Apparently director Brian DePalma is a
huge Hitchcock fan, and people who study these things say he steals from the master regularly. If that is indeed the case, then I have to say that Hitchcock, like the Marx Brothers or Buster Keaton, cannot be placed in a modern setting, because the Brian DePalma films I've seen (with the possible exception of
Carrie, but I was young and innocent then (and watching alone in a house at the end of a road except for my sleeping grandmother)) have had the patina of cheesiness that I remarked on about John Carpenter's films. It surprised me how cheesy this one was, because it has a stellar reputation, and I was expecting a
Three Days of the Condor or
Klute kind of vibe. But, despite this supposedly being one of Travolta's best performances, (he does effective work with a lot of
listening, and fiddling with various film-and-audio equipment)
the stilted dialogue and hammy acting of the others involved (with the exception of a very young-looking John Lithgow as the killer stalking our heroes),
along with the
egregious heavy-on-the-super-schmaltzy-sax score, drags it down to definite B-movie level. The plot is good enough: sound man for schlocky horror films is out recording wind sound effects one night when he witnesses (and records) a car accident where a limo skids into a river. He jumps in and saves the female passenger, but the driver, a very popular politician and "probable next president," dies. He takes the passenger to hospital but quickly realizes something is afoot when (a) he is told by a friend of the dead politician not to tell anyone about the woman (she obviously was not the candidate's wife) and (b) the police seem eager to write this up as an accident, when his tape shows that there was a gunshot immediately before the car skidded out of control.
We see a shadowy figure somehow sneak into the police impound lot and replace the obviously shot-through tire with one lacking bullet-holes. And that same figure later argues with his employer, who is angry, because the plan was just to disgrace the politician, hence the female passenger (who later reveals she had been hired to seduce him), before announcing he plans to tie up loose ends. He (Lithgow) starts by attempting to garrotte the passenger (Sally, who is portrayed as something of an idiot by Nancy Allen (who later played Murphy's partner in
Robocop), despite being the movie's love interest). Well, he does successfully garotte
someone with his fancy James Bond-esque watch-garotte, but it turns out not to be her. He improvises and stabs her in a Liberty Bell pattern, because some celebration of the centenary of its last ring is coming up. This leads to another prostitute-killing to establish a pattern, so that when Sally gets hers it'll be chalked up to the insane actions of a serial killer and nobody will tie it back to the politician's death. Meanwhile a sleazy character played by
NYPD Blue's Dennis Franz has been peddling stills from a film he took of the accident, and Travolta uses them to reconstruct a film to run alongside his soundtrack and sees a flash at the same time as there is a shot on his tape. Turns out Franz's character was the one working with Sally and she steals the real film off him so Travolta can take it to a newsman. But Lithgow sweeps in and convinces Sally that
he is the newsman and she has to meet up with him in a train station. Travolta smells a rat and puts a wire on her (flashback to his previous career as a cop in internal affairs where a wire of his shorts out and gets a fellow policeman killed when he has to take it off because it's burning him). The climax of the movie is Travolta desperately trying to find Lithgow and Sally before she's killed. Sadly, although he manages to force Lithgow to stab himself, it's too late and he's already strangled Sally. But, in a grisly twist, Sally's death screams that are caught on the wire prove to be the solution to a jokey thread that has run through the whole film, where his director is unable to find a plausible scream for a scene in his slasher film. Dark!
I have to admit that I was not bored, which is the only cardinal sin of a film in my view, and there were some flashy camera moves that are DePalma's MO. He LOVES split-screens, and there's one scene where Travolta discovers that Lithgow has broken in and wiped all his tapes (including all his special effects, his bread-and-butter) where the camera just rotates for about five minutes as Travolta frantically yanks different tapes out of their boxes, that is pretty effective. Also, it's fun to see how seedy Philly looked back then, and how primitive the technology appears. I would've sworn the film was made in about 1975 and was astonished to see it was six year later. Obviously the Reagan boom hadn't kicked in yet.
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