Reviews

SPOILERS

-The sol1218 review missed the point. Duvall is in fact GUILTY of the charge. It's just that this being 1962, you couldn't depict that particular crime with the kind of explicitness that you could two decades later or come out and say so directly. Duvall isn't being arrested at the end for stealing $4.23, he's being arrested because he has committed horrific deed of child molestation. The scene of the girl's indifferent parents is 1962 code for showing us just *how* she became prey to this. And listen to Duvall's explanation of what "child molestation" means to the girl. He isn't saying, "They're accusing me of something horrible that I didn't commit" he's saying, "That's something said by people who don't understand what you and I have." If you came away thinking Duvall is innocent, you weren't paying attention.

Walter Wager's novel "Viper Three" is a very suspenseful novel that would have made a great movie. Ex-SAC Major Lawrence Dell who is on Death Row in Montana for the wrongful conviction of his wife's murder has broken out and with four other death row inmates conspired to seize control of a nuclear missile silo at Malmstrom AFB (where Dell was once intelligence officer) and threaten the launch of the missiles unless they get millions and safe passage and they want the President as a hostage. Combined with the fact that the flurry of activity at the base is making the Russians take notice, Dell's act of revenge threatens to cause a chain reaction elsewhere in the world!

It could have made a great movie. But then Robert Aldrich got his hands on it and decided that the motive behind this action needed some grandiose political statement and Aldrich, leftist that he was, decided this would be the occasion to hammer audiences with a bunch of BS about the evilness of American foreign policy in the Cold War era culminating in Vietnam. Dell is now an ex-General instead of a Major. He was "railroaded" by the Air Force on a murder one charge because he was sounding off after his Vietnam experience. Now he wants the President to release an NSC document that basically says America fought Vietnam just to show Russia how tough we were even though we knew we couldn't win. This is so Dell can be seen as a hero and that his motives are for the good of America. But it's all going to end badly. Dell convinces the President (a BADLY miscast Charles Durning) that he will release the document but that Dell and his cohorts have to be taken out so he presents himself as a hostage and the hope is the sharpshooters will take Dell (Burt Lancaster) and his surviving henchman (Paul Winfield) out. But alas, this is a story where the US military does nothing right and so the barrage also claims the life of the President whose dying plea to his Secretary of Defense (Melvyn Douglas) that the document in which America will prostrate its sins before the world be released, goes unacknowledged.

Quite a mouthful. And a case of how a simple, suspenseful narrative of doomsday tension got ruined by Aldrich's desire to have Burt Lancaster, Charles Durning etc. make one annoying speech after another that distracts from the emergency at hand. And along the way, in order to accommodate this political soapbox narrative, things about the storyline that worked fine in the novel when it was just Major Dell striking back over the injustice of his murder conviction, no longer make ANY sense.

#1-General Dell was "railroaded" by the Air Force into murder one charge so he could get 30 years to life because he got into a brawl with an MIA victim's brother who had a fatal heart attack. But how could the Air Force have anything to do with that, if Dell wasn't in a military prison? Of course he *couldn't* be in a military prison because then he wouldn't have been able to stage his scheme with his fellow inmates who are NOT military.

#2-How does Dell know about this document in the first place? He couldn't have known about it before he went to jail or else he would have blabbed about it then by gee....maybe contacting someone in the PRESS? This is too conveniently covered when the President asks him who he got it from and Dell snaps, "A patriot but that's irrelevant." No, it IS relevant. Who was stealing a Top Secret document and feeding it to a man in jail on a murder charge? Why didn't THAT guy leak it to the press or was that "patriot" anxious to aid and abet an act of domestic terrorism? A responsible leader (and Durning's President is anything but!) wouldn't let that go. But this is just Aldrich's attempt to move quickly past a gaping plot hole that was created only by his desire to go on a soap box.

#3-In order to paint Lancaster's Dell as a hero, Aldrich tries to make sure he doesn't do anything that could tarnish the halo. This is why when the unstable psycho of the team, Hoxey (William Smith) callously blows away several of the Air Force guards that were supposed to just be left unconscious, Dell blows him away. But alas, Aldrich overlooked something later that cut the ground out from under him when he conveniently decided to make everyone forget about the two members of the missile crew, one of whom (Richard Jaeckel) just HAPPENS to be an old friend of Dell's and who just HAPPENS to have gone through the same horrific experience in Vietnam that Dell did, but who chose instead to not fight the System. This character is created solely to give us the abysmal cliche of "friend of hero argues with him to tell him he's in over his head". Then Jaeckel is tortured by the two underlings Winfield and Burt Young so they can get his partner to crack under pressure and reveal the combination to the safe with the launch keys (idiotic to believe that ANYONE with that responsibility would so easily crack under pressure). When next we see Jaeckel and his partner they suddenly break out of their closed door captivity to try and wrest control of the silo back. The partner is gunned down (and Young killed) and Jaeckel (who already has a stab wound in his shoulder) is clubbed unconscious and put back in the other room trussed up again. And then......he just disappears from the rest of the film. At no time does Durning's President or anyone else demand that Dell explain what happened to the two men in the crew. Even when Durning arrives as a hostage he doesn't ask and consequently as the three of them go back up to their laughable sad ending that ensues, NO ONE knows that a wounded, unconscious Jaeckel is still at the bottom of the silo all trussed up! But I guess if we had to deal with Dell's brutal treatment of an old friend of his, there would go this halo of self-righteous nobility that the film tries to cloak him with.

#4-A simple question regarding the tragic ending where the President is also shot by the Air Force snipers. WHY DIDN'T THEY HAVE HIM WEAR A BULLET-PROOF VEST????? Would have been rather simple wouldn't it?? I guess they forgot about that just like they forgot all about Jaeckel!

Lancaster's Lawrence Dell is no hero. He's a deranged psychopath prepared to put the lives of billions of people at risk for what he calls the proper way America should behave in the name of "open government". A real President would have called him out on his hypocrisy and how there's no fundamental difference between himself and what he says he's against.

The only thing that makes the film watchable is when you see the elements of the original novel faithfully adapted such as when the silo is seized accompanied to Jerry Goldsmith's suspenseful music. It's a sad reminder of how there was potentially a great movie waiting to be made that we didn't get thanks to a director's mad obsession with wanting to make a grotesque political statement that when applied to the era it took place in was a vile slander on the American effort to contain the 20th century's greatest mass murdering ideology.

This episode is one of many poor Season 2 shows that prove once and for all that Fred Freiberger was not the man who ruined Star Trek. I had gone more than 30 years without seeing this episode but its details were burned in my memory because I used to have the old Trek "Fotonovel" of this episode. Finally revisiting it, it is so bad and distasteful that I think those who are so quick to praise it should stop and think for a minute.

Let's start with how this episode gives us for the THIRD time, Gene Roddenberry's caveman philosophy about women in which they can't be seasoned professionals and also have a love life. Nope, first we had Marla McGivers (Space Seed), Carolyn Palamas (Who Mourns For Adonias) and now Nancy Hedord, professional women all who are lonely and unfulfilled. Funny how James T. Kirk can be a man who is devoted to his profession who will never settle down but we can accept that. Not with women though.

Well if that isn't bad enough, let's consider this episode's ultimate resolution. Nancy Hedford is dying of disease because this self-centered gas cloud "Companion" has forced the shuttle down to provide companionship for stranded Zefrem Cochran, and then later Hedford basically dies and the Companion takes over her body so the Companion can know what it means to love. For all this "We are here" junk, the fact remains that Nancy Hedford has been taken over by an alien for the alien's pleasure and only because she died thanks to being denied medical treatment that was needed. And oh BTW, isn't it interesting how James T. Kirk's revulsion for war in "A Taste Of Armageddon" goes out the window here? Because after all, the Commissioner, a professional the Federation thinks is the right woman for the job to stop a war taking place on another planet (how many people are dying in all that death, disease, destruction and horror that's taking place?) is gone now and Kirk just shrugs (in what reeks of an "oops, we forgot about that point!" moment put in the script the last minute), "Oh, I guess the Federation will find SOME woman who can stop that war." No big deal that people are dying somewhere else, so long as that Companion is happy. And just how is Kirk going to explain things to Scotty and company who he's been so chipper with on the communicator up to now? How is Kirk going to explain this to Starfleet? If he's not going to tell them about Cochran it's going to be his head for negligence! Please don't tell me I'm nitpicking and missing the "big picture". The fact is, if you want me to think about the "deep" issue of the story then don't screw up the details of the story that undermines your "deep" point. Make Hedford an ordinary bureaucrat in a dead-end desk-pushing job and you solve one problem at least. Failure to solve these problems is to put it bluntly, rotten writing.

I have been a fan of the novel "Mayday" since it first came out in 1978 which was when pilot Thomas Block had sole author's credit. It was a very effective, chilling take on the familiar "airplane disaster" type story that had become popular in the wake of the Airport movies. I also enjoyed the 1997 update which gave us a more dramatically effective ending. Because of that intimate familiarity with both versions of the novel, I really had low expectations for a two hour TV production, because (1) I knew that would not give us enough time to do the story justice and (2) we would be spared depiction of what is the novel's really most chilling aspect, the fact that the surviving passengers are turned into brain-dead zombies for all intents and purposes, and are as much an obstacle to the plane's ability to get back as the conspiracies of Commander Sloan and the Airline executive/Insurance company respectively.

So, coming in with low expectations, I came away for the most part not too bothered by the changes that were made. I was in fact grateful that the Navy comes off better in this telling of the tale than they do in the novel with Lieutenant Matos ultimately defying Commander Sloan, and Admiral Hennings deciding to blow the whistle on Sloan's actions (in the novel, Sloan manages to trick Matos into crashing his plane so he can be killed as a witness, and the guilt-ridden Admiral Hennings commits suicide. Sloan ultimately gets arrested when its revealed his office was tapped). Also, I was glad they cut out the implausibly stupid romance of John Berry and flight attendant Sharon Crandall that developed along the way.

On the down side, the film was stuck with the dated source material by having a cockpit crew of three which was normal back in the 70s but is no longer so today. Also, the ending was soft-pedaled completely, leaving out the brain damage effects consequences to the passengers, and implying that many of them will ultimately recover, and leaving out the improved ending of the 97 novel where airline exec Johnson boards the plane to try and remove the incriminating printout documents and has his confrontation with Berry. The subplot added of other passengers trapped in the Conference Room proved pointless, and the matter of Harold Stein still being alive at the end, rather than committing suicide earlier was a weak point too.

All in all, if you're a fan of the novel, you'll consider this a tepid "by-the-numbers" adaptation that failed to take advantage of how more chillingly effective the story could have been on the big screen. If you're not familiar with the novel at all, I won't blame you for finding the whole thing wildly implausible and silly and would recommend getting the novel, whether the 78 original or the 97 rewrite.

"Vanished" has an impressive cast in the first ever two part TV movie, some good location photography in Washington that was rare for TV in those days and a great main theme by Leonard Rosenmann. But what starts out as an interesting premise of a presidential advisor disappearing and leading to all kinds of baffling questions as the flummoxed press secretary (James Farentino) tries to get to the bottom of things, ultimately closes with a laughably lame finish.

SPOILER ALERT! DO NOT READ IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW THE END!

We end up discovering that the President (Widmark) has orchestrated the whole business to concoct his utopian scheme for nuclear disarmament (in other words we get four hours to be served up an unimaginative premise given to us in the opening minutes of "Seven Days In May" which was written by the same author) which in effect involves an arrogant community of atomic scientists blackmailing the entire world into disarming or else, irrespective of how in the setting of Cold War America this would have been an irresponsible policy action (someday, someone is going to have the guts to point out that the existence of atomic arsenals during the Cold War is what prevented a bloody conventional war in Western Europe from happening a third time in the 20th century and that what was needed to end the Cold War was not the elimination of atomic weapons, but the elimination of communism, which is exactly what happened). The CIA director is supposed to be the villain of the piece because he feeds information to the president's chief political rival, but frankly the way things unfold he ends up coming across as more sympathetic given how the President freezes him out of the process out of pure spite. His crime was having a covert group set things up among atomic scientists to get information which in the early 70s we were supposed to regard as a heinous offense, but in the post-9/11 world this comes off as being a big deal over nothing.

"Vanished" represents that intrusion into Cold War era films and telefilms of the weak-kneed philosophy toward waging the Cold War that thankfully our real life leaders never implemented. The unfortunate thing is that most people still refuse to learn this lesson when looking back on films made during the Cold War like this one.