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The punning title points up the murky nature of the gumshoe's trade as well as his affinity for the chess player who misses the winning strategy right under his nose. "You one of those intent-on-the-truth types?" Sam Spade adjusted, former Oakland Raiders bruiser turned Los Angeles shamus, Gene Hackman's splendid embodiment of the Arthur Penn seeker in torpid middle age. The faded Hollywood star (Janet Ward) kicks off the case, her daughter (Melanie Griffith) is an absconding nymph who gives voice to her generation's restlessness/rootlessness: "I like things to change no matter what." Feints from coast to coast, behind the scenes in New Mexico with the stuntman (Edward Binns), submerged in the Florida Keys with the runaway's stepfather (John Crawford). (As the charter pilot's mistress, Jennifer Warren vibrates with sunburned edginess: "It's the heat and the low wages.") Interconnection and desolation comprise the paradoxical mystery, Penn's piquant textures plus Alan Sharp's inspired dialogue in the distillate of Seventies malaise. To decipher signs is a heavy task for the private eye who cannot see, he'd rather track down his wife's lover (Harris Yulin) than talk to the wife (Susan Clark) who's just as lost as him. Sunken skeletons and MacGuffins, the Zapruder invocation of grainy, bloody footage that documents foul play and questions filmic reality. "Where were you when Kennedy got shot?" "Which Kennedy?" The hero prefers a football game on TV to a Rohmer film in the theater, he's not equipped to deal with art-house ambiguity and introspection in his own life, under the gritty veneer is an oneiric land-air-water flow. The investigation locates illumination through a glass-bottom boat darkly, and closes with an endless swirl on the oceanic void. "Sounds kind of bleak. Or is it just the way you tell it?" Antonioni's The Passenger is strikingly concurrent. Cinematography by Bruce Surtees. With James Woods, Kenneth Mars, Anthony Costello and Ben Archibek.
--- Fernando F. Croce |