Sissy Spacek, Beatnik

If you've watched enough Hollywood movies from the late 1950s and early 1960s, you may know that Hollywood had what feels like a rather stereotypical view of the beatnik. And then many years later they had the chance to show the original beatniks, only to come up with something that feels rather tepid. That movie is Heart Beat, which I recently got the chance to watch.

Sissy Spacek provides the narration, giving a stereotypical talk about 1950s suburbia and introducing us to a pair of men. One is the well-known writer Jack Kerouac, who would go on to write On the Road and get it published in the late 1950s, although as the movie opens it's the late 1940s and Kerouac (John Heard) is still living with his mother in a New York City apartment. The second man is Neal Cassady (Nick Nolte), who came from Denver where he spent a lot of his adolescence in reform school since his alcoholic father abandond him. Indeed, in this telling of the story when Cassady gets out of prison he immediately steals another car and heads to New York, which is where he meets Kerouac. The two then head west for San Franciso together with a girl.

In San Francisco, the pair meet Carolyn Robinson (that's Sissy Spacek), who's studying art at the art institute and is engaged to a guy named Dick who doesn't play all that much part in the rest of the story. Jack, Neal, and Carolyn become an inseparable threesome living in a tenement apartment and working what odd jobs they can to make the rent, although Neal ultimate gets a better job with the railroad. Eventually Jack decides to head back to New York to try to sell his manuscript to On the Road which he keeps rolled up in what looks like a grocery bag. Neal has by this time knocked up Carolyn, and Jack suggests to Carolyn that she probably shouldn't marry Neal because she's not going to be happy.

With kids and responsibility, Neal and Carolyn move out to the sort of early-1950s tract housing that was being builty to accommodate the families creating the Baby Boom, and Neal has a tendency to shock the neighbors. After several years, Jack shows up again, and takes a "room" in the attic of the Cassady house with the three living in what again seems like somewhat of an open relationship, something that really shocks the neighbors. Jack heads back to New York again, and with help from Ira (Ray Sharkey), someone supposedly based in part on Allen Ginsberg who wanted nothing to do with this movie, gets On the Road published and becomes a sensation. The fact that the main character is rather based on Neal, however, causes problems for Neal, who eventually gets busted for marijuana possession.

The last act of the movie involves Cassady's itinerance, driving a converted school bus with a bunch of hippie-like characters; Cassady would die fairly young not having published much in his lifetime, although the movie doesn't mention Neal's death.

Once again, I can see why any number of people would have felt influenced by works like On the Road and would want to make a movie based on Kerouac. (I, to be honest, have not read On the Road and have never been terribly interested in the counterculture.) The movie we get in Heart Beat, however, feels rather anodyne. These people lived what in many ways turned out to be wild lives, yet everything feels rather sanitized. I think the actors do the best they can with the material, but it doesn't work as well as one might hope.

Missing

There are any number of films that came out when I was growing up in the late 1970s and 1980s that I had of course heard about when they came out, but never got to see in the theater because I would have been too young for them at the time. Another such film is Missing. So the last time it showed up on TCM I made a point to record it for the next time it showed up. That next time is tomorrow, May 13, at 3:00 PM.

The movie starts off on September 15, 1973. Charles Horman (John Shea) is riding in a car with his friend and presumptive co-worker Terry Simon (Melanie Mayron) being driven by a US diplomat with diplomatic plates. They're in Chile, riding back from the coastal resort of Viña Del Mar to Santiago, where Charles and Terry live and where Charles' wife Beth (Sissy Spacek) is waiting for them. They're stopped at a police checkpoint because four days earlier, there had been a coup in the country. Terry is somewhat thinking about leaving, but the airport is still closed, while Charles and Beth seem to show no desire to get out of what is clearly becoming a dangerous country.

Charles' job isn't fully made clear; he does some work translating articles for a local newspaper that one can guess opposes the new administration, and claims to be working on a novel. But they're also of the political persuasion that knows the wrong sort of people, as Charles is taking notes on what he's seen the past several days and is clearly worried about the new authorities finding those notes. Charles returns home the following morning, having had to spend the night in a hotel because of the curfew, and the next night when the couple is separated again, Beth returns home to find the house ransacked. And then Charles goes missing.

Beth tries to get help from the US Embassy, but feels like she's getting stonewalled. Back in the US, Charles' father Ed (Jack Lemmon) is a businessman with much more influence than the wife of a writer living thousands of miles away. Ed talks to a senator, a US Representative, and various people at the State Department, and feels like he too is getting the run-around. So he decided to fly to Chile to go look for his son himself.

At this point, we learn that father and son had some differences of opinion, with Dad thinking that perhaps his son should have been more careful; this obviously leads to all sorts of issues with his daughter-in-law too. But as Ed investigates, and in a series of flashbacks, we learn that Charles met some Americans in Viña Del Mar who claim to be involved with the US Navy and claim to have some involvement in helping to oust the previous president, something that would certainly explain why embassy staff are trying to give the Hormans the brushoff.

Missing is based on a true story, and is quite well-made as far as it goes, thanks to pretty good characterizations from Lemmon and Spacek. However, Missing also suffers a bit from omissions because of its basis on a true story. There's this impression that Chile just suddenly, magically had a US-engineered coup on September 11, 1973. Regarless of the extent to which the US was involved (the Nixon administration certainly would have hated a president like Allende who flirted with Marxism), the country had been unstable for some time at least since anti-Allende forces gained majorities in both houses of parliament in elections earlier that year. Certainly, things would have been deteriorating long enough that you'd expect normal people in the capital city to have an exit strategy. Also, a couple of Charles and Beth's American ex-pat friends are portrayed as being even more of the sort of people to wind up getting disappeared, except that they don't. Director Costa-Gavras had, a dozen years earlier, made Z, which was clearly about the military junta in his native Greece although he wisely doesn't mention Greece there. It makes for a better movie, I think, not that Missing is bad by any means. It just feels more unsubtle in its political views.

The bigger irony is that, in the intervening years -- I think I'd pin the shift to the start of the Barack Obama presidency -- there's been a sea-change in the perception of the US left and right to state power and the use of that power. Nowadays, it's those on the right who go on about "color revolutions" and how the western establishment attempts coups in other countries (eg. Ukraine in 2014) and goes after its political opponents (see the canceled presidential election in Romania last year for an example), while the left seems just fine with using state power against "populism". Not that anybody would have seen that coming when Missing was made. It's just an interesting point to ponder while watching the movie.