People are voting emotionally.

Load of rubbish!!

All that we are seeing on the screen is happening with real people, real action sequences in the background, forcing the eye to watch as if we were there.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Robert Shaw and Malcolm McDowell star as MacConnachie and Ansell, too men making an escape across various rural backdrops with their hands tied behind their backs. They may have been imprisoned for crimes of some sort, and now authorities relentlessly pursue them through the countryside. Their most persistent nemesis is a helicopter manned by two people.Exactly where this is taking place, we never do find out. We don't learn very much about our protagonists, so they both remain something of an enigma. The plot is often stripped to the bare essentials; this is a very existential, interesting action-chase-thriller with a straightforward set-up. Scripted by Shaw himself, from the novel by Barry England, it does give some decent acting showcases to the two stars, and it also puts them through their paces almost non-stop. One can imagine that this must have been quite a gruelling shoot physically.Shaw and McDowell are very good, under the direction of famous blacklisted filmmaker Joseph Losey ("The Damned", "Accident"). But the real "stars" of the picture have to be the cinematographers (three of them are credited) and camera operators, who impressively capture some truly breathtaking scenery - deserts, forest, snowy mountaintops, etc. To that end, it's appropriate that "Figures in a Landscape" was shot in 2.35:1. It IS a very nice-looking picture.Exciting and harrowing at times, this is the kind of story that intrigues its viewers by largely leaving exposition out of the picture, and firing their imaginations.Seven out of 10.

It's difficult making films which rely on a two-hander at their heart... especially when that film is pared back so much that the two actors have no interaction with anyone else anywhere in the film. In Figures in a Landscape, the intensity of the relationship between Robert Shaw and Malcolm Macdowell aspires to Waiting for Godot, but comes across as occasionally contrived and hokey. It seems that Robert Shaw himself adapted the screenplay... there is constant banter between the two main characters, but the verbal set pieces come across as being too theatrical. Malcolm Macdowell has a monologue about their being animals, but what is really lacking is the animus in these characters, the id... if they had the instinctive cool of the spaghetti western - a genre invoked by the film sharing the mountainous Andalucian landscapes of spaghetti classics such as Cut-Throats Nine (1972) - this would be a superior film. The classic Italo-Spanish spaghetti westerns also always intercut the terrains of the human face in close up and the badland landscape, and, curiously, close ups of the actors are almost absent in this film.That said, a film in which two fugitives run through a landscape hunted by a black helicopter and a faceless army has to be pretty cool in its own right.

FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE presents two men escaping from military capture somewhere out in the desert (filmed in Spain) seeking refuge in another, hospitable country. They're endlessly pursued by a helicopter with an unseen pilot, who seems more interested in toying with then than capturing them. It's an exciting, thought-provoking piece of work. Director Joseph Losey has finally made the great ambiguous movie he was shooting for with the like of BOOM! and SECRET CEREMONY. The film is startling in its use of the vast scenery the two men find themselves against. Losey's direction has never been so tightly controlled, with sharp, jarring editing and a creepy, sparsely used score by Richard Rodney Bennett. A huge asset is the casting of Robert Shaw (who also scripted) and Malcolm McDowell as the escapees. They have great chemistry...McDowell's naiveté and neediness working well against Shaw's veteran soldier's gruffness. Shaw has a great speech where he recall's the courtship of his wife during "the war." A thrilling, rarely seen, movie!

Figures In A Landscape could never be more than a minor work. And I can't see it being made in any time other than the 1970's. It is existential, Beckettian. Two escaped men make an attempt to escape to a bordering country, pursued by a black helicopter with a malevolently playful pilot, and faceless soldiers on the ground directed by him. Along the way, they encounter some villagers, but mostly they are on their own, coping and not coping with escape. Robert Shaw plays the older, gruffer, working class Mac, McDowell is the young, higher class Ansell. But though they at first seem to play to type, this does not prove to be the case.I personally think there should be more odd films like this. There is a real interesting sense of humour and character study contained within the script, and evinced by the acting. The performances by Shaw (who also wrote the script) and McDowell are excellent. Shaw seems at first a gruff, experienced older tough guy, but soon reveals a very strange underside, and McDowell is wonderful as the young, confused, hunted Ansell. Moreover, Losey's direction is stunning, and a brave departure from the suffocating interiors of his more typical films like The Servant (even though there are some horrors in the editing). But, at the same time, I also feel that Figures In a Landscape is too vague in its allegory.