By Richard Winters
My Rating: 7 out of 10
4-Word Review: Someone wants him dead.
Loosely based on the novel ‘The 13th Man’ by Murray Teigh Bloom the story centers around Harry (Roy Scheider) a government agent who has a nervous breakdown after his wife gets killed during a shootout while he was on a secret mission. After spending time in a sanitarium he gets out to realize that his agency no longer has any assignments for him and he fears they may want him dead while trying to make it look like an accident. When he gets back to his apartment he finds that it’s been sublet to Ellie (Janet Margolin), a doctoral student at Princeton University. He tries to get her to move-out, but can’t and then starts to receive threatening notes in Hebrew and uses Ellie’s background in that language to help him decipher what they’re saying. Soon the two go on the run convinced that the same person after Harry may also now be targeting Ellie, but nothing is exactly as it seems.
Jonathan Demme, despite his immense talent and admirable film output, never received name recognition and for the greater part of his career failed to have a hit at the box office. In fact it wasn’t until the success of The Silence of the Lambs that he even became a sought after Hollywood commodity. Even then when most people think about that movie it’s Anthony Hopkins, or even Jodie Foster that comes to mind while Demme’s directorial efforts seem overlooked. In many of his interviews this was his biggest complaint and that no matter what he did he could never break-out of the bubble to have his name put over the title like with Spielberg, Scorssese, or Hitchcock. I could understand his frustration as his movies were step above your basic indie flick and while not perfect still had far more going for it than a usual B-picture and if anything this film should’ve been the one that got him noticed.
There’s been many Hitchcock imitations with a lot of them done by Brian Di Palma, but those seemed overdone while this one gets just the right balance. The on-location shooting is splendid with my favorite moments being at Princeton University bell tower and of course the climactic sequence at Niagara Falls. I’ve personally been to the falls, but found this movie made me feel closer and more immersed in it than in person especially with the sequences shot inside the Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant and another done in the Cave of the Winds, which is what really makes the film stand-out. The music score by Miklos Rozsa, has the perfect blend of what would’ve been used by Bernard Herrman, which was Hitch’s main composer, which helps to make this seem like a movie Hitch himself could of very well done himself.
Scheider’s acting is good as he’s constantly cranky and irritable, which anyone going through his situation would be, so it was realistic and relatable, but I really hated the white suits that he wore. For one thing the guy was out of work and no longer a professional agent, so why he felt the need to dress-up all the time when he really wasn’t on the job anymore didn’t make much sense. Why they were all white was even more head-scratching. Outside of Pat Boone I don’t know of anyone who wears a white suit and it made him stand-out in all the wrong ways. If this guy is afraid that he’s being targeted then he should be dressing down so he could then blend-in, which in this movie he definitely wasn’t.
Margolin, best known for her work in the landmark indie flick David and Lisa, is good too especially with her dual personalities where she plays a nerdy student and her alluring, sexy vamp alter ego at other points. She though was not the original choice for the part as Demme wanted Lynn Lowry, who had been in his previous film Fighting Mad, but Scheider, who was dating Margolin at the time, preferred her and studio backed him on it forcing Demme to drop Lowry, but out of guilt he still paid her and allowed her to collect residuals despite her never appearing in any of it.
Spoiler Alert!
The plot is fast-moving and well crafted and keeps you guessing while also introducing a wide array of new twists without ever getting too confusing. The final twist though, in which we find that Ellie is the one after Harry and has been murdering other men as well in a revenge plot for what Harry’s and the other men’s grandfathers did to her grandmother who was gang raped by them at age 15. The idea was to tie the Ellie character to the Biblical avenger of Goel, which sounds cool, but ultimately an overreach. Had Ellie been raped directly by these men then I could see her going out of her way to seek rough justice, but doing it all for a grandmother she barely knew just didn’t seem all that believable. Also, how does this then ‘right the wrong’ by taking vengeance out on the grandchildren of the men who committed the actual crime? The grand kids had no control over what their grandparents did and weren’t even around when it happened, so how is any of this fair, or even make sense?
A better way to have ended it was to have Ellie portrayed as being a crazy kook going after these men due to a belief in some conspiracy theory only for the viewer to finally realize that she was an actual rape victim and Scheider, who we thought was this good guy, was instead the villain. Since she was raped at 15 her features could’ve changed, which would thus explain why Scheider didn’t recognize her initially. With a movie so compelled to have one twist after the other, this would’ve been the ultimate jaw-dropper. It’s just a shame they hadn’t chosen this route as the film, as slick as it is most of the way, leaves the viewer with an empty feeling after it’s over.
My Rating: 7 out of 10
Released: May 4, 1979
Runtime: 1 Hour 42 Minutes
Rated PG
Director: Jonathan Demme
Studio: United Artists
Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Tubi
Scopophilia 