Watching Fear Is the Key is almost exactly like reading Alistair MacLean's adventure novel on which the movie is based. Or any of MacLean's adventure novels, for that matter. The action is fast, furious and often incomprehensible. The plot roars straight ahead without a care for plausibility, coincidence or loose ends. Women are scarce and irrelevant. The hero can do anything.
MacLean had one great strength, and it's a strength a lot of adventure writers would kill for. He knew how to set up a plot that would capture a reader straight off, and then never let the tempo slow down, always building one readable action sequence after another, however improbable. Fear Is the Key was one of his earlier novels. It holds up as a good action read to finish in a day or two.
The movie is not as good. Novels let us create our own mind images of the action and the ambiance. (Louisiana bayous and tidal swamps are great places to imagine.) Fear Is the Key, the movie, has a lot of action. But since there's no room for our own images in a movie, we're stuck with seeing exactly what the talents of the director, the faces of the actors and the pictures from the cinematographer force us see. It's harder to ignore improbabilities.
The opening, like so many of MacLean's books, has great hooks. We watch and listen to a man on a short-wave radio talk to the pilot of a small cargo plane flying somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico. We hear the man on the ground talk to a young woman on the plane. Then suddenly the plane's pilot yells that an aircraft is firing on them. We hear bullet strikes, screams, the long dive and the crash into the ocean. We don't know what's going on but by now we're interested.
Three years later we meet the man again. John Talbot (Barry Newman), grim and surly, is driving down the Louisiana coast looking for trouble. He finds it, slugging cops, insulting a judge, making a courtroom escape and shooting a court constable, taking a young woman hostage and then spending the next 15 minutes or so on one of the longest car chases I've seen. With police in pursuit and his hostage wishing she were anywhere else, Talbot takes his stolen car screeching and swerving down city streets, across cane fields, smashing through roadblocks, roaring onto a ferry, clattering over wooden roads, and bouncing over potholes. It's kind of boring after awhile because it goes on for so long and -- key point here -- we have no idea what this tough guy's motivation could be. It's forty minutes before the outline of some reasonable motivation takes shape and 60 minutes before the point of the movie is reached. During this time I found it hard to stay interested despite all the violent action and creepy characters. The last forty minutes, however, when plot and motivation finally meet, turn out to be satisfyingly brutal and filled to the brim with revenge. Along the way, in addition to Newman, we meet a puzzling big business natural gas owner played by Ray McAnally; his daughter (the hostage) played by Suzy Kendall; a smoothie crook played by John Vernon; a possibly corrupt cop played by Dolph Sweet (in a fine performance) and a cool hit man with a nearly full head of dark hair played by a young Ben Kingsley. Except for Kendall, a looker but no actress who has an irritating voice that sounds like a little girl was combined with a munchkin, they all do fine jobs.
Newman, who played tough guy heroes in a number of movies during this time, is grim and capable to a fault. His character becomes understandable only in the last five minutes. Newman has to play him as he's written...and Talbot is written to be an ace driver, skilled scuba diver, knowledgeable explorer of an off-shore oil rig, superb pilot and engineer for an undersea submersible, dominant with his fists and his feet, perfection when it comes to crashing through French doors and always ready with an ironic comeback. In other words, he's one of MacLean's typically over-achieving, unbeatable heroes, and completely unbelievable. In my opinion, Barry Newman was a fine actor when he wasn't called upon to be this kind of Hollywood hero. It seems to me he has just gotten better as he has aged. He was terrific in The Limey.
The movie, like Alistair MacLean's books, gives us action and more action, sketchy motivation and enough loose ends to make a big ball of yarn. Still, I thought the book was fun. The movie is fun for the first 10 minutes and the last 40 minutes.
MacLean had one great strength, and it's a strength a lot of adventure writers would kill for. He knew how to set up a plot that would capture a reader straight off, and then never let the tempo slow down, always building one readable action sequence after another, however improbable. Fear Is the Key was one of his earlier novels. It holds up as a good action read to finish in a day or two.
The movie is not as good. Novels let us create our own mind images of the action and the ambiance. (Louisiana bayous and tidal swamps are great places to imagine.) Fear Is the Key, the movie, has a lot of action. But since there's no room for our own images in a movie, we're stuck with seeing exactly what the talents of the director, the faces of the actors and the pictures from the cinematographer force us see. It's harder to ignore improbabilities.
The opening, like so many of MacLean's books, has great hooks. We watch and listen to a man on a short-wave radio talk to the pilot of a small cargo plane flying somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico. We hear the man on the ground talk to a young woman on the plane. Then suddenly the plane's pilot yells that an aircraft is firing on them. We hear bullet strikes, screams, the long dive and the crash into the ocean. We don't know what's going on but by now we're interested.
Three years later we meet the man again. John Talbot (Barry Newman), grim and surly, is driving down the Louisiana coast looking for trouble. He finds it, slugging cops, insulting a judge, making a courtroom escape and shooting a court constable, taking a young woman hostage and then spending the next 15 minutes or so on one of the longest car chases I've seen. With police in pursuit and his hostage wishing she were anywhere else, Talbot takes his stolen car screeching and swerving down city streets, across cane fields, smashing through roadblocks, roaring onto a ferry, clattering over wooden roads, and bouncing over potholes. It's kind of boring after awhile because it goes on for so long and -- key point here -- we have no idea what this tough guy's motivation could be. It's forty minutes before the outline of some reasonable motivation takes shape and 60 minutes before the point of the movie is reached. During this time I found it hard to stay interested despite all the violent action and creepy characters. The last forty minutes, however, when plot and motivation finally meet, turn out to be satisfyingly brutal and filled to the brim with revenge. Along the way, in addition to Newman, we meet a puzzling big business natural gas owner played by Ray McAnally; his daughter (the hostage) played by Suzy Kendall; a smoothie crook played by John Vernon; a possibly corrupt cop played by Dolph Sweet (in a fine performance) and a cool hit man with a nearly full head of dark hair played by a young Ben Kingsley. Except for Kendall, a looker but no actress who has an irritating voice that sounds like a little girl was combined with a munchkin, they all do fine jobs.
Newman, who played tough guy heroes in a number of movies during this time, is grim and capable to a fault. His character becomes understandable only in the last five minutes. Newman has to play him as he's written...and Talbot is written to be an ace driver, skilled scuba diver, knowledgeable explorer of an off-shore oil rig, superb pilot and engineer for an undersea submersible, dominant with his fists and his feet, perfection when it comes to crashing through French doors and always ready with an ironic comeback. In other words, he's one of MacLean's typically over-achieving, unbeatable heroes, and completely unbelievable. In my opinion, Barry Newman was a fine actor when he wasn't called upon to be this kind of Hollywood hero. It seems to me he has just gotten better as he has aged. He was terrific in The Limey.
The movie, like Alistair MacLean's books, gives us action and more action, sketchy motivation and enough loose ends to make a big ball of yarn. Still, I thought the book was fun. The movie is fun for the first 10 minutes and the last 40 minutes.