Review: Fear is the Key

A stranger (Barry Newman) turns up in Hicksville, USA and demands a gas station/store owner sell him a bottle of bourbon on a no-alcohol Sunday. Police turn up and the stranger violently resists arrest, landing him in jail and subsequently court. From there he manages to get a gun, shoots a cop and takes an innocent attendee of the court (Suzy Kendall) as hostage on his way out. They drive off in his sweet-arse red ’72 Gran Torino and go on a long chase. From there, all I will say is that we learn that Kendall is an important heiress, the stranger is an underwater salvage expert whose services are requested by a rich businessman (Ray McAnally) and his sinister associate (John Vernon), and that nothing at the beginning of the film is what it seems. Dolph Sweet plays a bounty hunter who figures into the plot, while a young-ish Ben Kingsley (in his debut film role) plays a jerk henchman/assassin.

 

Completely shoddy 1972 adaptation of the Alistair MacLean (whose novels have been turned into the likes of “The Guns of Navarone” and the not-bad Cannon film “River of Death”) novel from director Michael Tuchner (“Villain”, with Richard Burton and Ian McShane) and screenwriter Robert Carrington (“Wait Until Dark”, of all things) is a pretty poor attempt at passing off a UK production for an American one. Sure, it stars American Barry Newman and character actor Dolph Sweet, but pretty much everyone else is a Brit (or in John Vernon’s case, Canadian). That’s annoying and weird, but it’s the least of the film’s problems. I just wanted to get the petty stuff out of the way first.

 

Oh let me count the ways this movie sucks. It’s a basic story, but it has been told in the most inept fashion possible, suggesting something very, very wrong happened here at some stage before the film’s release. Starting of like TV’s “The Professionals” by way of “The Dukes of Hazzard” and a touch of “Bullitt”, it’s narratively all over the shop. It’s cool when a film keeps you guessing as to what its deal is, but not when it’s done in such clunky fashion that it literally plays out like a few different films awkwardly spliced together. Some will admire the film for hiding its true nature for quite a while and keeping you guessing as to whether it’s an American-style car chase movie, a gangster pic, or an underwater salvage flick/personal drama. I call it a total mess that doesn’t seem to have a clear understanding of what it wants to be. It didn’t feel calculated to me, it felt like it was being written on the spot. I bet the book is much better than what we get on screen. Worse, the film plays out like it has been hacked to death by an editor wearing a blindfold in post-production. I get that you might want to tighten the pace up, but the way it has been done it leaves the film looking incredibly choppy. Once Newman gets to meeting up with Dolph Sweet and John Vernon, things get really, really choppy. The scene where Newman escapes from Vernon, Kingsley etc. and all of a sudden turns up somewhere else, only to then go back to the mansion to prevent Vernon and Kingsley from finding out that he was gone, is a disaster of narrative coherency. But yeah, don’t bother removing that largely superfluous car chase, though. That’s vitally important, right? Yeah, it’s not like it was a poor attempt at reminding people of Newman’s previous “Vanishing Point”. Speaking of the car chase, if this was indeed a mostly British attempt at an American-style action/crime film, this scene in particular shows that Tuchner (a Brit veteran of film and stage) has no clue what he’s doing. Car chases, even long ones should be viewed as a sprint. A long sprint in most cases, but a sprint nonetheless. The red ’72 Gran Torino is really cool, but the car chase we get here from Tuchner plays more like a marathon. It’s a slightly more amped-up Sunday drive, which is why you’ll probably find yourself more taken by the lovely scenery. That’s when you know a car chase has been fucked up by someone who has no clue what they’re doing. Where’s the danger, thrills or excitement in a Sunday stroll? The crazy thing is that the stunt work was from the guy behind “Bullitt” and “The French Connection”, classics in the car chase game. So I’m putting the blame on the director for this one.

 

The whole thing becomes tedious in the final quarter of the film when we get to the crux of the plot as it is slowly revealed. It’s a great cure for insomnia, although the tragedy concerning Newman’s character is somewhat interesting and deserved both a better story and a better actor than the singularly unappealing, smug Newman. Suzy Kendall, a rather fashionable actress for the time (she pretty much retired after a while), is pretty forgettable too. A young Sir Ben Kingsley (with a bit of hair!) almost looks more Indian in his debut here than he would as “Gandhi”. This film went over so well that Kingsley went back to theatre and occasional TV for the next 10 years until he made his Oscar-winning return in “Gandhi” (and then pretty much pissed away his cred for the next 30 years with abominably shitty choices, but that’s another story). The only ones to not come out of this looking too bad are the perfectly cast John Vernon, and a decent showing by Dolph Sweet. However, not even they can come close to salvaging (get it?) this mess. Very 70s cop show music score by the highly erratic Roy Budd (“Get Carter”, “The Stone Killer”, “Wild Geese II”, “Who Dares Wins”/“The Final Option”), which is not remotely a compliment. It’s particularly bad during the car chase.

 

The basic story here isn’t without merit. It could’ve potentially worked. Unfortunately, it has been completely botched either during a rather careless screenplay revision or through incompetent post-production editing. Something went horribly, horribly wrong with this one and it’s no surprise that it isn’t talked about today. I mean, even the car chase is botched.

 

Rating: D