Missing ***** (1982, Jack Lemmon, Sissy Spacek, Melanie Mayron) – Classic Movie Review 5879

Writer-director Constantin Costa-Gavras’s 1982 political thriller is tremendously well-handled, targeted for maximum emotional impact, with the director maintaining high dramatic tension and a dynamic pace throughout.

Jack Lemmon gives a superb performance as Ed Horman, a distraught, uptight, conswervative middle-aged American searching, along with his daughter-in-law Beth (Sissy Spacek), for his idealistic American writer son Charles (John Shea), who has gone missing in Chile during the coup d’état there in September 1973.

Lemmon won the Best Actor award at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival and Costa-Gavras won the Palme d’Or, tied with Yol (1982).

Lemmon gives a beautiful, quite exquisite piece of detailed acting, gradually shifting from disapproval for his son’s politics and lifestyle to sympathy for and empathy with him as he fights to discover the truth about his disappearance.

Costa-Gavras and Donald Stewart won the 1983 Oscar for their distinguished Best Adapted Screenplay, taken from Thomas Hauser’s book based on Ed Horman’s true story. And they won the BAFTA Film Award for Best Screenplay too, with Françoise Bonnot also winning for Best Film Editing.

It is a most thoughtful and intelligent piece of work, as well as brilliantly effective on screen. All in all, it is hard to remember a better American film in this thinking person’s thriller genre since the 1962 The Manchurian Candidate, though Lemmon’s The China Syndrome (1979) might be one, and Seven Days in May (1964) might be another.

It was also Oscar nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (Lemmon) and Best Actress (Spacek).

Also in the cast are Charles Cioffi, David Clennon, Richard Venture, Jerry Hardin, Richard Bradford, Joe Regalbuto, John Doolittle, Janice Rule, Ward Costello and Richard Whiting.

It is shot by Ricardo Aronovich, produced by Peter Guber, Jon Peters, Edward Lewis and Mildred Lewis, scored by Vangelis and designed by Peter Jamieson.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5879

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