Jonathan Demme doing Brian De Palma doing Alfred Hitchcock. Emerging from a sanitarium after a breakdown, intelligence agent Roy Scheider has to deal not only with the guilt of having lost his wife in a cantina shootout, but also with death threats sent in Aramaic. Is his former secret government agency (headed by Christopher Walken) trying to rub him out? Or is tag-along gal Janet Margolin something more than Love Interest? Without giving too much away, it involves a string of interconnected murders, cross-generational revenge, and a crabby old Jewish sidekick (Sam Levene, natch). Despite the vaguely corporate paranoia of the early New York scenes, the picture's jaunty tone is far from the somberness of the decade's Watergate-soaked thrillers (The Parallax View, Night Moves) -- from the start, Demme sends his camera sailing into Hitch-quoting territory, with prowling shots marinated to Miklós Rózsa's deliriously obtrusive score. As transparent a genre exercise as Obsession, though lacking De Palma's own obsessive grappling with the tropes of suspense cinema, the film has the feel of an artist bending his own temperament to salute another whose tensions he does not share (not as disastrously as Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black, though just as forcedly an act of worship). Accordingly, the movie breathes when Demme is Demme (in his handling of actors, his cherishment of human quirkiness) and dies when Demme strains for the Master (the bell tower shootout and the Niagara Falls climax, both botched by technique applied willfully, unfeelingly). Adapted from Murray Teigh Bloom's novel The 13th Man. With John Glover, Charles Napier, and David Margulies.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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