two-minute warning: the dawning of a bleak era

*SPOILER ALERT*

(1976. dir: Larry Peerce) About the time that Star Wars and Jaws were about to change the face of Hollywood, two variant strands of popular cinema were fading away: the blockbuster, cast-of-a-thousand-stars, disaster film (the Towering Inferno, Earthquake, the Poseidon Adventure), and those brilliant, American Paranoia films which began darkening the landscape as the sixties turned into the seventies (the Conversation, the Parallax View, culminating in All the President's Men). Two-Minute Warning, which seems to have taken its inspiration from Peter Bogdanovich's low-budget Target, is a clumsy attempt at the first, but finds its few bleak moments of epiphany when rising into the second.

It's Superbowl Sunday. We meet various folks, many of whom will be dead before the movie ends, follow their various paths to the Coliseum: a pair of pickpockets, a middle-class family whose paterfamilias has just lost his job, a pair of lovers, a schlub whose life depends on L.A. winning the game, a priest. We also watch, from the killer's point of view so we never see who he is, a random bicycle-rider shot dead from distance, through a hotel room window, using a sniper's rifle. We watch him, as well, pack his weaponry into a coat and smuggle it into the stadium.

As he stations himself above the crowd and the cops become of aware of him, we find ourselves trying to guess at his motives and his targets. It's all standard fare until the head cop (Charlton Heston, naturally) tells the the SWAT team honcho (John Cassavetes) that he's ordered all the politicos (mayor, governor, president) smuggled quietly out of the crowd. Cassavetes asks why, to which the stolid Heston responds, "To get rid of potential targets," and Cassavetes, in his best, flat-practical, cynical voice, says, "Everyone's a target."

It's interesting. It marks the dawn of a new era. Heston never gives up trying to make sense of the slaughter, finally shaking the dying shooter, demanding reasons, but all he gets is, "Don't hurt me. Don't hurt me." Cassavetes is right. In the end, we don't get our answers. Was he there to shoot the President, or the first black quarterback to lead his team to the Super Bowl, or someone against whom he had a grudge we don't know about, opening fire on the crowd when his plans were stymied? We never know. Cassavetes' nihilistic end-speech, which I wish to God I'd written down, is a baleful portent of our ongoing state of emergency today: there is no reason, there is no logic, and, by extension, no real hope.