Eyewitness

Christopher Plummer died at the beginning of last month. By coincidence, FXM had brought one of his lesser-known movies out of the vault for putting in the rotation: Eyewitness. It's going to be on again tomorrow morning at 3:10 AM with a repeat at 1:15 PM tomorrow, so I recently watched it to do a blog post on it here.

Plummer isn't the star, of course, that honor goes to William Hurt. He plays Daryll Deever, a Vietnam vet who now works as a janitor in a Manhattan office building. Among the offices is one Mr. Long and his son, both of whom emigrated from South Vietnam after the war. Daryll also has a friend Aldo (James Woods) who is a former co-worker at the building, and who believes Long might have been responsible for costing Aldo his job. (In an unrelated subplot, Aldo is trying to hook Daryll up with Linda, Also's sister.)

After getting home from work, Darryl likes to unwind by watching a recording of the local news, since he has the hots for one of the members of the late news, Tony Sokolow (Sigourney Weaver). In addition to being a newscaster, she's an amateur pianist whose parents (Irene Worth and Albert Paulsen) set up salon-type concerts to help raise money for their pet project, which is using that money to get refusenik Jews out of the Soviet Union. Plummer plays Joseph, who works with the elder Sokolows and is Tony's boyfriend.

All of this comes together one night when Daryll is doing his rounds in the building, and, when he gets to the Long office, finds that the elder Mr. Long is very much dead, having been murdered. Somehow, there's no suspicion on Daryll, which I'm guessing has to do with janitors and night watchman types having to check in and those records being checked. But at any rate, the TV station sends Tony over to cover the story and interview the people.

In order to get closer to Tony, Daryll decides he's going to intimate that he knows more about the case than he really does. Amazingly, it works, as Tony winds up over at Daryll's apartment on several occasions and even in bed with him once. This seems like a pretty blatant violation of journalistic ethics, at least if you ever thought that journalists had any ethics to begin with.

The police are obviously investigating as well, in the form of Lt. Black (Morgan Freeman before he really became a star) and Lt. Jacobs (Steven Hill). It's their cursory interviewing of Daryll that gets him off the hook, while they seem to imply that they've got their eyes on Aldo, who seems like a natural suspect. And he's not doing anything to make himself seem any less guilty.

Eyewitness goes on like this for about 100 minutes. It's an interesting enough premise with a lot of fine actors. But they've got a script that really lets them all down. Tony getting in bed with Daryll that quickly, especially if she knew about his crush on her, seems out of character, as does a decision later on to quit being a newscaster. I mentioned the irrelevant subplot of Aldo's sister; there's another irrelevant subplot involving Daryll's father. One moderately interesting section is the climax, which takes place in what are presumably the stables for the Central Park horse-drawn carriages. There's also nice vintage footage of Manhattan circa 1981.

Unfortunately, none of this is enough to make Eyewitness anything more than one of the least notworthy pictures in the filmography of any of the main stars. And as far as I can tell, it's not available on DVD or any of the main streaming services right now.