By Richard Winters
My Rating: 7 out of 10
4-Word Review: Her child goes missing.
Susan (Kate Nelligan) works as a college professor while also raising her 6-year-old son Alex (Danny Corkill) as a single parent. Alex normally walks 2-blocks to his school every morning in their Brooklyn neighborhood, so Susan thinks nothing of it when she waves goodbye to him as he turns the corner towards his school while she goes the other way to her job. However, when she returns home and finds that he’s not there she begins to worry. She calls her friend Jocelyn (Stockard Channing), who has a daughter the same age as Alex, only to learn that Alex never showed up to school that day. She then immediately calls the police and Detective Al Manetti (Judd Hirsh) becomes the lead investigator in the case to find the child.
The story is loosely based on the real-life case of Etan Patz who disappeared one day while walking to school on May 25, 1979. Not only did he become the first child to appear on a milk cartoon for missing children, but it also inspired Beth Gutcheon to write a novel, which was a fictionalized account of the his case that was later purchased by producer Stanley R. Jaffe in the amount of $350,000 to turn it into a film, of which Gutcheon was hired to write the screenplay.
While the film has a riveting quality that keeps you watching it does also have a certain ‘genteel atmosphere’ that critic Leonard Maltin complained about in his review, that keeps it a bit sterile for its own good. The film acts like child abduction is almost a novelty that’s rare to happen and shocking when it does though kids can go missing each and every day in this country. The detective states that children can be sexually molested by adults though if children came forward about it they’d ‘never be believed’ or ‘taken seriously’, which is something that I think has certainly flipped the other way in this day and age. He also brings up the subject of child porn, which gets called ‘chicken porn’ here, and parents respond in a naive way to this concept, which again is something I think most adults in this era would’ve been familiar with its existence and not act like they’re being told about something completely new they had never heard about. The police also ‘set-up-shop’ in the women’s apartment turning it into a virtual police station and remain there day-and-night for 6-weeks, which I couldn’t see happening now.
The sequence with a psychic, played by Kathleen Widdeos, I found unintentionally laughable. Her ‘visions’ are quite vague and when she gets pressed to give something specific, like the license plate number of the car, or identity of the kidnapper, she can’t. Yet the mother acts relieved when the psychic says the child is still alive, but since her ‘information’ is so nebulous she could be a con artist making it all up and no one would know the difference.
David Dukes, who plays the ex-husband and father of the child, who at this time was best known for playing the man who tried to rape Edith Bunker, in a memorable episode of the classic TV-show ‘All in the Family’ of which he received several death threats, plays the only character that shows any emotion and thus the only one who stands-out. The movie also examines the detective’s home-life, which I didn’t feel was needed. Normally I say it’s good when we learn more about a cop’s private side, but since he wasn’t the film’s protagonist I didn’t find it necessary and only helps to lengthen the film’s runtime, which was too long anyways and could’ve neatly been told in only a 90-minute time frame instead of 110 minutes.
I did come away liking Nelligan’s performance, some critics at the time labeled her as coming-off as ‘cold’, but I felt she did alright, but was kind of disappointed that Stockard Channing didn’t get the lead instead. At the time Nelligan was considered the up-and-coming star while Channing had been mostly relegated to comedy including two failed sitcoms, but in retrospect Channing has become the better known actress and proven to be highly versatile, so seeing her in the part of mother would’ve been quite interesting and she might’ve even been able to do it better.
Spoiler Alert!
My biggest beef though is with the ending, which is much different than in the actual incident. In the Patz case his body was never found and it turned into a cold case for many years before a man named Pedro Hernandez came forward in 2012 and confessed to the crime. Here though the boy gets found alive having been kidnapped to help take care of a man’s disabled adult sister, but it’s very hard to fathom how much help a 6-year-old could be expected to give an adult woman nor has there ever been in the annals of crime where a kidnapping has been done for this reason. Having the kid immediately answer the door of the home he is supposedly being ‘confined in’ hurts the tension and would’ve been more suspenseful had the police had to search the place before finally finding him hidden somewhere. Also, if the kid is able to open the front door then what’s stopping him from running out at some point and finding help?
The fact that a neighbor woman named Malvina Robbins (Louise Stubbs), who lives next door to the kidnappers and keeps calling the police about it, but they ignore her, really hurts the credibility of the Manetti character who we’re supposed to like and he’s portrayed as being ‘super dedicated’. If that’s the case then he should’ve followed-up on every single lead he could’ve even if he thought some of them might be ‘cranks’ it shouldn’t matter because you just never know. The fact that he doesn’t do this even after she calls the police hundreds of times makes it seem like a dereliction of duty who should be investigated for not following up and certainly not some ‘hero’.
I realize most audiences want some sort of resolution and making a movie like this that doesn’t have one might prove frustrating, but in real-life a lot of cases like these don’t get resolved, or if they do the findings are a grim one. To have a movie stay realistic the whole way only to tack-on a feel-good ending does a disservice to the many parents whose missing children never come home and thus hurts it from being as insightful and compelling as it could’ve been.
My Rating: 7 out of 10
Released: February 4, 1983
Runtime: 1 Hour 50 Minutes
Rated PG
Director: Stanley R. Jaffe
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Available: DVD-R, VHS
Scopophilia 