Wed 18 Jul 2012
A Movie Review by Walter Albert: WITHOUT A TRACE (1983).
Posted by Steve under Mystery movies , Reviews , True crime[8] Comments
by Walter Albert
WITHOUT A TRACE. 20th Century Fox, 1983. Kate Nelligan, Judd Hirsch, David Dukes, Stockard Channing, Jacqueline Brookes, Keith McDermott. Screenwriter: Bess Gutcheon, based on her novel Still Missing. Director: Stanley R. Jaffe.
One of the things that has always struck me in the classic “Damsels in Distress” (DID) films is the almost total absence of women other than the star. DIDs attract either psychos or sympas but never, or almost never, another woman.
However, the revolution in social roles has not gone unnoticed by filmmakers, and a recent example of the DID film reflects some of the changes. Without a Trace, a film version of Bess Gutcheon’s Still Missing, based on the real-life story of the still unsolved disappearance of a six-year-old boy on his way to school, was promoted by our local critics as an entertaining, well-made film.
In the face of overwhelming apathy, the film was held over for two or three desultory weeks and then shunted off to the Regency Square, where I saw it on a Friday night with a substantia1 family audience.
Without a Trace stars British actress Kate Nelligan (who earned her credentials as a DID specialist in Eye of the Needle) and Judd Hirsch. playing the police lieutenant who’s put in charge of the investigation when Nelligan reports her son missing.
As we were asked to believe that stewardess Day could be prompted into landing a plane [in Julia, reviewed here], so are we asked to believe that Nelligan is a university English professor who teaches a course in modern poetry in which she lectures to a sizable audience of over-age actors, in the kind of amphitheater that in my part of the university world is only used for science courses. (Does anyone in Hollywood have any idea what has happened to registration in literature courses in the past decade?)
My wife pointed out to me that the quote attributed, during a lecture on Robert Frost, to Pope was actually from Emerson, but I found the slip (for which we should really hold the screenwriter responsible) engaging and a reminder that no film based on “real life” is real and that a British actress posing as a professor of American literature in an American university is, after all, only playing.
(The British usually are much better at playing Germans than they are at playing Americans. The current PBS series, Private Schulz, presents a Germany completely inhabited by British accents. I’m looking forward to the episode in which Private Schulz, “disguised” as an Englishman, is set down in wartime England where he must play a German impersonating an Englishman. The dilemmas posed for the hapless English actor are mind-boggling.)
In Without a Trace, Nelligan has a mother, a best friend, and some sympathetic women neighbors, but true to the demands of the DID film, she is abandoned by all of them, and at the moment of crisis she is alone, without even the male policeman apparently willing to listen to her.
And it is at this moment, when everything seems hopeless and she’s almost ready to give up, that a deus ex machina is introduced to turn the situation around. And, since these are the eighties, the deus is a dea.
In the Doris Day film, Doris hung in until the very end, and although the men are, at times, almost literally propping her up to get her out of the Perilous Predicament, the Star is always center stage.
In this example of female New Cinema, the star is allowed to go off-stage during the climactic chase. This permits the Inferior Male (Hirsch) to redeem himself but also involves one of the most unlikely coincidences (“Daddy, let’s go to the park”) and extreme double-takes that I’ve suffered through since the days of the Monogram serials.
Nelligan is attractive and probably intelligent, and Hirsch is fine, but this DID variation finally succumbs to the same weakness that plagued the romantic DID vehicles: implausibility. And the virtues of Without a Trace — the good cast, fine photography, and tragic but not unusual situation — only serve, finally, to expose rather conceal the threadbare plotting.
Vol. 7, No. 2, March-April 1983.
Previously on this blog: DAMSELS IN DISTRESS, PART ONE (Julia, 1956).
Editorial Comment: The author’s book and the movie are based on the true-life disappearance of Etan Patz, who went missing in New York City’s Lower Manhattan on 25th May 1979. On May 24, 2012, Police Commissioner Kelly announced that a man was in custody who had implicated himself in the Patz disappearance. According to a New York Times report from 25 May 2012, the police had at that time no physical evidence to corroborate the man’s confession.
July 18th, 2012 at 5:45 am
I remember at the time the book came out that there was some “outrage” that author Gutcheon had (supposedly) surreptitiously befriended mother Julie Patz to get material (and insight) for the book she was writing. I don’t know if there was anything to it or not.
I do know the guy who confessed this year was a different homeless guy than the one they’ve always said killed the boy.
July 18th, 2012 at 12:47 pm
I confess to not having followed the case all that closely. Being in Connecticut at the time, we still weren’t close enough to New York City to get the same amount of newspaper and TV coverage about the boy’s disappearance I’m sure you did, living in Brooklyn.
But we get the NY TIMES now — we didn’t back then — and the recent “confession” meant the case was brought back up again and rehashed over a period of several days, so now I know quite a bit more than I had before.
What’s remarkable, though, is that when I found this column of Walter’s movie reviews to post here on my blog, I had no idea that this middle portion had anything to do with the Patz case. The perfect timing was purely unintentional.
July 18th, 2012 at 3:08 pm
OFF TOPIC OFF TOPIC !
Anybody interested in seeing W.R. Burnett, author of ‘Little Cesar’ in moving pictures and hear him talk (to Edward G. Robinson)-
go to the Original trailer of ‘Dark Hazard’ (1934) .
The Doc
July 18th, 2012 at 5:53 pm
This review comes from 1983, so it is interesting to note that nearly twenty years later Damian Lewis and Hugh Laurie are Britons who have made a great success of playing Americans on American TV. Kate Nelligan is a splendid actress (whatever became of her?) and she does a faultless British accent, but she is actually a Canadian…
The mention of PRIVATE SCHULZ puts me in mind of another British show called ‘ALLO ‘ALLO, which was a comedy about the French Resistance during WWII (!!!) They had French characters, German characters and English characters, each speaking their own language. To make this understandable they had the French speaking in a stage version of French (‘It eees, ‘ow do you say?’), whilst the other nationalities spoke in exaggerated version of their own accents. When a member of the Resistance had to speak in English to escaping English airmen, she simply went from her normal French accent to an English accent (‘I say, you fellows, how would you like a cup of tea?’) Another gag had a British secret agent who was posing as a Frenchman. He believed that he could speak perfect French, but he couldn’t. To put this across, they had him speak in an English accent, but pronouncing everything oddly (‘Good morning’ became ‘God Moaning’).
I’ve never been convinced by any versions of academia that we see in Hollywood. Lecturers are played by actors, and are thus often charismatic and interesting. My college tutors always sounded like they had taken courses in boredom, delivering entire lectures in a sing-song monotone.
July 18th, 2012 at 5:56 pm
Hmmmm, 1983. I suppose that I should have said ‘thirty years’….
July 18th, 2012 at 6:28 pm
“My college tutors always sounded like they had taken courses in boredom, delivering entire lectures in a sing-song monotone.”
I wish (well, not really) that I could remember any of the college literature courses I took, but they’ve all gone into that great sinkhole of my brain, never to return.
Which is not necessarily the instructors’ fault (well, in one case it was), more mine. I wasn’t interested, and no one was going to persuade me otherwise.
Yes, the 1980s are now officially 30 years old. Unbelievable. Seems like yesterday. Who snapped their fingers and let 30 years disappear just like that?
July 18th, 2012 at 6:38 pm
Snap your fingers and make 30 years disappear ?
That’s nothing ! There is an entire theory, that the history of the Middle Ages have to rewritten, because a thousand years simply did not happen !
They were, according to the theory, a medieval invention .
The Doc
July 18th, 2012 at 7:43 pm
I had a variety of teachers in college. My History professor shared dirty stories from various centuries (let us out early to watch a streaker – it was 1976). He was a very good teacher and worthy of the movies.
I had a film professor who made us pay forty bucks for a mimeographed copy of his notes which he slowly and dully read to us.
I had a creative writing teacher who did not know what a screenplay was (1976).
I was a Business major but my goal was to write comedy. I had an English teacher and a Speech teacher tell me to stop experimenting with comedy and write seriously (essays or speeches) because that was what businessmen do.