BY FRED BLOSSER
Producer
Robert Stigwood ended the 1970s with three major musicals in a row, “Saturday Night Fever,†“Grease,â€
and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Band,†and then stumbled in 1980 with “Moment
by Moment,†a dumb romantic melodrama with Lily Tomlin and John Travolta. “The Fan†(1981) was expected to revive his
winning streak, headlining Lauren Bacall and James Garner in a suspense thriller
about a Broadway star (Bacall) stalked by the deranged title character, played
in fine creepy fashion by newcomer Michael Biehn. But “The Fan†also did mediocre box
office. Some observers believed the
timing was bad. Three real-life
tragedies involving stalkers were still uncomfortably fresh in peoples’ minds
-- the murders of John Lennon and actress/centerfold Dorothy Stratten, and the
attempted assassination of President Reagan. Other critics blamed the studio’s marketing of the production as a
“Bacall and Garner movie.†The two stars
drew an older fan base that perhaps expected a sedate show-biz suspense drama,
and instead were surprised and turned off by scenes of slasher violence and
homosexuality.
Despite
co-billing with Bacall, Garner has hardly more than a walk-on role as Jake, the
ex-husband of Bacall’s character, Sally Rice. He doesn’t even show up in the denouement when Sally has her big
confrontation with knife-wielding Douglas Breen (Biehn) in an empty
theater. Garner’s absence from this key
scene must have confounded his followers. Surely Jake would pull a Jim Rockford and show up in the nick of time to
rescue Sally.
Thirty-plus
years on, viewers who come to “The Fan†by way of its new release as a Warner Archive Collection DVD may find it far
more interesting than moviegoers in 1981 did. This was director Edward Bianchi’s first feature film (he’s since gone
on to a prolific career directing TV dramas), and instead of investing the movie
with his own style, he clearly borrows from Brian de Palma for the stalker
scenes and from Bob Fosse for the backstage rehearsal scenes and Sally’s big
number for opening night. It isn’t that
Bianchi doesn’t borrow well, with the debt to de Palma underlined by the fact
that the movie is scored by de Palma’s resident composer, Pino Donaggio. It’s that the jarring slasher scenes seem to
belong to a different movie than the slinky, “All That Jazzâ€-flavored
song-and-dance routines. Adding to the
tutti-frutti mix, Bacall’s spotlight number, “Hearts, Not Diamonds,†sounds
like a Saturday Night Live parody of a 1981-era Marvin Hamlisch/Tim Rice show
tune. In fact, it actually is a
Hamlisch/Rice composition.
Where
the 1981 audience may have been disappointed by this scrambled omelet of
over-the-top moments, it’s a lot more entertaining than the predictable,
star-driven suspense movies that followed later in the ‘80s, such as “Still of
the Night,†“Jagged Edge,†and “Suspect.†Younger viewers now may get a kick out of the movie’s vanished world of
land-line rotary phones, typewriters, and people smoking in hospital waiting
rooms. Pay attention and you’ll see
Griffin Dunne, Dana Delaney, and Dwight Schultz in minor roles. A scene of Douglas cruising a gay bar, with
unfortunate results for a young man he picks up, has chilling implications on a
symbolic level that would not have been apparent to audiences when the movie
opened in May 1981; the first reports of a real-life scourge stalking the gay
community, AIDS, had not yet surfaced.
The Warner Archive
Collection edition of “The Fan†is a manufactured-on-demand DVD. It has a scene-selection menu and English
captions for the hearing-impaired, but no other extras. The image is a little soft, which may be
unavoidable for older source material, and it’s only a drawback in the “Hearts,
Not Diamonds†number where a crisper image would add to the fun.
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