The Fan

Mario Cantone sat down with Ben Mankiewicz last October to do a TCM programming series on, well, I'm not quite certain what it was supposed to be about since the movies don't quite all fit one genre. Anyhow, there was one surprisingly new-to-me movie that once again I recorded because I hadn't heard of it and the plot synopsis sounds interesting. That movie was an early 1980s thriller called The Fan.

Michael Biehn plays the titular fan, whose name is revealed to be Douglas Breen, and as the movie opens we hear him clacking away at a typewriter and voicing over a letter that he's writing to Sally Ross (Lauren Bacall). Sally was a big movie star, and Douglas claims to be Sally's biggest fan. Of course, the letter he writes sounds a lot more creepy than any sort of letter a loving, or even emotionally stable, fan would write.

Sally's personal assistant, Belle (Maureen Stapleton), handles all of Sally's correspondence, as a big star like Sally presumably gets a lot of mail. Sally has left Hollywood for New York, where's she's currently in rehearsals for what she hopes is her big new triumph of an off-Broadway musical, and she doesn't know anything about Douglas. Belle sends Douglas a signed photo of Sally, and disposes of his letter since Sally gets so much mail it's pointless to keep all those letters.

Douglas gets the photo, and he's not particularly happy as he already has a copy of this particular photo, and he being Sally's #1 fan clearly deserves much better fan service. He keeps writing increasingly unhinged letters that Belle deals with without making poor Sally have to deal with this stuff. She's got enough in her regular life what with the new show and a complicated relationship with ex-husband Jake (James Garner).

Douglas eventually starts stalking the apartment building where Sally lives. One evening, as Belle exits the building, Douglas follows her -- and slashes her with a straight razor! She survives, but the incident is troubling for everybody. Sally's in danger, and Belle is badly hurt, although amazingly we see a shot of her later in the movie where she has no scar where those facial bandages had been. The police send detective Raphael Andrews (Héctor Elizondo) to investigate, and as the stabbings begin to pile up, eventually gives Sally round-the-clock protection. But you can see why Raphael is disappointed Belle never saved Breen's correspondence.

As you might guess, The Fan winds its way toward the inevitable climax of Sally and Douglas winding up alone in a darkened space where the final showdown between the two of them takes place, and everybody lives happily ever after. Well, OK, they don't all live happily ever after, but that's another thing you could probably have guessed.

The Fan was a box-office bomb on its release back in 1981, and having seen it, I can see why. It's fairly predictable with wooden actng from Biehn. And the show-within-a-show is terrible despite having songs written by Marvin Hamlisch. On the bright side, The Fan is entertainingly bad, and that makes it worth a watch.