Yes, I know this movie is nearly 40 years old, but I just watched it for the first time. I figure if there’s anyone out there who can speak to this they’d likely be right here.
So, at the very end of the movie (I think 40 years negates the spoiler rules…) when Robert Redford’s character tells the CIA agent that he went to the press with the story. the spook asks him how he knows they’ll print it, and that he’ll be in big danger if they don’t. The last line of the movie is Redford saying, “They’ll print it” as he walks away. Did they? What made him so sure they would? There was nothing in the movie (that I saw) that made it a certainty.
Pretty much the same answer: the end is a prayer that the news media of the U.S. resists government control. If not, Redford’s character is screwed and – by extension – so are we all.
Thanks everyone. I just re-watched the ending and Redford’s facial expression *does *convey uncertainty which I missed the first time. I guess this was the Watergate era and uncertain times. All in all I thought it was a good movie.
I remember an interpretation I agreed with, in the final scene the Salvation Army is in the background singing God Rest you Merry Gentlemen.
Besides the “salvation” as what I think the band symbolizes for the hero, I think another clue is on the song.
To me it is a clue that indeed the hero will be comforted and saved from the evil powers he encountered by shining a light over the forces gone astray.
Just checked the final scene, I think that idea is good because the Salvation Army, regardless of what doubts the hero has, is now between him and the guy representing evil/satan.
I think it’s a great, almost-forgotten movie. Max Von Sydow’s character was wonderful. The cat and mouse between Redford and the CIA was really well done. And I remember seeing it a few years after it first came out, and the ‘spy’ tech was pretty cool then. Pretty quaint now, though.
It really is a movie of the 70’s, when reporters were heroes, governments were evil, but good would always triumph. But as I get older, I don’t think Higgins was so wrong. In justifying the actions of the CIA that led to the assassinations in the movie, he proposes that people are not as idealistic as Turner thinks:
Higgins: It’s simple economics. Today it’s oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food. Plutonium. Maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?
Joe Turner: Ask them?
Higgins: Not now - then! Ask 'em when they’re running out. Ask 'em when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won’t want us to ask 'em. They’ll just want us to get it for 'em!
I believe the movie intended him to be wrong, but even in 1975 I’m not sure he was. In out ‘post 9/11 world’ he probably isn’t going far enough in what the people would want. Maybe I’m just too cynical in my old age…
That’s how I interpreted it. The question was intended as an implied threat, and to indicate the speaker did not fully appreciate how things had changed.
IIRC (it’s been many years) the book ends the same way, even though he had three more days. Maybe it was published in the Sunday paper, but I haven’t read the sequel.
