Okay, this is a blatant cheat since this is a brand new movie, now showing in theaters and maybe on your cable or satellite's "on demand" feature. Comcast has it on demand, and that's where Judy and I saw it. I'm writing about it because I don't want you to overlook it.
The movie is based on a novel by Joe R. Lansdale, and it captures the spirit of the book very well. Michael C. Hall plays Richard Dane, just an ordinary guy in a little East Texas town. It's a far cry from his role as Dexter, which may be one reason he was eager to play it. He has a frame shop, he's married, he has a little boy. One night he hears a burglar. He gets his home defense revolver, confronts the burglar, and when his finger slips on the revolver's trigger, he kills him. The burglar was unarmed. Not that it matters. The town considers Dane a hero. Hall's very good as the everyman type who knows he's not a hero and who eventually gets in way over his head, beginning at the point when Sam Shepard shows up. Just out of the Huntsville penitentiary, Shepard believes his son was the burglar, and he's not happy about what's happened.
This is where I stop with the plot summary, since there are twists that I don't want to reveal. If you've read the book, you know what's coming, but I'm not going to be the one who tells. The trailer reveals way too much, but you might have watched it already. Sorry about that.
What I'll tell you is that the whole cast is excellent. Shepard is gruff and ready, and Don Johnson nearly steals the show as flamboyant private-eye Jim Bob Luke. He has great shirts and a dandy car, too. I'll also mention that there's plenty of tension and suspense and that the violence goes pretty far, especially in the climactic scenes. This is a very effective thriller.
That being said, there are some plot threads left dangling, and the theme of fathers and sons that enriched the novel is barely hinted at. I got the impression that the original script might have been cut by 15 minutes or more. So while I think the movie is don't-miss entertainment, I think you should read the novel, too. All those questions are answered there.
Charles Williams, one of my favorite Gold Medal writers, occasionally published in hardcover. He also knew a thing or two about sailing, and Dead Calm is a hardback suspense novel that lets him show off that knowledge. It's a good story, and Orson Welles planned to film it. Like others of his projects, this one never got done. It would've been interesting to see his take on it, but instead we get a version by Philip Noyce. It's a dandy little movie, but it's not a lot like the book, aside from the basics of the situation.
What are the basics? A man and his wife (Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman) are sailing far from the peaceful shore when they come across a boat that's sinking. There's one man (Billy Zane) aboard, and he comes over to their boat to tell them that everyone on his boat has died of food poisoning. Neill goes over to check, and Zane, being a bit of a nutter who's killed everyone else on the boat, sails away with Nicole.
After that, it's just one thing after another as Nicole tries to escape, Neill tries to keep the sinking boat he's on afloat, and Zane tries to keep Nicole from going back to rescue her husband. There's an annoying dog (HUGE SPOILER ALERT: People sensitive to animal deaths should avoid this movie. END OF HUGE SPOILER ALERT) who causes problems, too. There's a good bit of suspense, a good bit of stupidity on the parts of the characters, and (HUGE SPOILER ALERT) a villain who's not easy to kill (END OF HUGE SPOILER ALERT). Kidman, Neill, and Zane are all very good, and there's some great ocean scenery. If you haven't seen it, give it a try.
Not many Gold Medal writers are forgotten, but Richard Himmel seems to be. A brief Google search turned up next to nothing about him or his books. I'm partially at fault here, since I've had a good many of them on my selves for well over 30 years and never read a one of them. Why? Well, you can't read everything. Anyway, I decided it was time to take a look at one. Himmel, after all, sold millions of books. His first one for Gold Medal was I'll Find You, and it was the second novel GM published. (The first was John Flagg's The Persian Cat, and Flagg is another GM writer whose work I've never read. So many books, so little time.)
What did I learn? For one thing, the Gold Medal pattern was set from the very beginning. I'll Find You has just about everything that the later books from this publisher had. The first-person narrator, Johnny Maguire, is a self-proclaimed punk, a night-school lawyer whose attitudes toward women are primitive at best: "OK, so she might have fought. It would have been good that way. Maybe that's what she wanted. Maybe she wanted to get messed up a little bit. Maybe that's the way it was good for her." He says this about a woman he's fallen for, hard. She's the first woman he's ever loved, though of course he's had plenty of sex. Sex is big in the GM line.
As soon as Maguire falls for the woman, she disappears, an apparent suicide. Maguire doesn't think she's dead and decides to find her. Hence the book's title. And he does find her. That's when things get complicated. Gangsters are involved, and there's a murder, but this isn't really a crime novel. In its own twisted way, it's a love story in the Gold Medal vein, with the emphasis on speed, with lots of raw emotion, with plenty of melodrama. And a really great final scene and line, very much in keeping with the character of Johnny Maguire.
Himmel had something going for him, and it's not a big surprise that the book was such a hit. My guess is that he didn't plan to make Maguire a series character. He wasn't cut out to be one. The book sold so many millions, however, that bringing him back must have proved irresistible. In one of the sequels, Maguire is even an investigator for the State Department. I guess I'll have to read another one to see how this came about.
