Tag Archives: Kate Nelligan

Eye of the Needle (1981)

Posted on July 7, 2024 | 8 comments

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Spy infiltrates isolated family.

Henry (Donald Sutherland) is a German spy stationed in England during WWII, who comes upon an airplane site that he thinks is the Allied commandment post for the eventual invasion of Normandy, but upon closer inspection he finds out that the planes are all made of wood and the place is simply a decoy. With this information he tries to charter a U-boat to get back to his homeland, so he can hand his findings directly to Hitler and thus potentially change the course of the war. Instead his boat gets hit by a storm and crashes on the beach of Storm Island. Only four people reside there including Tom (Alex McCrindle), a lighthouse keeper and owner of a 2-way radio, which Henry needs to communicate back to Germany, as well as a young family made up of Lucy (Kate Nelligan), her husband David (Christopher Cazenove) and their 5-year-old son Jo. The family allows Henry to stay in their home while he recovers from his accident.  Lucy is sexually frustrated because on their wedding the couple got into a terrible car accident, which has left David paralyzed and unable to perform in bed. Henry catches onto to Lucy’s despondent situation and soon becomes her lover, but David suspects Henry of being a spy and the two have an ugly confrontation, which sends the situation for all those on the island to go spiraling out-of-control.

The film is based on the 1978 novel ‘Storm Island’ by Ken Follet, with the script staying pretty faithful to its source material. The story though kind of acts like two movies in one. The first half almost fully focuses on Henry’s spy exploits with lots of action and thrills while the second-half settles into being more of a subdued romance. Watching Sutherland playing this cold-blooded killer willing to callously off anyone that even slightly gets in his way without any remorse when for most of his career he played peace-loving hippie types, or at least that’s what he’s best known for, makes for an interesting contrast. It also shows as opposed to James Bond movies how being a spy can be a very lonely and unglamorous endeavor where a person is forced to constantly be on the run and can rely on no one, but themselves.

Spoiler Alert!

The shift during the second act where the tone becomes more of a drama doesn’t work as well. I couldn’t understand why Henry, this spy on-the-run and under extreme stress, would suddenly pick this time to get into a romance with a perfect stranger that he’s known for less than a day. If he wants to try and exploit the situation to feign romance so she will let down her guard and possibly defend him when and if the authorities arrive then fine, or maybe he’s just looking for some cheap sex to unwind him, which I could understand also. However, being in extreme survival mode where the welfare of himself and his top secret film are of the uppermost importance and then suddenly to pick this time to get sidetracked, and put himself in a an evermore and needlessly vulnerable position by trying to start-up and an affair while also simultaneously hiding-out made absolutely no sense.

I couldn’t buy into Lucie openly admitting her painful marriage to a perfect stranger either, which she candidly divulges to Henry less than 24-hours after first meeting him. Most people have pride and ego and thus won’t want to admit the harsh truth about their lives when somebody, in this case Henry, exposes it to them. They instead would want to ‘keep up appearances’ and maybe even become defensive, or resentful of someone they don’t know bursting into their home and openly telling them unflattering things about themselves and yet here Lucie melts completely when Henry confronts her about her flawed union and gushes out all the personal details like he’s her own personal therapist, which happens too quickly to being even remotely believable.

Spoiler Alert!

The affair angle didn’t seem necessary anyways since during the third act when she finds out he’s a spy she goes after him violently without any pause. You’d think if she had been intimate with him she might want to ‘hear his side of things’ or consider escaping with him from her dreary life instead of her immediate response being that he’s the mortal enemy.

With all this said I did like the climactic foot chase where Lucie goes after Henry with a gun alongside this rocky cliff ( in the book she throws a stone at him, but the shooting gun makes it more dramatic). Yet even this and some of the other twists that come about during the third act aren’t as effective as they could’ve been because all of the secrets are given away right from the start and instead having it start out in the cottage, where the relationship between Lucie and Henry could’ve taken more time to be realistic, and where Henry’s true identity wasn’t known upfront would’ve made what happens at the end more riveting, shocking and even profound, which with the way it gets done here doesn’t fully gel.

There’s also some problems on the technical end. The music is way too loud and at times obnoxious to the point it becomes heavy-handed and could’ve easily been left out altogether. The scene showing Henry chasing after Lucie who’s driving away in a car gets badly botched. The faraway shots of him running are okay, but the close-up, showing him from the waist up, looks like he’s jogging on a treadmill. The scene too inside the lighthouse where Lucie unscrews a lightbulb in order to insert a key into the socket and cause the fuse to blow looks phoney because if she were handleling a live bulb bare handed, as she does, she would’ve flinched and even let out a bit of a yelp from the scorching heat, but instead she doesn’t.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: July 24, 1981

Runtime: 1 Hour 52 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Richard Marquand

Studio: United Artists

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Freevee, Roku, Tubi, Amazon Video

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Posted in 80's Movies, Movies Based on Novels, Movies with Nudity, Spy/Espionage

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Without a Trace (1983)

Posted on March 4, 2024 | 1 comment

without

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

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Posted in 80's Movies, Drama, Kidnapping Movies, Movies Based on Actual Events, Movies Based on Novels, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Obscure Movies

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Crossover (1980)

Posted on August 20, 2022 | Leave a comment

patman1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: He’s slipping into insanity.

Mr. Patman (James Coburn) works as a nurse at a psychiatric ward in Canada. While he enjoys his work and the patients respond well to his methods he’s put-off by some of the other doctors and administrators who he feels don’t really care about the people they’re supposedly trying to help. He’s also carrying on an affair with two women. One is Nurse Peobody (Kate Nelligan) who works at the same hospital he does and the other is Abadaba (Fionnula Flanagan) the wife of his landlord. While trying to juggle these two women and dealing with the pressures of his job he begins seeing strange visions and fears the he may be losing his mind.

This is quite similar to Beyond Reason, which starred Telly Savalas. This one though fared a bit better at least for the first 20 minutes. I liked the way the hospital and the patients are portrayed where their impulsive and unpredictable behavior gives it a certain creepy vibe and the staff needs to be high alert at all times, or face the consequences, which for me brought out the realistic stresses of doing a job like that. The bleak, gray, and rainy setting of Vancouver, shot there to take advantage of the Canadian tax concessions that were given to film production companies at the time, helps accentuate the grim elements.

The film though fails to take advantage of what could’ve been an intriguing plot. Not enough weird visions are seen and the few that are, are underwhelming. It should’ve been approached as a thriller and filled with all sorts of nightmarish and surreal imagery that could’ve helped build the tension, but instead it gets treated as a drama with long talky segments between Coburn and his two girlfriends that bogs the whole thing down until you don’t care what happens. John Guillermin, the director, had helmed many successful features before this one including: King Kong, Death on the Nile, and The Towering Inferno, but shows no panache here and seems to be giving the material only a half-hearted effort. It might’ve done better had John Huston, who was the original choice to direct, had been hired instead.

Coburn, who stated that he did the movie due to an interest in the character who decides he finds the crazy world inside the hospital more comforting than the outside one, but later admitted that had he read the script after its numerous rewrites instead of accepting the offer upfront, he most likely would’ve rejected it, is excellent and the only good thing about the movie. Nelligan, who described the film as being a ‘nightmare’ while working on it as well as calling it an embarrassment, is not as interesting and the entire supporting cast is blah though the young woman patient named Miss Montgomery, played by Tabitha Harrington, who enjoys walking around nude at least offers some diversion.

The script was written by Thomas Headly Jr. in 1971 who later went on to write Flashdance, which storywise is quite different from this. There’s also a twist ending, though I figured it out long before it gets there and others most likely will too. I feel this was the type of concept where it started with the ending and then gotten written from there, but more side elements were needed instead of just relying on the twist to make it interesting, which for a 30-minute episode of ‘Twilight Zone’ might’ve worked, but as a feature film it gets stretched too thin.

Alternate Title: Mr. Patman

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: September 5, 1980

Runtime: 1 Hour 37 Minutes

Rated R

Director: John Guillermin

Studio: Film Consortium of Canada

Available: DVD-R (j4hi.com)

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Posted in 80's Movies, Foreign Films, Movies from Canada, Movies with a Hospital setting, Movies with Nudity, Obscure Movies

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