The Anderson Tapes - 1971 film review

Over the years, I've somehow managed to miss The Anderson Tapes, a 1971 film directed by the gifted Sidney Lumet, and based on a novel by Lawrence Sanders. It's a heist movie starring Sean Connery at the peak of his powers, and I've long been familiar with the excellent theme tune by Quincy Jones. Finally, I managed to catch up with it, thanks to the admirable Talking Pictures TV.

It's apparent that Lumet was trying to do something more than direct a straightforward film about a robbery. This is a story, in part, about covert surveillance, and it pre-dates The Conversation, which is my favourite movie about surveillance, a genuine masterpiece. At the start of the film, Connery is released from prison. He is an angry man, who immediately reunites with his girlfriend, Dyan Cannon, who is being maintained by another lover in a posh apartment block. Connery decides to rob her fellow residents.

The trouble is that this is a two-hour film with barely ninety minutes of material. Lumet's approach may have been cutting-edge in its day, but it seems to me to have dated, and this film is much less effective, in my opinion, than some of his other work. I am a Connery fan, but I never warmed to his character, and the heist seemed to me to be hopelessly protracted, and so obviously doomed to failure that tension faded.

Even Quincy Jones' soundtrack seems, to a modern ear, to be intrusive and occasionally a bit irksome, despite the quality of that theme. The ending is meant to be ironic, but I'm afraid that by that stage, I didn't really care too much. You'll have gathered that I was disappointed by this one. Maybe it's a case of having had expectations that were too high. But in my opinion, it's nothing like as good as The Conversation.

Equus

I’m not quite sure why I have never got round to watching Peter Shaffer’s Equus before – well, in fact, it’s the film version I’ve seen, but the screenplay is by Shaffer. I suppose I was repelled by the idea of a story based upon a boy blinding horses. But although I find the act deeply repugnant, overall I’m glad I watched the film.

It’s a mainstream piece of writing, but really it borrows aspects of the crime novel, not just in the criminal subject matter, but also in terms of the detective work done by the psychiatrist, played by Richard Burton, who tries to understand the forces that drove the boy, played by Peter Firth, to act as cruelly as he did.

Peter Shaffer, with his equally gifted twin brother Antony, collaborated on a short-lived series of detective novels published in the 50s but very much in the Golden Age tradition before moving on to darker and less plot-orientated material. Those books are still enjoyable light reads, by the way.

I found the film compelling, and a reminder of what a good director the late Sidney Lumet was. A word of warning – the violence is graphic, and there is full frontal nudity. Mind you, since the nudity features both Peter Firth and Jenny Agutter, two exceptionally good-looking actors, this might just attract some viewers. The sex and violence is not gratuitous, though. It’s a serious film about a deeply serious subject.

I thought Burton’s performance superb, even though I’d have liked more insight into his character’s personal demons. The parents of the boy are also splendidly played by Joan Plowright and the utterly brilliant Colin Blakely, who died far too young.

Guilty as Sin

Guilty as Sin is a 1993 movie directed by Sidney Lumet, whose CV includes such notable ‘legal world’ films as 12 Angry Men and The Verdict. Guilty as Sin is not in the same league, but even so, I thought it was pretty effective entertainment.

The stars are both very good-looking – Rebecca De Mornay and Don Johnson. De Mornay plays a hot-shot criminal defence lawyer, while Johnson is a manipulative womaniser accused of throwing his rich wife out of a window. De Mornay unwisely succumbs to his pleading that she represent him, and spends the rest of the film regretting it.

I’m not a trial lawyer, and in particular I’m not familiar with the American legal system, but with this movie, as with many others, there were aspects of the story that stretched my credulity. Would a judge really have forced De Mornay to continue representing Johnson when she wanted to back out – and wouldn’t her bosses have fielded some other advocate when Johnson suggested that the two of them were having an affair?

But once disbelief was suspended, I enjoyed the twists and turns of the plot, even if the finale was rather abrupt. It’s certainly never a hardship to watch a film starring Rebecca De Mornay, and although this wasn’t one of Lumet’s masterpieces, it demonstrated his ability to tell an entertaining story.