What if Paddy Chayefsky wrote the third act of 2001?

Yet another of the movies that I watched because it sounded interesting was Altered States. And then I actually sat down to watch it. Interesting is certainly an accurate word for this one.

The movie was released in 1980, but the opening scenes are set in the late 1960s. Eddie Jessup (William Hurt) and Arthur Rosenberg (Bob Balaban) are a couple of postdoc students studying psychiatry. They've found a disused sensory deprivation tank, and decide to do the great scientific method thing of experimenting upon themselves. Eddie especially spends long periods in the tank. The results are interesting, but inconclusive. One night, at a party, Eddie is introduced to Emily (Blair Brown), a doctoral student herself. The two fall in love and get married.

Fast forward several years. Eddie and Emily are married with two daughters (watch for a very young Drew Barrymore as one of the daughters), but the marriage is falling apart in part because the two don't get to spend that much time together what with all the research they're going out in the field. Edward hears about the Hinchi, an indigenous group in Mexico who still carry out the old rituals, some of which include taking hallucinogenic drugs. Edward is intrigued by this, so goes down to Mexico and wants to participate in one of the rituals.

The ritual includes cutting Edward's hand to include some of his own blood in with the ground roots and whatnot that he's going to be ingesting, and the results are really interesting, as he has a very intense hallucination. Too intense even for the Hinchi, who force him to return to the States, although at least he still has a sample of the potion that the Hinchi prepared for him.

At this point, Edward gets a really wild idea, which is to combine taking that potion with going into the sensory deprivation tank, with his good old friend Arthur montoring his condition. This time, the experiment doesn't go so well, with Edward bleeding, foaming at the mouth, and not able to talk, having had hallucinations that looked a lot like de-evolution. After cleaning Edward up, Arthur has him X-rayed.

The result is shocking: the lab tech, not having any idea that the X-ray was of Edward while he was still under the effects of the experiment, says that the X-ray is of a gorilla, something that seems scientifically impossible to normal human beings. But Edward figures out the thing to do is experiment further, taking more of the drug and spending a longer period in the sensory deprivation tank, which as you might guess threatens to destroy him and everything he holds dear.

As you might have guessed from the title of the blog post, Altered States has a screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky, and is radically different from everything else he wrote, or at least everything of his I've seen. William Hurt does a good job, although the material really veers into the ridiculous in the second half of the movie. As I said, it's definitely interesting, although the movie may not be a success to everybody because of how crazy it gets.

But because of how interesting it is and how the flaws are fascinating, Altered States is definitely worth a watch even if you wind up not liking it.

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.

Listening to the winds of change

During one of the previous free preview weekends for Epix, I had the chance to record Gorky Park. It's going to be on again multiple times this week, starting tomorrow afternoon at 3:50 PM on Epix Hits (and again Friday on Epix 2 and Saturday on Epix).

One winter's night near the skating rink in Moscow's Gorky Park, somebody runs across three decomposing bodies, which is of course disconcerting. The militsiya, the local civil police (not a "militia", and a four-syllable word, despite everybody in the movie calling it the "militia"), led by Arkday Renko (William Hurt), is called in. Renko is the son of a World War II hero and good at what he does, although on previous cases he's butted heads with the KGB, something that really worries him.

He's going to have good reason to be worried, as the three bodies are clearly murder victims, with their faces and fingertips cut off so as to make identification that much more difficult. There are still small bits of evidence, with a couple of them being surprising. One is a pair of ice skates which have a woman's name on them. Renko goes to see that woman, Irina Asanova (Joanna Pacula). She's unsurprisingly evasive in her answers.

The other surprising clue is that one of the dead men has dyed red hair, and dental work using materials not currently used in Europe, identifying this man as likely American. This means a posible international incident. Indeed, Renko is invited to visit the dacha of Chief Prosecutor Iamskoy, where he meets American furrier Jack Osborne (Lee Marvin), who has been importing Russian sable, one of the finest furs. There are also people from the KGB there, worrying Renko even more.

Osborne turns out not to be the only American Renko meets. One day he gets waylaid by somebody who beats the crap out of him, and in investigating further, winds up at a hotel for foreigners where he makes his way to the hotel room of one William Kirwill (Brian Dennehy). On going through Kirwill's stuff (no search warrant here, this not being the US), he finds information on the triple murder case, and parts that assemble together to make a gun -- but then Kirwill walks into his room!

It turns out that Kirwill is a police detective from New York City, and that the dead American is most likely Kirwill's kid brother James, who had studied in Moscow and who wanted to help people defect from the USSR, a very dangerous game indeed. Renko decides eventually to accept whatever help Kirwill could give him despite being constrained by being a foreigner in Moscow.

Renko also discovers that Osborne and the KGB may well be involved in the triple murders, as the three were building a chest that could hide religious icons being smuggled out of the country. Perhaps this could allow Renko to crack the case wide open, but then, there's still the KBG to deal with....

Gorky Park is a well-constructed mystery, at least up until the third act, as a longish final act is tacked on that I felt made the story bog down. Still the acting is uniformly good and nobody really tries to recreate a phony Russian accent, which is also a plus. This having been made in the Soviet era, they obviously couldn't film in Moscow, so Helsinki stands in and mostly does a good job other than a few buildings that didn't look Russian to me at all.

Gorky Park is definitely worth a watch. It's been released on DVD with TCM having it as part of a set of three movies and Amazon having the standalone DVD. Amazon also has it on Prime Video if you can do that.