-liner. He never says anything seriously...and when his big physical challenge arrives in desert survival (climbing straight up a high rock formation), he diverts himself by telling a long, long, LONG joke to himself.

But our lead astronaut is James Brolin -- also with the thick long black 70's hair)..the stalwart hero who will likely be the only survivor. Brolin was kinda/sorta a movie star for a short bit(he was almost James Bond)and this movie is about as good as it got for him. Interesting: he's far more conventionally handsome than his rough-hewn son Josh Brolin...and in 1978, Brolin is pretty much a dead ringer for ...today's Christian Bale.

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

The third astronaut was an acceptable and accessible choice in 1978: OJ Simpson himself. He does well...though he doesn't get a lot of lines.

On the villain side, amiable and bureaucratic Hal Holbrook bravely took on a brave script decision by Hyams: Holbrook delivers a speech of pages, and pages, and PAGES of monologue in the early scene where he has to set up the conspiracy(the Mars rocket is flawed, the astronauts would have died -- they have to fake the Mars landing or their families will be killed.) The one sentence I just wrote takes up about ten minutes of screen time -- just Holbrook talking and the three astronauts doing slow burns.

Peter Hyams must have liked Holbrook's approach -- he used him 5 years later as a similar villain to SIMILARLY explain a courtroom conspiracy to Michael Douglas in The Star Chamber.

The cast "fills out" with two cameos. One is Karen Black - -just about at the end of her brief star career -- trying to do a Rosalind Russell-style female reporter who flirts and fights with Gould. One realizes how dangerous the movie business is, here. Both Gould and Black had lost a lot of stardom by the time they made Capricorn One. And Black would never really get hers back. However, Karen Black HAD been in that self-same Hitchcock film Family Plot, a further connection from that film to Capricorn One. (Plus one bit actor, a colorless bald guy named Alan Fudge -- here a bad NASA man, in Family Plot a helicopter pilot cop.)

The other cameo comes at the very end -- Telly Savalas, escaped from Kojak and getting a bunch of funny lines as a "nonsense character" -- the crop duster pilot who believes that Gould is part of a heist gang and there's loot to be shared if Savalas will fly him to search for Brolin, etc. This kind of silliness made that shill audience laugh hard at the theater in 1978 but Savalas is simply not playing a plausible , real person here.

CONT

[–] Mulletor (520) 3 years ago

Sevalas is playing a prevert!

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

That's true! He must be related to Keenan Wynn (Colonel Bat Guano) in Dr. Strangelove...

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

Here I found some dialogue between Caulfield (Elliott Gould) and Albain(Savalas)

Robert Caulfield: You in charge here?
Albain: See that sign there?
Robert Caulfield: Yes.
Albain: Well, read it.
Robert Caulfield: I did.
Albain: Out loud.
Robert Caulfield: A&A Crop Dusting Service.
Albain: You wanna know who I am?
Robert Caulfield: I bet you're one of the A's.
Albain: But which one? I bet you can't answer that question, smartass.
Robert Caulfield: The first one.
Albain: Wrong.
Robert Caulfield: Can I have one more guess?
Albain: You got it.
Robert Caulfield: The second one.
Albain: Wrong. I'm both of them. My name is AlBain. Now, I got a son. You know, the other A was for him but he don't like to fly. He became a lawyer. I think he's a pervert so I took the A away from him. You want to speak to someone in charge, you're speaking to the both of them.
Robert Caulfield: My name is Caulfield.
Albain: Hey, I can't help that.

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

CONT

I guess I'm of two minds about Capricorn One. Back in 1978 thanks to that full-house cheering crowd, I found the movie fun and exciting...and intelligent enough, in the Hitchcock pre-Psycho tradition of low violence.

The movie had a great Jerry Goldsmith score...very exciting at the beginning of the film and helpful to the action climax.

All these years later, a watch revealed how "surface" the movie is. I don't mind plot holes...thrillers often HAVE to have plot holes...but the whoe enterprise is rather glib, and when Telly Savalas shows up, downright silly.

Still, its a great memory of a movie that I really liked "back in the day" and I offer it to modern audiences with a recommendation that you picture 1978 as best you can when you watch Capricorn One.

PS. Capricorn One was a big enough hit that it sired a "title sequel": Saturn 3. Which WAS a bad movie.

[–] ccr1633 (1414) 2 years ago

I posted here a while back about one aspect of this (highly enjoyable) film that always bugged me. The central motivation of the conspiracy is to keep big government money flowing into NASA. Presumably, if Congress caught wind of a hugely expensive, possibly fatal design flaw in the Mars lander then that would be all the excuse they need to terminate that program. But wouldn't a heat shield failure resulting in the deaths of three astronauts be even worse???