TWO-MINUTE WARNING (1976: Dir. Larry Peerce)
As he approached his 53rd year Charlton Heston was having one of the most commercially successful periods of his career, but even he must have known it was the spectacle of disaster that had lured audiences to Airport 1975, and Earthquake, rather than his aging star persona. It wasn't just his hairpiece that was getting less convincing, so were his days as a romantic lead. Realizing this, Heston embraced his middle age by segueing into mostly father figure and supporting character roles. 1976 would be the tipping point and a very busy year for him, having already starred in two films opposite James Coburn, the brutal Western The Last Hard Men, followed by the large cast WWII epic Midway. Continuing his connection with Universal Pictures, Heston accepted an offer to play the smaller yet pivotal role of the Los Angeles Police Captain dealing with a lone gunman at a championship football game in the LA Coliseum. Written and produced by the same team who had previously done the made-for-TV docudrama 21 Hours at Munich about the Israeli hostage incident at the 1972 Olympics, this was the third in a sniper film cycle following Targets (1968), and The Deadly Tower (1975), both inspired by the 1966 Charles Whitman shootings in Texas. Director Larry Peerce, whose New York Subway hostage thriller The Incident (1967) is a textbook example in low budget suspense film-making, expertly ratchets up the tension as a random collection of football fans inexorably march towards their tragic fate. Peerce wisely insisted, over studio protestations, that the killer remain both unknown and unknowable, mostly depicted as an anonymous series of fidgeting hands, point of view camera shots and obscured angles. This puts the audience in an exceptionally uncomfortable position, accentuating the anxiety of its chilling terrorist scenario. Composer Charles Fox doubles down on the dread with an eerie score that at times channels the oeuvre of Jerry Goldsmith, but appropriately when the violence erupts, the music becomes unnervingly absent save for the startling crack of a rifle being fired. The irresistibly intense John Cassavetes co-stars as the saturnine S.W.A.T. team leader whose appetite for deadly retribution contrasts with the more reasoned response of Heston's cop, an exchange given added irony by Chuck's future real-life appointment as president of the NRA. With its shocking R-rated bloodletting the film was a stand-out among the more family friendly horrors of most of its genre, perhaps being responsible for a cool reception at the box office. Audiences were just not interested in witnessing a bloodbath and mob panic that had no discernible entertainment value other than pure terror. Dismissed at the time as a fear-mongering exercise in cinematic ballyhoo, Two Minute Warning can be especially disconcerting for post 9-11 viewers whose commonplace experience with murderous rampages have only increased in the intervening decades.
BLU-RAY
