I recently saw this movie with friends. To say I disliked it is to put it mildly. It seemed to me to be propaganda of the worst order, with a lot of accusatory inferences that US officials were guilty of major crimes, but saying next to nothing concrete. The central premise of the movie was so vague and internally inconsistent that it's hard to believe that anyone could take it seriously. But apparently a huge audience has. So here goes.
The central premise is that the victim-hero while escorting a lady friend to a seaside resort in what is obviously Chile, stumbles upon a nest of US operatives, and sees so much that he has to be eliminated.We see him and the friend breakfasting at a seaside resort with some companionable older people, who chat pleasantly with them (the couple apparently spend the night – the time sequence is as vague as everything else) - and then invite them to a barbecue, and apparently tell all. Since he knows too much, he has to be eliminated.
Now this makes no sense at all. If the knowledge were so dangerous that possession means death, why are top secret operatives blabbing in the first place? At one point, the movie speculates that they assumed, being American, that the young man is on their side. When they learn better, they have him killed. Oh, please. This was 1971 – the US had gone through the most tumultuous decade in its history. Top secret agents are going to casually talk to a youthful stranger socially?
Not to mention that these encounters take place at a well-known seaside resort (not exactly the kind of place where the CIA billets people.) Per the dialog, the place is 'crawling with uniformed officers'. So what about the other guests? The maids? The hotel staff? They're deaf and dumb to all this? Why aren't they targets? The movie's theory fails at the most elementary level.
Although the victim's companion would know as much as him, no one threatens her. The mystery of the actual relationship of the two can serve as an example of the vagueness throughout. The victim hero takes the girl out to the resort and meets one of the supposed agents at breakfast. So they may have spent the night. So were they having an affair? At one point, the dad (Jack Lemmon) asked his young widow (Sissy Spackek) that question. She ducks the question, "Oh dad, you know what Chuck was like." That is typical of the entire movie.
There is another absolutely baffling scene, where the young widow is invited to the home of the US official whom the movie accuses of being most culpable. Inexplicably – and I do mean inexplicably – she bathes there. While she is in the tub, the bad guy inexplicably enters, in an intrusive way that most married women would resent if their husband did so, and there is confrontational dialog, with eyes glaring and all the rest. Huh? Why does she feel comfortable taking a bath there? By what earthly right would he feel entitled to enter the bathroom? The movie doesn't even attempt to explain.
The script goes on to implicate the State Department and CIA, on the basis that 'no national official would execute an American' without CIA approval. The premise of the movie is that the coup has been some sort of sudden, overnight seizure of power, engineered by the CIA. However, to the extent that the unnamed nation is Chile under Allende, which it obviously is, the premise is false to the point of being cynical. Space is too short to get into detail, and the site does not permit links. Suffice it to say that the Allende government was in real trouble throughout all of 1973, with the Supreme Court denouncing Allende for his violations of Constitutional guarantees in May and the Assembly doing the same in August. (These developments are usually overlooked by those who want to canonize Allende.) Copper prices had fallen dramatically in 1972 and 1973 – a hundred thousand women took to the streets in the summer to protest the high price of sugar. The entire country was in an uproar.
The point is that this was not a coup organized by a foreign country that stole democracy from the Chilean people. It came straight out of the political culture of Chile. While it is intuitively likely that the CIA provided aid and comfort, there is no indication at all that it ever had a veto over the Chilean government. Meaning that it is simply flat out not the case that 'no American could be shot' without CIA approval. Nor is there any reason to believe that the CIA marshaled operatives anywhere in Chile to assist. All this happened before the notorious Church Committee hearings in 1976, anything but a whitewash. It didn't find anything like what is suggested in the movie.
(The State Department didn't do itself any favor by classifying a contemporary memo related to Charles Horman, the luckless young man who is the model for the hero. In 2011, however, they were finally released, with shouts to high heaven from the movie's supporters, for they do indeed contain a mention of the CIA. But if you download it which I did, you'll find the reference is as speculative as the movie. It leads nowhere.)
So this is the worst kind of propaganda. Since there are a lot of problems with the case it wants to make, it chooses the method of vague innuendo and muddled narrative. Nathaniel Davis, the ambassador to Chile at the time, filed a $150 million dollar lawsuit for defamation. He lost, and rightly so, since there is a First Amendment and this is fair comment. But defamatory? Oh, yeah. Almost certainly.
The central premise is that the victim-hero while escorting a lady friend to a seaside resort in what is obviously Chile, stumbles upon a nest of US operatives, and sees so much that he has to be eliminated.We see him and the friend breakfasting at a seaside resort with some companionable older people, who chat pleasantly with them (the couple apparently spend the night – the time sequence is as vague as everything else) - and then invite them to a barbecue, and apparently tell all. Since he knows too much, he has to be eliminated.
Now this makes no sense at all. If the knowledge were so dangerous that possession means death, why are top secret operatives blabbing in the first place? At one point, the movie speculates that they assumed, being American, that the young man is on their side. When they learn better, they have him killed. Oh, please. This was 1971 – the US had gone through the most tumultuous decade in its history. Top secret agents are going to casually talk to a youthful stranger socially?
Not to mention that these encounters take place at a well-known seaside resort (not exactly the kind of place where the CIA billets people.) Per the dialog, the place is 'crawling with uniformed officers'. So what about the other guests? The maids? The hotel staff? They're deaf and dumb to all this? Why aren't they targets? The movie's theory fails at the most elementary level.
Although the victim's companion would know as much as him, no one threatens her. The mystery of the actual relationship of the two can serve as an example of the vagueness throughout. The victim hero takes the girl out to the resort and meets one of the supposed agents at breakfast. So they may have spent the night. So were they having an affair? At one point, the dad (Jack Lemmon) asked his young widow (Sissy Spackek) that question. She ducks the question, "Oh dad, you know what Chuck was like." That is typical of the entire movie.
There is another absolutely baffling scene, where the young widow is invited to the home of the US official whom the movie accuses of being most culpable. Inexplicably – and I do mean inexplicably – she bathes there. While she is in the tub, the bad guy inexplicably enters, in an intrusive way that most married women would resent if their husband did so, and there is confrontational dialog, with eyes glaring and all the rest. Huh? Why does she feel comfortable taking a bath there? By what earthly right would he feel entitled to enter the bathroom? The movie doesn't even attempt to explain.
The script goes on to implicate the State Department and CIA, on the basis that 'no national official would execute an American' without CIA approval. The premise of the movie is that the coup has been some sort of sudden, overnight seizure of power, engineered by the CIA. However, to the extent that the unnamed nation is Chile under Allende, which it obviously is, the premise is false to the point of being cynical. Space is too short to get into detail, and the site does not permit links. Suffice it to say that the Allende government was in real trouble throughout all of 1973, with the Supreme Court denouncing Allende for his violations of Constitutional guarantees in May and the Assembly doing the same in August. (These developments are usually overlooked by those who want to canonize Allende.) Copper prices had fallen dramatically in 1972 and 1973 – a hundred thousand women took to the streets in the summer to protest the high price of sugar. The entire country was in an uproar.
The point is that this was not a coup organized by a foreign country that stole democracy from the Chilean people. It came straight out of the political culture of Chile. While it is intuitively likely that the CIA provided aid and comfort, there is no indication at all that it ever had a veto over the Chilean government. Meaning that it is simply flat out not the case that 'no American could be shot' without CIA approval. Nor is there any reason to believe that the CIA marshaled operatives anywhere in Chile to assist. All this happened before the notorious Church Committee hearings in 1976, anything but a whitewash. It didn't find anything like what is suggested in the movie.
(The State Department didn't do itself any favor by classifying a contemporary memo related to Charles Horman, the luckless young man who is the model for the hero. In 2011, however, they were finally released, with shouts to high heaven from the movie's supporters, for they do indeed contain a mention of the CIA. But if you download it which I did, you'll find the reference is as speculative as the movie. It leads nowhere.)
So this is the worst kind of propaganda. Since there are a lot of problems with the case it wants to make, it chooses the method of vague innuendo and muddled narrative. Nathaniel Davis, the ambassador to Chile at the time, filed a $150 million dollar lawsuit for defamation. He lost, and rightly so, since there is a First Amendment and this is fair comment. But defamatory? Oh, yeah. Almost certainly.