An exploitation-ripe Demme does Hitchcock…
NOTE: Netflix is taking down virtually all of their MGM titles on May 1st, so I thought it might be fun to see how many I can watch in the next two weeks, and then post quick, little hit-and-run reviews here. Hope you enjoy, and if you want to see any of these movies and have Netflix, better watch ’em now!
Last Embrace starts out with a pictoral scene of Roy Scheider enjoying dinner with his wife, only to then be ambushed by men brandishing guns. Schieder fights them off, but his wife catches a stray bullet and dies. Scheider works in intelligence, you see, and had brought his wife along on a mission as a cover. Reeling from her death, Scheider spends some time in a sanitarium before going back on the job, but something’s not right. He begins to feel that someone’s following him, and a cryptic note left at his apartment sends him on a search that threatens to shatter his already crumbling sanity. Jonathan Demme was fresh off his Roger Corman films by the time he tackled Last Embrace, and that low-budget background of crafting excitement on the cheap serves him well for this effective little spy thriller. Demme keeps us in the dark for most of the film - we’re never entirely sure if Scheider is actually being followed or if its just his paranoia run rampant; staged admirably through many slick suspense scenes owing more than a little to Hitchcock. Anchoring it all is Scheider himself, who along with able cast-mates Janet Margolin, Charles Napier, John Glover and Christopher Walken (in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo) help to keep the plot grounded when the truth comes out and the film is threatened to be derailed by overwrought melodrama. But a fantastic finale at Niagara Falls (a set-piece at a national landmark, true to Hitchcock form) brings everything around again for a mostly satisfying whole.
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