11/11/08: Pursuit (1972)We were halfway through
Pursuit when we turned on the television to see how the election was going for McCain. We should’ve kept watching the movie. As it was, we weren’t sure if
Pursuit was going to end up with any real conservative content. We had to find out the next day, after learning that Michael Crichton had died on November 4th.
Pursuit is Michael Crichton’s directorial debut, and this TV-movie is a warm-up for the glory of his big-screen debut with 1973’s
Westworld. He’s even recycling a humble early novel as source material. The accomplished author would end up helming some lousy films, but that’s okay. As far as Crichton’s obituaries were concerned, his greatest sin was daring to write a book goofing on the idiocy of blaming mankind for global warming. The obituary from the Associated Press was especially careful to deliver the necessary shaming.
Anyway, we were enjoying
Pursuit. We didn’t even recognize star Ben Gazzara in the opening credits. He plays government agent Steven Graves, who’s probably moonlighting as David Eisenhower’s fashion guru. Graves is a spectacularly square government agent. He’s extremely buttoned down, and will spend much of the film doing a crossword puzzle while conducting surveillance on crazed millionaire James Wright (E.G. Marshall). Graves has no idea that he’s in a tense thriller. Instead, the agent will end up endangering all of San Diego due to his lack of interest in calling in Federal marshals to arrest Wright. He could’ve done it early that morning, but Graves decided it’s more fun to follow Wright around and watch him rig up a deadly nerve gas attack.
Just to be clear, Graves is the good guy.
Wright has targeted San Diego because it’s the site of the Republican National Convention. That’s actually where the RNC planned to hold the 1972 shindig, until a little scandal made it necessary to move the party to Florida. That must’ve been a real disappointment to Crichton. (
Pursuit aired in December on the ABC network, so it was probably filming that summer.) Wright isn’t a big McGovern fan, though. He’s a crazed Commie-hater who’s sick of both Republicans and the Democrats. Say what you will about the industrialist, but at least Wright foots the bill for his own mad plot. Also, today’s conservatives can certainly relate to Wright’s metaphor of turning around a series of bad hands by getting a nice new deck of cards.
Not that we approve of gassing a city full of innocent folks, along with the President of the United States—who, incidentally, ends up in San Diego with the threat still imminent because nobody could reach our nation’s leader on the phone. That kind of thing probably happened all the time back in 1972.
Want to know something else that wasn’t unusual back in 1972? Having a good guy trying to stop a plot to kill a bunch of Republicans.
Pursuit is refreshingly free of snide comments, and Graves—as mentioned—isn’t a swinging secret agent man. It’s kind of neat to see the hopeless nerd casually turn heroic. (Everybody’s too polite to point out that Graves is pretty much responsible for the imminent crisis.) The movie seems even more conservative once Martin Sheen shows up as one of Wright’s cronies. The closing scene will point out that anti-Communists aren’t the only political extremists who are likely to be looking for innovative ways to bomb American cities.
Also, there’s a Jerry Goldsmith score and a clock ticking down to disaster like on
24—which mainly reminds you that a guy like Graves wouldn’t survive past Hour 3 of that show.
Make it your own: Michael Crichton was enough of a brand name to get
Pursuit released
on DVD, but the package is minimal. It has all the care you’d expect to be given to an ABC Movie of the Week. Check out the generic packaging above. Somebody slapped a biohazard symbol over a city and went out for lunch.
We covered a lot of obscurities when
we once interviewed Ben Gazzara, but we didn’t know about
Pursuit (aka
Binary). We’d like to have asked if he was willing to make a commitment if the TV-movie had been turned into a series. Hard to believe, though. Gazzara wasn’t happy with making
Run for Your Life, and that was one of the coolest shows ever.
