ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN (1976) ★

This fall, I watched all three films in Alan J. Pakula's "paranoia trilogy"—Klute, The Parallax View, and this—while they were available through Criterion. Of those three, I feel like this is the one people hold in the highest critical regard, so is it blasphemous to say that I preferred The Parallax View? All three films have similar strengths—obviously the pervasive paranoid vibes, but also breathtaking cinematography and strong performances by world-class leading men (Redford and Hoffman here; Warren Beatty in The Parallax View; Donald Sutherland in Klute). And yet The Parallax View has the most range to its setpieces: it has a car chase, a bar fight, an assassination, a suspenseful sequence with a bomb on a plane, and a weird experimental film-within-a-film right at its center.

All The President's Men, by contrast, has the least range—in fact, it basically has only one mode: since the work of the investigation is two guys mostly attempting to reverse-engineer an org chart with help from the world's most reluctant people, the film can only really give us scenes wherein they are cleverly teasing incremental bits of detail out of squirrelly men and women.

As it happens, this is pretty fun to watch, so even though Redford and Hoffman are basically doing the same thing over and over, Pakula juices up these endeavors with a remarkable amount of variety, assisted no doubt by the winning charisma that these two actors bring to the table. Nevertheless, by the time the credits roll, this mode feels pretty exhausted, enough so that you can accept the film's abrupt ending. (Pakula elects to jump from mid-investigation straight to Nixon's resigning, and for a moment you feel cheated—why didn't we follow the conspiracy all the way through to its final unraveling?—but you also find yourself feeling that you might rather not watch another hour of tense conversations just to get there, and maybe the choice to just skip to the end is for the best.) Still a marvelous watch by any measure.

A ★★★★ review of All the President’s Men (1976)

This fall, I watched all three films in Alan J. Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy”—KLUTE, THE PARALLAX VIEW, and this—while they were available through Criterion. Of those three, I feel like this is the one people hold in the highest critical regard, so is it blasphemous to say that I preferred THE PARALLAX VIEW? All three films have similar strengths—obviously the pervasive paranoid vibes, but also breathtaking cinematography and strong performances by world-class leading men (Redford and Hoffman here, obviously; Warren Beatty in THE PARALLAX VIEW; Donald Sutherland in KLUTE). And yet THE PARALLAX VIEW has the most range to its setpieces:

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