Someone’s Watching Me! (1978)

Following what appears to have been a very bad break-up, live TV director Leigh Michaels (Lauren Hutton) moves from New York to LA, even before she has found a new job. She is clearly going to land on her feet, though, her obvious competence winning her a new position very quickly. Emotionally, her weird sense of humour and her tendency to speak to herself a lot seem to ground her considerably.

All could be well, if not for an ever increasing campaign of phone terror by someone who must actually have some sort of inside knowledge of her life. He’s also sending her objects – among them a telescope – supposedly as parts of some kind of contest to win a European vacation. The audience learns much sooner than Leigh that her caller is a pretty creative stalker who even bugs her living room, and manipulates the electronics in her apartment. The man may also very well be responsible for the death of other women, so our increasingly frightened and angry heroine is in actual physical danger apart from the damage caused by the emotional abuse. As always (at least in the movies), the police is of little help, but Leigh’s new boyfriend, the philosopher(!) Paul (David Birney) is of use, as is Leigh’s assistant Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau).

John Carpenter directed and wrote this NBC TV movie the same year as Halloween – and before that TV Elvis thing – and at times, one can indeed notice that, even though DP Robert Hauser is no Dean Cundey. But then, who is? There are quite a few shots that are set up in a manner very typical for Carpenter at this stage in his career, making some relatively standard suspense scenes rather more interesting than you’d expect without going overboard or blowing the technical possibilities of a TV production.

Apart from early Carpenter, the director predominantly does Hitchcock here. Some scenes, particularly the late business with Leigh breaking into the stalker’s apartment while being watched by Sophie through the telescope, are direct variations on scenes from Hitchcock, and there are so many nods in that direction here, poor Howard Hawks was probably getting jealous. It’s good, tense, suspenseful Hitchcock worship, so there’s no reason to complain.

Of course, no Hitchcock movie would have a heroine like Leigh, who is highly competent in her job without being snarled at by the film for it, a bit weird in a manner the film is clearly enamoured by, and tough even when she has reached her breaking point. So, while Paul is allowed to be somewhat helpful, it’s Leigh’s business to dispatch of the stalker/killer in the end, fighting her own fight because the men around her are pretty much useless in it.

The film consistently puts the stalker into the context of rather a lot of shitty men around our heroine, Leigh having to cope with a horn dog colleague who doesn’t understand the word no, and clearly having experienced enough crap of that kind in her life, she deals with these things with an exasperated toughness, pretending she’s not as angry about sexism as she has every right to be, but still shutting it down whenever she encounters it. Hutton does very well with the role (one can’t help but imagine her having some experience with quite a few of Leigh’s troubles herself), making our heroine very likeable and relatable even for guys like me who don’t have to run this particular kind of gauntlet. Carpenter’s script does a lot of little things in the background to build up a contrast between the way some men – worst among them obviously the stalker and killer – treat her, and the way Leigh actually is, not just showing her competence at her job, but also – without comment – showing her doing all kinds of manual things, working electronical equipment, putting together the telescope, and so on.

Today, some people would probably call Carpenter an “angry feminist”, when what he is actually doing is providing Someone’s Watching Me! with a verisimilitude that grounds the thriller business in lived experience, which makes the audience care more for our heroine and helps make an actual thematic argument to boot. Not bad for a little TV movie.

Three Films Make A Post: Working here can be murder.

Thor: Ragnarok (2017): In another example to disprove the curiously much-vaunted nonsense that Marvel’s superhero movies don’t leave space for their directors to express their individuality, Taiki Waititi’s Thor movie is very much a Taiki Waititi Thor movie, featuring exactly the style and tone of humour you’d expect from the director. While I would have preferred someone to actually succeed at a Thor movie going for the big and operatic tone the best of the source material tends to have and actually succeed with it, I take a fun, fast and brilliant to look at SF action comedy with pleasure, even though I don’t enjoy it quite as much as James Gunn’s Marvel SF action comedies, which feel just a bit warmer to me. Which is to say that I had a lot of fun with Ragnarok’s loving and silly plundering of Greg Pak’s fine Hulk and Walt Simonson’s transcendentally brilliant Thor runs.

The Cradle Will Fall (1983): In a very different time, medium, and budget bracket, often great TV director John Llewellyn Moxey shot this adaptation of a Mary Higgins Clark potboiler about a brilliant assistant DA with tragic past-based commitment issues (Lauren Hutton) coming head to head with a mad scientist doctor (James Farentino). This certainly isn’t one of Moxey’s best movies, mostly thanks to a script that never quite seems to be able to hold tone and focus, a problem that’s further exacerbated by the need to shoe-horn various character from the soap “Guiding Light” into minor roles. From time to time, Moxey gets the opportunity for one of his patented classical suspense scenes, but much of the film seems fixated on the elements of the plot that are the most conventional and least interesting. Despite a spunky turn by Hutton and some joyful scenery chewing by Farentino, the whole thing never really comes together as a suspenseful narrative.

The World Beyond (1979): Staying in US TV movie land, this is the second of two abortive TV pilots about the adventures of Paul Taylor (the brilliantly named Granville Van Dusen), who is commanded by visions of dead people to protect the victim of the week (here portrayed by JoBeth Williams) from supernatural forces.


The plot sees Van Dusen and Williams fighting a mud golem on an island off the coast of main. Director Noel Black does some pleasantly atmospheric work with the locations, and seems to enjoy the sort of macabre little events that warm my heart too, so you bet there’s a mud golem hand staying active after having been cut off, an occult dabbler causing the whole affair, and some simple yet pleasant moments of classic suspense. There’s no depth to it, of course, but as an hour of spooky entertainment, even in the badly looking version recorded from TV and dubbed from what I suspect to be an EP VHS tape that’s the only way it is making the rounds, is well worth one’s time.

In short: Lassiter (1984)

London, 1939. Cat burglar Lassiter (Tom “I’m bored” Selleck) is pressed into the joined service of his and the British government by mild-mannered FBI agent Breeze (Joe Regalbuto), and irascible London copper Becker (Bob Hoskins). He is to steal a bunch of diamonds from the German embassy or he’ll land in jail on trumped up charges.

Well, in truth, Becker has such an irrational hate-on for Lassiter, he’s planning on locking him up in any case once the thief has gotten hold of the jewels; clearly, nobody involved explained to him the story Lassiter would tell during his process might get a wee bit embarrassing for the UK or their American friends who haven’t actually even joined the war at this point. But before he needs to solve that problem, Lassiter has to commit sexspionage on crazy German diamond courier Kari von Fürsten (Lauren Hutton), survive the ire of his girlfriend Sara (Jane Seymour), and plan and execute his jewel heist. Oh, and of course there will be The Sting-like caper movie tricks involved, just much dumber.

And there’s one of the main problems of Roger Young’s Lassiter right there: if you attempt to make a movie that’s playing on the field of movies like The Sting and the caper movies of the 30s and 40s, you really need to make sure you are actually on the same level and not a tired, erratically paced mess that seems to believe in its own cleverness too much to ever be even the slightest bit clever. And what use is all the fine, showy production design recreating 1939 if there’s not much of interest happening in it anyhow because your film is only ever dragging its feet in it, with large parts of the film consisting of an incredibly bored looking lead actor doing nothing of import or interest?

Which promptly leads us to the next problem, namely the fact that Tom Selleck isn’t just no Cary Grant, but tries to get by on his good looks alone, never showing any interest or spark of life at all, neither when he’s actually getting around to some thievery, nor when he’s half-unwillingly getting seduced by a Lauren Hutton whose crazy overacting could have used a foil willing or able to play along (the same goes for Hoskins or Seymour, by the way). I have gotten used to supposedly charming rogues in movies in truth being unpleasant arseholes, but Selleck’s performance here is so disinterested it’s impossible to get any feeling at all that suggests whatever he thinks he’s doing on screen. Selleck’s a void in the centre of a film that desperately needed the kind of actor able to take control of scenes, or sparkle.

This lifelessness seems to infect many aspects of the film, be it the stop and start plotting that never goes anywhere, the way the film builds Hutton’s character as menacing and dangerous but then just forgets about doing anything with that, and the tiresome and tedious attempts at plot twists. I’m getting as bored as Selleck looks throughout Lassiter just writing about it again.

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