It didn't
really strike me until the scene above Grand Central that this was Peter
Yate's homage to Alfred Hitchcock. Then when you look back, you realize it
has been Hitchcock all along. Like many of Hitchcock's films, it involves
an innocent who gets caught up in a conspiracy of evil. It is beautifully
shot taking full advantage of NYC and has a cast that was very hot at the
time. Kelly McGillis right off of Witness and Top Gun plays the innocent;
a very young looking Jeff Daniels after Terms of Endearment, The Purple Rose
of Cairo and Something Wild is the FBI agent and Yates of course had one
good film after another including Bullitt, Eyewitness, Breaking Away and
The Friends of Eddie Coyle. A sure fire hit, right? For some reason, nobody
went to see it. A total bomb. A man setting himself on fire would have drawn
a bigger audience. Mystifying to me. I thought this was a solid tense film
with good performances.
It is 1951, the Yankees beat the New York
Giants in five games to win the World Series and another Red Scare is underway.
There had been one in the 1940s as well and we may be about to have another
one, this time called Radical Leftist Terrorists and as opportunistic and
idiotic as the others. Emily (McGillis) is testifying before Congress and
Salwin (Mandy Patinkin) in his best Nixonian slime is demanding that she
name names. She refuses. Gets fired from her job at Life Magazine and has
to take a job as a reader for an elderly lady (Jessica Tandy). The FBI (Daniels,
Ken Welsh) are ordered to keep an eye on her.
She becomes friendly with a young foreign
man next door who reads Poe, she Dickinson, but it is clear that something
in the house is troubling him. Then she spots Salwin in there and becomes
more curious. The one weakness of the film was her lack of motivation to
risk her life in all of this. New Yorkers just mind their own business, but
no matter how dangerous it gets she just won't stop. Eventually of course,
Daniels as the FBI agent is pulled in to help her and romance her. A couple
really well done suspense scenes - at the Strand bookstore and filmed there
with two men chasing her, the scene above the main area at Grand Central
and when she snoops in the house at Carroll Street. I am not clear if this
is the same Carroll Street as in my old neighborhood in Park Slope but the
brownstones sure looked like it.
