by Anthony King
To hell with privacy.In the trailer to The Groundstar Conspiracy the announcer proclaims, “We challenge you to guess the ending.” Like any good conspiracy-based paranoid thriller, many questions are left unanswered. When I watch All the President's Men (1976) I like being left with the paranoia the previous 138 minutes instilled in me. A movie that refuses to be wrapped up nice and tidy with a pretty little bow has my respect. Even if the movie itself is subpar, an ambiguous ending warrants at least half a star from this writer.Luckily, The Groundstar Conspiracy is not subpar. It's a fun cat and mouse paranoid thriller with a cast that'll charm the pants off any viewer. The film opens with Michael Sarrazin as John Welles attempting to steal top secret plans from a government facility called Groundstar. In his attempt an explosion is triggered with Welles barely escaping. He ends up at the home of Nicole (Christine Belford), who calls for help. Welles is operated on, given reconstructive plastic surgery, and interrogated by a government investigator named Tuxan (George Peppard). Welles claims to have amnesia but is still tortured and locked up. Tuxan then allows Welles to escape and follows him in hopes to discover the truth behind the attempted theft and the people behind it. Welles returns to Nicole's home, they fall in love, the chase ensues, and all is revealed, question mark.
I'll start at the end. A good conspiracy movie will have a red herring or two, trick us into thinking all is well, reveal the truth, but still leave us questioning. Is the ending really tied up with a bow? Did they answer all my questions? Surely it can't be that easy. The Groundstar Conspiracy succeeds in all these areas. It plays out like a typical Peppard action-thriller, bordering on made-for-TV movie. These are not strikes against the film, by the way. I would put these in the plus column. Add in the cynicism so prevalent in films of the '70s, a redheaded beauty, Sarrazin's palpable hysteria, and Peppard's cool swagger and you have the exact thing many of us look for in an American film from the 1970s.
Peppard's career fascinates me to no end. He first made a name for himself on the big screen starring alongside Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961). Proving himself to be a strong male lead capable of dramatic and romantic roles one would think Peppard went on to make a career out of such roles. George Peppard went the other way. He stole Nazi rocket plans with Sophia Loren in Operation Crossbow (1965); he was a private eye hired to be a bodyguard in P.J. (1968); he tangled with Nazis again in House of Cards (1968); a spy again in The Executioner (1970). Westerns, espionage thrillers, rogue cops, post-apocalypse – Peppard became a genre icon. And then he entered every household in America in 1983 as John 'Hannibal' Smith in The A-Team. Just as we assumed he was born to build a career from playing a character like Paul Varjak in Tiffany's, Peppard took the darker, dirtier, bumpier, more exciting path to genre film.Few actors can pull off the charismatic bad guy like Peppard. Just like how Sarrazin commands our sympathy in many of his roles, Peppard commands our envy. We wish we could be half as cool as Peppard in any of his roles, including that of Tuxan in Groundstar. We don't know if Tuxan is good or bad. He's probably the bad guy. But he's so damn charming and cool we tend to lose sight of allegiances. Is Welles telling the truth? Can he really not remember anything? When the reveal takes place at the end of the film we're still left in that gray area between good and evil. Who's good and who's evil? Does it really matter? These are the questions I love to ponder as the credits role. And The Groundstar Conspiracy leaves us with the good questions while also entertaining us to no end.
You always bring out interesting movies that i rarely have heard about. Then i have to urge to go to amazon or ebay and buy the blu-ray. You're costing me money man 😜
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