By Don Stradley
While
recently watching Sweet Hostage
(1975), I couldn’t stop thinking that Martin Sheen should’ve been a much bigger
star. I didn’t get out to the movies
much as a kid, and could only watch a small black & white TV in my bedroom.
Hence, it was Sheen, the king of the TV movie, who gave me my first inkling of
what an actor could do.
Aside
from his iconic turn as the homicidal Kit in Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973), Sheen did most of his
1970s work on the small screen. He had a
shifty-eyed way about him that screamed “troubled loner.†Granted, he could dial it down long enough to
play Bobby Kennedy in The Missiles of
October, but generally, he played twitchy, neurotic types.
Sheen
seemed to be on television every month in those days. I remember him as the
doomed Private Slovick, shaking like a leaf as he stood in front of an
execution squad. Then he was as a cocky hot rodder trying to upstage a sadistic
sheriff in The California Kid. He was
“Pretty Boy†Floyd, the Depression era bank robber. There was the Kennedy turn, and then, of
course, the endless reruns of various cop dramas where he often appeared as
misfits and derelicts, cackling all the way.
Sweet Hostage originally aired on ABC in Oct. 1975, the peak of the “made for TV
movie†era. Sheen’s portrayal of
Leonard Hatch, an escapee from a Boston mental ward who kidnaps a lonely teen
played by Linda Blair, was quite a big deal at the time, especially among
women. I recall overhearing various
females – aunts, teachers, ladies at the supermarket – talking about this
movie. “Did you see it?†they’d ask each other. “Did you cry at the end?â€
In
the decades since, the movie appeared to fall into the rabbit hole where a lot
of made-for-TV flicks go, but it loomed large in my mind. I recalled it as a dark tale of a man who
held a woman hostage, and somehow they fell in love. I’m not familiar with
Nathaniel Benchley’s novel, Welcome to Xanadu, which served as the basis for
the movie, but I’ve heard the movie is much more of a tearjerker. On a side note, I remember a day in the
1990s when Sweet Hostage was airing
on an obscure local station, wedged in between Mexican mummy movies and
infomercials. I hadn’t seen it in years
and wanted to get reacquainted with it. To my surprise, the movie felt
sentimental and overblown. Watching it
tonight streamed on the Warner Archive, though, it seemed a nearly perfect
relic of the era.
The
first image is a tight close-up of Sheen’s gaunt, slightly haunted face. The
wind blows his hair back, all the better to see his thousand mile stare. As
Hatch, Sheen may have reached the pinnacle of his psycho period. He’s a
literature spouting nutcase, the sort of eccentric who wanders the grounds of
the asylum reciting poetry and demanding the nurses call him ‘Kublai Khan.’ He
escapes one night, steals a truck, robs a store (while wearing a clown mask)
and heads for parts unknown.
Blair
plays Doris Mae Withers, a 17-year-old who dreams of the day when she can leave
her father’s chicken farm. One day her truck breaks down on the highway and
Hatch picks her up. When he decides she’s an illiterate who could use some
mentoring, he holds her captive in his cabin, trying to impress her with the
beauty of poetry. She makes a few feeble
attempts at escaping, but gradually succumbs to Hatch’s weird charm. True, he has an irrational temper, but when
he’s not yelling at her, he’s rather kind, like a man from another era, someone
out of a story book of princes and rogues. He even wears a puffy shirt. Hell,
it beats living on the chicken farm, so she gets comfortable and hunkers down
for the long hall. Far-fetched? Sure,
but I never said the movie was flawless.
Sheen,
at times, comes dangerously close to overdoing it as Hatch. He’s a dervish of
fake accents, odd mannerisms, cackling laughter, and manic outbursts. But for all of his frenzied behavior, we
never learn why he was in the mental hospital. For all we know, he’d been locked away because he loved poetry. (There’s
an odd scene where Hatch meets a townie who babbles at him in lines borrowed
from Star Trek. He even gives Hatch the Vulcan salute. What do we glean from
this? Quoting Mr. Spock is permitted, but quote Lord Byron and you go to the
psycho ward?)
Cinematographer
Richard C. Glouner shoots the hell out of the Taos, New Mexico locations, but
his strategy of filming the main characters from below works against the theme
of the movie. Shooting from below makes Sheen and Blair look like large
powerful figures, when they’re actually two little people in a big lonely
world. Glouner’s work is striking, but
it doesn’t fit the story. He does have a flair for making Taos look like big
sky country, and he makes Hatch’s cabin look rustic and hard, but his best work
is a scene where Sheen and Blair waltz
around inside the cabin – he brings his camera above the scene, looking down at
the two as they appear to be growing closer. It’s a warm scene, and it’s a
reminder of how director Lee Philips carried off the neat trick of making us
believe Blair could fall in love with her captor.
Philips,
a veteran TV director, keeps the movie motoring along, but he nearly destroys
it with music, including a terrible theme song that he dumps into the movie at
random sections. The song, which I won’t glorify by mentioning its title or
singer, nearly capsizes the movie. Imagine if, while watching Badlands, or, say, Bonnie and Clyde, a scene was suddenly interrupted by Terry Jacks
singing ‘Seasons in the Sun.’ That’s how off-putting the music is here. Since
most TV shows of the period had an opening theme song where the plot would be
described ( i.e. “Here’s the story of a man named Brady…â€) television producers may have thought a TV
movie needed the same thing, a song to describe the action. Still, it’s
ridiculous. This is probably why I had a bad reaction to the movie back in the
1990s.
Philips
also had a bad habit of laying drippy music underneath all of the emotional
scenes, as if he’s determined to tell us how we should feel. The score, a schlocky mix of TV music clichés
by Luchi De Jesus (who had done a lot of Blaxploitation movies), really hasn’t
aged well. Some of the scenes were
magical on their own, such as when Sheen and Blair embrace after she reads a
poem that moves him to tears. Strip the
music away and the scenes would be much more powerful, for Sheen and Blair
don’t need musical accompaniment. And as much as I like Sheen, it’s really
Blair who made this movie sit up and speak. As Doris Mae, Blair gives just
about the most honest performance ever given by a teenager.
Blair,
like Sheen, had become a bit of a TV icon, emerging from The Exorcist to appear as various teen alcoholics and runaways on
somewhat scandalous TV movies. (Her name is above Sheen’s on the credits, which
shows you the power of The Exorcist
was still in the air). And while Sheen
hyperventilates as Hatch, Blair has the sense to underplay their scenes together
– she’s the rock in the middle of his windstorm.
And
consider this: If female viewers fell in love with Sheen in this movie, they
were doing so through Linda Blair’s eyes. Blair must have tapped into something
that exists in all women, some strange desire to be trapped, combined with a
need to nurture. The creepy cabin in the
woods becomes a kind of enchanted cottage, with Doris Mae sweeping up and
hanging curtains, her eyes widening as Hatch tells her of exotic, faraway
lands. Yet, she also knows that this
grown man is still something like a kid himself. For Doris Mae, Hatch is all men in one: the
unpredictable but gentle father, the encouraging teacher, the playful brother,
the flirtatious boyfriend, and even, in a roundabout way, the son who needs
protection. With so many facets of Hatch to deal with, Doris Mae can only grow.
To her delight, she likes growing. In what is probably the performance of her
lifetime, Blair shows us the inner workings of a sad girl warming up to life.
The
ending is a bummer, with bloodthirsty vigilantes closing in on Hatch’s
cabin. When he spots a police helicopter
hovering over his place, he decides to take the only way out he can think of,
sacrificing himself so Doris Mae can live. TV viewers bombarded newspapers with
angry letters, asking why the film had to end in a death. The movie was a success, though, and was even
given a theatrical release in several European countries. There were even
rumors that 34-year-old Sheen and 17-year-old Blair had some sort of off-screen
affair (which both denied).
Sheen
announced at the time that he was leaving television to focus on big screen
features. He started by killing Jodie
Foster’s hamster in The Little Girl Who
Lives Down the Lane. He got as far
as Apocalypse Now, suffered a heart attack during filming, and spent the next 30
years bouncing between TV and independent pics. He’s never hit the peaks I’d imagined for him. As for Blair, well, Roller Boogie was beckoning. Blair, too, has worked steadily, but she was never better than she was
as the girl in Leonard Hatch’s cabin, her eyes widening with love for the
strange man who brought out the poetry in her.
(Sweet Hostage is available for viewing
on the Warner Archive streaming service.)
ALSO AVAILABLE ON WARNER ARCHIVE DVD: CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON