The Keep (Michael Mann, 1983)

The Keep (Michael Mann, 1983)

Cast: Scott Glenn, Alberta Watson, Jürgen Prochnow, Robert Prosky, Gabriel Byrne, Ian McKellen, William Morgan Sheppard, Royston Tickner, Michael Carter. Screenplay: Michael Mann, based on a novel by F. Paul Wilson. Cinematography: Alex Thomson. Production design: John Box. Film editing: Dov Hoenig. Music: Tangerine Dream.

Could the 210-minute cut of The Keep that Michael Mann originally submitted to Paramount really have been a better film – or even a good one? Because the 96-minute version now available on the Criterion Channel is a hopeless mess, incoherent and only mildly provocative in what ideas it seems to contain about good and evil. The story of its muddled production, the result of studio interference and the death of a key member of the crew, visual effects supervisor Wally Veever, has been widely told. Even its fine cast, which includes Scott Glenn, Jürgen Prochnow, Gabriel Byrne, and Ian McKellen, can’t save it. Glenn, who is one of those actors who make almost any film they’re in better, is oddly cast as some kind of superhero named Glaeken Trismegistus, who instead of setting to work immediately dealing with the monster called Radu Molasar (Michael Carter), spends time bedding Eva Cuza (Alberta Watson), the daughter of the professor (McKellen) brought in to solve the mystery of the keep, the fortress constructed to contain Molasar. Moreover, the professor and his daughter are Jewish, but the SS commandant (Byrne) who has taken charge of the keep doesn’t mind pulling them out of the crowd waiting to be sent to a concentration camp: He’s losing too many Nazi soldiers to the monster. Yes, there’s the makings of a good horror thriller in the film, and there are those who claim to find it in what exists, by filling in its many blanks. But I can only dismiss this as a rare failure by the director who gave us such exceptional films as The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), Collateral (2004), and the first movie (and one of the best) to feature Hannibal Lecter, Manhunter (1986). Talk about bouncing back!

 

The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999)

Cast: James Woods, Kathleen Turner, Kirsten Dunst, Josh Hartnett, Michael Paré, Scott Glenn, Danny DeVito, A.J. Cook, Hanna Hall, Leslie Hayman, Chelse Swain, Anthony DeSimone, Lee Kagan, Robert Schwartzman, Noah Shebib, Jonathan Tucker. Screenplay: Sofia Coppola, based on a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. Cinematography: Edward Lachman. Production design: Jasna Stefanovic. Film editing: Melissa Kent, James Lyons. Music: Air.

Sofia Coppola's first feature is a well-crafted and reasonably faithful adaptation of a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides that takes a retrospective view of the suicides of five teenage girls in an affluent American suburb. Kirsten Dunst is, as so often, a standout as the sister who rebels against her overprotective parents and eventually promotes the suicide pact.

The Hunt for Red October (John McTiernan, 1990)

Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin, and Scott Glenn in The Hunt for Red October

Jack Ryan: Alec Baldwin
Marko Ramius: Sean Connery
Bart Mancuso: Scott Glenn
Capt. Borodin: Sam Neill
Admiral Greer: James Earl Jones
Andrei Lysenko: Joss Ackland
Jeffrey Pelt: Richard Jordan
Ivan Putin: Peter Firth
Dr. Petrov: Tim Curry
Seaman Jones: Courtney B. Vance
Capt. Tupolev: Stellan Skarsgård
Skip Tyler: Jeffrey Jones

Director: John McTiernan
Screenplay: Larry Ferguson, Donald E. Stewart
Based on a novel by Tom Clancy
Cinematography: Jan de Bont
Production design: Terence Marsh
Film editing: Dennis Virkler, John Wright
Music: Basil Poledouris

What to make of the fact that the KGB man assigned to be "political officer" on the Red October (and swiftly offed by the defecting captain) is named Putin? Coincidence, of course, but it's one of the things that make John McTiernan's film of Tom Clancy's blockbuster novel The Hunt for Red October still relevant. The film turns on the perpetual dilemma summed up in the oxymoronic Russian proverb that Ronald Reagan turned into a foreign policy, "Trust, but verify." This first Jack Ryan movie is a bit overplotted and occasionally slow to generate the tension a thriller needs, but it has weathered the fall of the Soviet Union better than a lot of stories about the Cold War, and having a character named Putin (though he's Ivan, not Vladimir) with a background similar to the current Russian strongman's does tickle the imagination a bit. The best thing about the film itself is its casting. Even though this was Alec Baldwin's only outing as Jack Ryan (he was replaced by a bigger box-office draw, Harrison Ford, in the next two Tom Clancy movies, Philip Noyce's 1992 Patriot Games and 1994 Clear and Present Danger, and the role has been played by Ben Affleck, Chris Pine, and John Krasinski), Baldwin gets the souped-up everyman quality of the role right. But he's overshadowed -- as who isn't? -- by Sean Connery, as well as by those two exemplars of Actors Who Make Every Movie They're in a Little Better: Sam Neill and Scott Glenn. The fantasy of Neill's Capt. Borodin is one of the screenplay's high points: "I will live in Montana and I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits, and she will cook them for me. And I will have a pickup truck and maybe even a recreational vehicle." It makes the character's dying words, "I would like to have seen Montana," an unexpectedly poignant moment for an action thriller. Glenn similarly finds the humanity within a character who could be just a stereotype, the tough-talking cowboy with an empathetic streak that keeps him from shooting first and asking questions later.

The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman, 1983)

With its brightly irreverent tone toward subject matter that typically brought out pious patriotism in Americans, The Right Stuff feels more like a film of the 1970s than of the Reagan '80s, which may be why it was a box-office disappointment. It remains true that some of the parts of the film -- the caricatures of the German scientists, the publicists, the press, and politicians like Lyndon Johnson (Donald Moffat) -- don't fit snugly with the genuine heroism shown by the astronauts and test pilot. But that's because writer-director Philip Kaufman dared to assume a point of view on the material that was fresh and unconventional -- a rarity in American film of the '80s. Some of the tone of the film can be found in its source, Tom Wolfe's book, which was designed as a corrective to the "official story" of the Mercury 7 that was provided by Life magazine. Instead of squeaky clean superbeings devoted to wife and family, the astronauts were just human beings, frequently raunchy, irreverent, and more than a little inclined to step out of marital bounds. The film's great glory is its all-star cast (though few of the actors in it were stars before it was made), with particularly good work coming from Sam Shepard, who received a supporting actor Oscar nomination as Chuck Yeager, the test pilot that the astronauts wanted to be, even as NASA and the scientists wanted them just to be glorified lab rats, plus Scott Glenn as Alan Shepard, Ed Harris as John Glenn, Dennis Quaid as Gordon Cooper, and Fred Ward as Gus Grissom. There is similar strength in the female cast, particularly Barbara Hershey as Glennis Yeager, Veronica Cartwright as Betty Grissom, Pamela Reed as Trudy Cooper, and Mary Jo Deschanel as the publicity-shy Annie Glenn, whose embarrassment at her stammer leads to a wonderfully satisfying standoff against an increasingly irate LBJ -- a man whose whims were seldom ignored. Deschanel's husband, Caleb, is the film's cinematographer. (Yes, they are the parents of Zooey Deschanel.) The movie was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won four: for sound, film editing, sound effects editing, and Bill Conti's score.