INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS 1978

Smart movies are hard to come by. Smart remakes…near impossible. Why?

Well, maybe it’s because Hollywood’s attitude towards remakes is built on a kind of Catch-22 logic: If a film is poorly made and flops at the boxoffice—precisely the type of film, one would assume, to best benefit from being remade—Hollywood won’t touch it. However, if a film is accomplished and financially successful (leaning towards classic-status), superfluous existence aside, Hollywood can’t seem to wait to get a crack at churning out a remake.

Wholly motivated by a studio’s desire to repeat an earlier triumph and capitalize on brand recognition without having to break a sweat, most remakes are cynical, dumbed-down affairs tricked-up with new technology and a paucity of inspiration. The lazier, more arrogant cousin of the sequel, remakes (which, by definition, presume an improvement over the original) have been responsible for some of the most painful moviegoing experiences I’ve ever had; e.g., The Stepford Wives (2004), The Haunting (1999), and The Women (2008). Just to name a few.

Yet, as if to prove the rule by exception, every now and then, when a remake is inspired by an idea rather than an accountant’s ledger, the results can be surprising, fresh, even transcendent. Such is the case with Phillip Kaufman’s shrewd and remarkably effective remake of the 1956 sci-fi/horror classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Donald Sutherland as Matthew Bennell

Brooke Adams as Elizabeth Driscoll

Jeff Goldblum as Jack Bellicec

Veronica Cartwright as Nancy Bellicec

Leonard Nimoy as Dr. David Kibner

The original Don Siegel film was a little B-movie masterpiece of paranoia and dread which, intentionally or not, tapped into America’s ambivalence to post-war conformity and anxiety over the anti-communist panic of McCarthyism. Staying true to the core story line of the original, Kaufman’s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (a deliciously pulpy title I’m glad the remake didn't abandon) is about an invasion of plant-like organisms from space that duplicate and replace human life—sans emotions. Life continues as before, the sole casualty (and ultimate tragedy) being a loss of personality and individuality.

The timeless appeal of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (it’s been remade at least two other times) may have a lot to do with the fact that we’re a culture which clings to the notion of individuality in the abstract, yet values conformity in the concrete. Even a cursory glimpse at the “comments” section of any Internet news site reveals that tolerance for opposing points of views and ways of life is not exactly America’s strong suit. Yet that doesn’t stop each of us from harboring, deep within our democratic bosoms, the romantic belief that we honor, above all else, the individual’s right to be just that: an individual.

What's HE doing here?
Robert Duvall's unbilled cameo as an unidentified priest  suspiciously eyeing Brooke Adams
as she picks one of the flowers that figure so significantly in the plot, was appropriately mysterious
enough to seriously unsettle 1978 audiences when the film premiered

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

What makes this Invasion of the Body Snatchers such a chilling delight is how acutely, and with such perceptive wit, it captures the mood and preoccupations of a particular point and place in time, and uses it to breathe fresh life into a familiar horror tale. The late Ira Levin (with both Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives) was a master at this sort of thing: creating tension out of tapping into the core anxieties lying at the center of a shifting cultural climate.

Instead of the small town setting of the original, the 1978 film makes the most of its “Me Decade” angst and takes place in that most defiantly individualistic of American cities; San Francisco. Which is, conceptually speaking, perfection personified. Where better to rage a war against conformity than a city which prides itself on being a haven for the eccentric, the unique, and the idiosyncratic.

San Francisco's Transamerica Pyramid
Throughout the film, shots are composed that juxtapose the unique elements of San Francisco's
unique "personality" with the threat of impending dehumanization and a loss of individuality

For those too young to have experienced the '70s firsthand, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an affectionate, but nonetheless spot-on, skewering of a certain West Coast sensibility. I was attending an arts college in San Francisco in 1978, and this film captures the feel of the time so authentically, it tweaks serious pangs of nostalgia every time I watch it. Seriously, most of the people I attended class with at The San Francisco Art Institute were like the characters played by Cartwright and Goldblum. 

The San Francisco of Invasion of The Body Snatchers is the post-"hippie movement" San Francisco when the aging, free-love crowd had to make room for the navel-gazing yuppie. It was an age of alternatives: alternative medicine, alternative religion and alternative thinking. The media was full of cults, causes, conspiracy theories, est training, and best-selling pop psychologists. Communal living and fighting for social causes was replaced by pride in ownership (restored Victorian apartments became symbols of yuppie affluence) and a reverence for privacy and personal space (as exemplified by the high-tech stereo headphones worn by the character, Geoffrey). Ecology buttons replaced peace signs, and a 1973 book titled “The Sound of Music and Plants” by Dorothy Retallck (detailing the effects of music on plant growth…a point referenced humorously in the film) was just part of a larger exaltation of urban plant life and vegetation in general.

As in all times of social realignment, unacknowledged social anxiety and unease is part of the adaptive cultural landscape. It makes sense to me that in a city as welcoming of change as San Francisco, the perceptive observer might also notice a distinct edginess and uncertainty behind the city's composed veneer of blissed-out broad-mindedness.

This barely perceptible nervousness is precisely what director Phillip Kaufman and screenwriter W.D. Richter seize on in Invasion of the Body Snatchers to provide a contemporary kick to the sci-fi, body-switching horror. The threat appears to come from deep space, but when it comes down to it, what’s most frightening about the whole body-snatching idea is the possibility that what we most cling to in an interdependent way among friends and loved ones (our individuality), is what is least valued about us from a societal perspective. 

It hardly feels unintentional that the pod people taking over San Francisco are undetectable precisely because of their behavioral similarity to the urban professionals whose infiltration had been threatening the city’s loosey goosey vibe since the early '70s. Nor are we meant to ascertain unequivocally whether or not the psychobabble of Leonard Nimoy’s paperback psychologist is pod-talk or just the new language of the New-Age.

PERFORMANCES

It always puzzles me the way so many directors of horror and suspense films overlook the obvious fact that the effectiveness of any horror film rests in whatever investment the audience has in the fate of the protagonists. Take time to flesh out the characters and there’s no telling how far an audience will go with your premise.

This is especially true with a film whose plot pivots on that intangible quality known as “humanity.” Invasion of the Body Snatchers appears to have been cast with an eye towards emphasizing the idiosyncrasies of its stars, and it makes a world of difference in how we respond to all the genre trappings of chases, close calls, and suspicious red herrings. Donald Sutherland, sporting the same curly locks from 1973's Don’t Look Now, has always been a kind of goofy, off-beat leading man. He’s not the lantern-jawed, hero type, so he comes off a believably strong, yet vulnerable enough for you never to be quite sure if he’s up to the task at hand.

 Brooke Adams is one of my favorite underrated actresses. She was among a small group of intelligent, distinctive actresses (like Geneviève Bujold) the '70s produced and then discarded when audience tastes turned to bland prettiness. Not anybody's idea of a cookie-cutter actress, Adams establishes herself and her character almost immediately. And in much the same way (and to similar effect) as Paula Prentiss' uniqueness is used in The Stepford Wives; the threat of Adams' distinctiveness being lost to flatlining conformity is made all the more acute by the casting. 

As good as Adams and Sutherland are (and Adams is amazing), the prizes have to go to Jeff Goldblum and Angela Cartwright. As just kind of couple you’d expect to find in San Francisco (they run a mud-bath establishment; he’s a poet, she’s one of those espousers of crackpot theories who nevertheless always sounds more sane than the people around her). They are a hilarious and touching pair, and I daresay that without their contribution, as excellent a film as Invasion of the Body Snatchers is, it wouldn’t soar the way it does.

And let’s not leave out Leonard Nimoy. I’ve never been a fan of Star Trek and no doubt I have a minimal awareness of his gifts as an actor, but I must say his role as the infuriatingly logical psychologist is an inspired bit of casting. Audiences were never likely to shed their image of him as Spock, so I like that the film intentionally makes use of our predisposed sense of him in a way that doesn’t intrude, but rather enhances.

A trade paper ad promoting Veronica Cartwright for Academy Award consideration

THE STUFF  OF FANTASY

Missed Opportunity or Cultural Sensitivity?

Perhaps it’s a sign of Kaufman’s good taste, but as a gay man, I find it hard to imagine how a film about human cloning set in San Francisco could resist the impulse to include a scene on Castro Street; home of the “Castro Street Clone.” For the uninitiated, The Castro is a gay district in San Francisco where (at least during the '70s) free-thinking gay men willfully abandoned all personal individuality so as to look identical to one another. Sporting identical mustaches, haircuts, clothing, and physiques, the Castro Street Clone was a city mainstay, as identifiable and generic to San Francisco as the Transamerica building. To poke fun at a subculture's need to unify by obliterating differences seems right in line with what the film sought to lampoon.

And yet, thinking back, I recall with great sadness that Invasion of the Body Snatchers was released about a month after the murder of openly-gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, and the murder of Mayor George Moscone. Under these circumstances there would have been no place in the film for a reference of this nature. I might have this wrong, but I even seem to remember that a jokey line of dialog Donald Sutherland speaks to psychologist Nimoy (“The Mayor’s a patient of yours, isn’t he?”) may have been temporarily cut out of sensitivity.

In any event, it was strange watching a movie with so many scenes taking place at its City Hall. San Francisco felt like a very scary place at the time, and, as one might imagine, that tragic real-life event—auguring a mounting intolerance and conservatism in the city known for its liberalism—only made watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers an even more unsettling experience than it already was.

"It was like the whole city had changed overnight."

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I don’t know if director Phillip Kaufman is an admirer of Roman Polanski, but Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a film I’m certain Polanski would appreciate. From the very first frames there is attention paid to establishing an atmosphere of ever-escalating paranoia and claustrophobia. Every shot contains something—whether in the foreground or distance—which supports these themes. Plants are in almost every shot, sometimes crowding the frame creating a small space of activity for the actors. There’s a brilliant sense of danger taking place beyond the confines of the story we’re witnessing. People are seen running in the distance, every window seems to have someone staring out of it. The tension grows to the point that even banal human rituals like flossing take on an ominous air (Elizabeth’s boyfriend is seen flossing in an early scene, later at a secret meeting in Union Square Donald Sutherland’s character passes a man flossing in public). 

Of course, it’s wonderful that all this ambiance is piled on and we’re left to fill in many of the blanks ourselves. The act of which engages us even further and pulls us into the story.

I've always liked how Sutherland's shattered windshield (result of a run in with disgruntled restaurant staff) never gets repaired and offers us a view of a city fractured. Reminds me of how Polanski has Jack Nicholson spend the lion's share of Chinatown with a huge bandage on his nose. Its incongruity and hint of unexpected violence is unsettling.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers has the most amusingly witty and dark screenplay. Here are just a smattering of my favorite lines:

Jack: "Of course it's a conspiracy"
Matthew: "What is?"
Jack: "Everything!"

Nancy: (recoiling from a lifesize pod replica of her husband) "Jack, don't touch it! You don't know where it's been!"

Jack: "Who are you calling?"
Matthew: "Washington."
Jack: "What...the CIA? The FBI? They're pods already!"

Nancy: "Well, why not a 'space flower'? Why do we always expect metal ships?"
Jack: "I've never expected metal ships."

After Rosemary’s Baby, which, to me, is the best horror/suspense film ever made, I have to count Invasion of the Body Snatchers as one of the most consistently scary (and fun) thrillers I’ve ever seen. It delivers as drama, black comedy, sci-fi, and horror.  

Although set in a marvelously evoked '70s San Francisco, the film is so smart that it remains a relevant nightmare-inducer even after all these years.

Today, with all the pierced, body-inked, automatons walking around with their earbuds buried in their brains, eyes trained on texting fingers, with nary a moment of eye-contact or human interaction passed between them, we might be ripe for another remake. But I think we’d better hurry up. From what I’m seeing there’s not a lot of individuality left to be fearful of losing.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

KLUTE 1971

There are many wonderful movie actresses whose work I greatly admire. But before Dunaway, Christie, Streep, Black, Blanchett, and Portman, there was Fonda. Jane Fonda was the preeminent actress of my youth — the gold standard — and for a long while there wasn’t an actress who could touch her. As beautiful as she is versatile, Fonda's transformation from bubble-headed ingénue (Tall Story and Any Wednesday); to libertine sexpot (Barbarella); to compellingly sensitive, serious actress (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?); mirrored the evolving role of women in America and charged her screen roles with an immediacy that quickly turned her into a symbol of the times. 

Onscreen she was Woman Emergent: the glamorous embodiment of a new feminine standard of intellectual and sexual liberation. Never more so than in the role of Bree Daniels in Klute. Braless, midi-skirted, sporting that iconic shag haircut, dressed in the height of post-hippie funky '70s fashion... Jane Fonda was the sex symbol redefined, and seemed to point toward a new era for women in film in the '70s.

Ostensibly, anyway. I mean, Fonda's Bree Daniels is yet another movie call-girl.

Time is Money: Bree checking her watch in the throes of artificial passion

Yes, even as late as 1971, Hollywood was still falling back on this overused cliché in its limited stock of women's roles. If a woman wasn't a wife, a girlfriend, a marriage-minded virginity-guarder or repressed businesswoman: prostitute  (or nymphomaniac, interchangeably) is invariably where imagination-starved screenwriters landed when stumped by how to write a female character who is attractive, independent, and has a sex life.  

Cinema's fascination with prostitutes and hookers-with-hearts-of-gold unquestionably has a great deal to do with standard male studio boardroom thinking that went: women in a film = sex. Thinking which also supported the double standard reasoning that if a woman in a film has sex outside the sphere of marriage, there's a problem with audience sympathy. Thus, the good-hearted hooker was born. She gave the movie all the sex and nudity it required, but her profession kept her at a cultural remove (she couldn't tarnish the sanctity of home and marriage) but her gold heart made her sympathetic to viewers. 

But in Klute, Bree Daniels being a call-girl is more than just steamy window dressing. Her profession is integral to the plot, and, as realized by Fonda, Bree is light years away from the usual idealized fantasy image of prostitution offered in movies. 

Jane Fonda as Bree Daniels

Donald Sutherland as John Klute

Roy Scheider as Frank Lagourin

Charles Cioffi as Peter Cable

John Klute (Sutherland) is a small-town detective assigned to investigate the six-month disappearance of local businessman and friend, Tom Gruneman. His search takes him to Manhattan where it appears Gruneman is in hiding and stalking Bree Daniels (Fonda), a call-girl he allegedly frequented. As Klute's investigation takes him deeper into the seedy underworld of pimps, drugs, and prostitution, his routine Missing Persons case reveals itself to be something unanticipatedly perverse and considerably more dangerous.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I really like the scene that introduces us to the character of Bree Daniels.

As one in an anonymous, objectified line of applicants at a modeling agency, Bree is dwarfed by photo blow-ups of a glamorously dehumanized model while being subjected to a blisteringly painful (to watch) "cattle-call" inspection that makes a meat-rack look humane.

Model from1970 issue of Harper's Bazaar

Real-life model Veronica Hamel appears briefly in an uncredited role as a model in Klute. Hamel would later go on to star in the TV series, Hill Street Blues.

This is the first of several scenes depicting Bree's pursuit of "respectable" employment (she's an aspiring model/actress) as being infinitely more humiliating and degrading than her work as a call girl. Potential employers take physical and emotional liberties (they feel free to touch her or make casually cruel personal comments) while she's forced to mask her humiliation and dejection behind nervous smiles. With this cinematic device, director Alan J. Pakula economically and with great visual panache (thanks to cinematographer Gordon Willis) establishes the essential conflict of Bree's life and sets the stage for why she regularly sees a psychiatrist.

Bree, asked by her therapist why is she still drawn to prostitution after professing a desire to quit:

"Because it's an act. That’s what's nice about it. You don’t have to feel anything, you don’t have to care about anything, you don’t have to like anybody. You just lead them by the ring in their nose in the direction that they think they want to go in...you get a lot of money out of them in as short a period of time as possible...and you control it and you call the shots."

The extended monologues of Bree's therapy sessions - exposed-nerve, free-association musings on why her life isn't working, wherein she reveals her intelligence and self-awareness - are contrasted with the coolly professional patter she employs with her "johns." Gone is any trace of emotional insecurity as Bree, in a deeply seductive lower-register voice, takes command of the situation while expertly playing the role of the carnal supplicant. Anyone operating so fully in such opposing modalities is clearly someone grappling with a lot of issues, and Jane Fonda brings incredible depth and complexity to the character of Bree, inviting the audience to relate to her as an individual personality, and not merely through the prism of a fixed moral stance taken on prostitution.

Working Nine to Five

PERFORMANCES

Perhaps the biggest testament to how exceptional Jane Fonda is in this, her Academy Award®- winning role, is how the persuasiveness of her performance got audiences and Academy voters alike to overlook their personal responses to Jane Fonda, the political activist, and lose themselves in the character of Bree Daniels. There aren't accolades enough for me to effectively express how much I enjoy and admire Fonda in this movie. It would have been the most pedestrian detective film imaginable without her. Whereas Klute is atmospherically rooted in the early '70s (Bree's outburst, "Goddamn hypocrite squares!" can't help but elicit a giggle), but Fonda's performance is timeless.

Life Imitates Art: Bree Daniels' mugshot (above), Jane Fonda's real-life 1970 mugshot (below).
Fonda's by-now iconic run-in with the law (you can find this image on everything from purses to T-shirts) occurred after filming on Klute had completed

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

My absolute favorite scene in the film is Klute's initial interrogation of Bree in her apartment. Fonda is masterful in navigating the myriad emotional shifts in her character (anger, defensiveness, manipulation, vulnerability) which contrast to dynamic effect with Sutherland's stolid calm. (Love what Fonda does with Bree's reluctant confession that she is afraid of the dark.)  

In addition, this scene is a standout example of how to build suspense and generate fear by showing less, not more. Few things are more fright-inducing than those three little words "Don't be afraid," so when Klute says this to Bree and leads her away from a skylight, tension grows unbearable as the camera pulls to a confining, low-angle shot that shows us only Bree's hands on Klute's back reflected in a mirror. As he reveals to her that he thinks someone is on the roof watching them, Bree's hands, seconds ago in a caress (hands dismissed in an earlier scene as being "funny"), clench in tension while she emits a genuine terrified gasp which eerily echoes the sound of the orgasm she'd feigned moments prior with a trick. Just brilliant. Even today, this scene scares the hell out of me.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I like it when filmmakers don't play their audiences for dumb. When intelligence is applied and respect given to so-called genre films (movies that fit specific narrative constructs like westerns, horror films, and police thrillers), there's a real opportunity to create something unexpected and entirely innovative. 

John Klute's world in Tuscarora, Pennsyvania.

Bree Daniels' world in New York. A dingy apartment in a brownstone overlooking a funeral parlor.
In this shot, the small pot of flowers Bree carries connects with the lush green of the Pennsylvania scenes

With Rosemary's Baby, Roman Polanski took what could have been a routine horror film and fashioned it into a masterpiece of urban paranoia. With Klute, the late Alan J. Pakula (with the indispensable contribution of Fonda) takes an unremarkable detective story (the MacGuffin of Tom Gruneman's disappearance is dispensed with so quickly that even those who like the film would be forgiven if they fail to remember his fate) and emerges with a deeply insightful character drama that's also a solid and genuinely frightening thriller. On that last score, the contributions of cinematographer Gordon Willis (The Godfather) and music composer Michael Small (The Stepford Wives, Night Moves) can't be oversold. 

Klute is one of the best examples of what the New Hollywood of the '70s promised: a merging of art-film sensibilities with popular entertainment. And with Klute, Jane Fonda, my favorite actress when I was growing up, joined Shelley Duvall in 3 Women and Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, in giving what I think of as one of the finest performances in an American film in the '70s.

"Don't be afraid..."

Said by Bree to a trick to relax him,

 by Klute to Bree to calm her,
and by the killer to Bree before...

AUTOGRAPH FILES:

Got this autograph of cinematographer Gordon Willis in 1984. He was flabbergasted anyone actually knew what he looked like.

A friend of mine who was Veronica Hamel's personal trainer during the Hill Street Blues years got this autograph for me

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2011

DON'T LOOK NOW 1973

There is nothing like a good scare at the movies. I don't mean those jarring, throw-your-popcorn-in-air, dig-your-nails-into-your-partner's-arm, moments (ah, sweet memories of Wait Until Dark). As fun as they can be, those moments are over much too swiftly. What I refer to are those far more satisfying, lasting feelings of intensifying disquietude that overtake you the moment a movie starts to touch upon an anxiety or sense of dread that runs deeper than mere surprise in the face of the unexpected. Those moments when the passive role of observer — the moviegoer's emotional safety valve—give way to the more interactive role of the projected participant. Suddenly, you're relating to the film on a visceral level, and all the while an electric current running through you is taking great delight in your being brought to such a vulnerable state of apprehension by mere flickering images projected on a screen.  

It happened once when I was a kid and saw Rosemary's Baby and it happened again as an adult with Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now. an opaque, atmospheric thriller that proves when it comes to scary stories, it's all in the telling.

  Julie Christie  as  Laura Baxter

  Donald Sutherland  as John Baxter

Hilary Mason as Heather, the blind woman with "second sight"

  Clelia Matania as Wendy

An off-season assignment to restore a decaying church in Venice Italy affords architect Donald Sutherland and wife Julie Christie the opportunity to leave behind mournful memories associated with their English country home—the site of a recent tragedy--the accidental drowning death of their young daughter. However, Venice in winter, a shuttered city blanketed in gray skies, desolate streets, and half-empty cafes and hotels, is so grim and foreboding it's hard to imagine a less suitable place to try to overcome depression. A feeling further intensified by the city being beset by a string of grisly, unsolved murders. With the “chance” meeting of a pair of eccentric elderly sisters, one blind and claiming to have a psychic connection with the deceased child, a chain of strange and uncanny events is triggered...events as labyrinthine and dark as the streets of Venice themselves.

                              The unforeseeable foreseen.
                              A sense of something not being right.
                              An accident. A premonition. A fate.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

What one considers scary is as subjective a designation as what one considers to be funny, so I'm aware my claim of Don't Look Now being one of the scariest movies I've ever seen is not the same thing as saying it's a scary movie. I'm certain that for many its premise and execution are far too leisurely and bloodless for the Texas Chainsaw Massacre crowd, and the label of "arty" would not be baseless in describing both its structure and visual style. But for whatever reason or whatever chord it struck, this darkly mysterious merge of the rational and paranormal just scared the bejesus out of me when I first saw it. And continues to do so even today.

Venice in Peril
A sign calling attention to the endangered status of Venice architecture also 
alludes ominously to the serial killer terrorizing the city.

PERFORMANCES
I claim no objectivity when it comes to Julie Christie. To the head-scratching bewilderment of my partner, who thinks she's fine enough but nothing to rave about, I find her to be an intelligently resourceful actress who brings an air of emotive conviction to everything she does. And it certainly doesn't hurt that she is a stone knockout, to boot. Her matter-of-fact naturalness proves an essential asset in a film such as this, lest her character be made to appear hysterical or unbalanced. Donald Sutherland underplays so well (usually, anyway) that the skill of his performances are often overlooked. In Don't Look Now he is at his relaxed best, making his character a believable skeptic in the face of the fantastic. Watch the play of emotions over his face as his character tries to sort out the mystery that his life has become. It's just the kind of in-the-moment urgency that is lacking in so many suspense films. Sutherland seems to be right with us, the audience, not a step ahead nor a step behind. I think he's fantastic here.

The much-discussed graphic sex scene between Christie and Sutherland is but one of many moments of genuine affection displayed between the couple. Moments that invest the film with a real sense of the pain of loss.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

There's a chilling sequence in which the couple venture out at night, looking for a restaurant they've heard about. The dark streets and alleys prove an insurmountable maze and they become lost and eventually separated. In the midst of this, an unearthly cry is heard and something terrifying is half seen. This scene just had my pulse racing. It is a brilliant bit of  cinematic tension.

Things only half seen and half heard.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The film's title is really splendid. No matter how you say it, literal or ironic, whatever you think it means, whatever punctuation you add, or wherever you place the emphasis; it remains 100% appropriate to the film's themes. It speaks of warning, apprehension, sight, and danger. All elements of the film evocatively rendered in the recurring perception motifs of eyes, watching, seeing, and reflecting.

A woman without sight watches.

The city is full of windows but no one sees the murderer.

A child drowns because no one is watching.

Much of  Don't Look Now concerns itself with the concept of perception. Most certainly self-perception (Sutherland's character's fatal flaw is ignoring his own sixth sense) and awakening to the danger inherent in not heeding signs of warning, not being watchful, not seeing, not looking. 

Don’t Look Now is one of those movies so rich in content that it yields dividends with each re-visit. This brief insert shot reveals details of Donald Sutherland's nightstand: a photo of his children with the drowned daughter's face obscured. A glass of water with a symbolically significant red base. A paperback copy of Der Stellvertreter (subtitled, A Christian Tragedy) by Rolf Hochhuth - a play alleging the Catholic Church turned its back on (failed to heed, refused to see) the warning signs of The Holocaust. Playing further into the themes of not looking and paying little heed, in a later scene, a Catholic Bishop pondering the violence in the world wonders aloud if perhaps God has "other priorities" or perhaps "we have stopped listening."

A thriller in every sense of the word, Don't Look Now is one of those rare suspense films that doesn't lose its punch after it's revealed its mystery. Indeed, that's precisely the point when more questions are likely to spring to mind. Whatever level it's approached by -- a mood piece, a study of grief, a psychic mystery, a ghost story -- Don't Look Now delivers as a chilling, remarkably effective, and atmospheric suspenser that's as much a treat for the eyes (Venice has never looked more hauntingly beautiful) as the imagination. But keep your eyes peeled.

BONUS MATERIAL

Don't Look Now theatrical trailer:

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2011