The Naked Face *** (1984, Roger Moore, Rod Steiger, Elliott Gould, Anne Archer) – Classic Movie Review 2432

Writer-director Bryan Forbes’s 1984 thriller, made for producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus’s Canon Films, was his 14th and final movie as director.

It is an adaptation of Sidney Sheldon’s novel and stars Roger Moore as Chicago psychiatrist Dr Judd Stevens, who may nor may not be a psychopathic killer. He is suspected of murdering one of his patients when the man is murdered in the middle of the city after a session, stabbed while wearing a raincoat belonging to the doctor.

Rod Steiger and Elliott Gould also star as the police detectives, Lieutenant McGreary and Lieutenant Angeli, who investigate. McGreavy bitterly resents the doctor from a previous case in which Stevens’s testimony led to a cop killer being put in an institution rather than sent to prison.

The cops soon come to the conclusion that Stevens is the killer. So eventually, as no one believes his innocence, Stevens is forced to go after the real villains himself, taking on a notorious Mafia kingpin.

This is a watchable Eighties thriller, but still a rather empty movie version of Sheldon’s bestseller that makes too little of the familiar premise. The very good cast try hard to make it work but give patchy performances and deserve rather better material to work on, and Forbes’s direction gets slightly stuck in the rut of his own rather wobbly script.

This isn’t really a particularly good role for Moore, who is far too genial a presence to suggest that he could ever be a psychopath.

Also in the cast are Art Carney (who starred in Forbes’s previous film Better Late than Never) , Anne Archer, David Hedison, Deanna Dunagan, Ron Parady, Rick Sollenberger, James Spinkns, John Kapelos, Cynthia Baker Schuyler, Virginia Smith, Joe D Lauck, Jimmie F Skaggs, Mary Demas, Frankie Hill and Nancy Serlin.

Sheldon wrote his novel in 1970 before psychological profiling became a widely accepted method of forensic crime-fighting work.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2432

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