“Pursuit”: a nutty classic waiting for stoners to find it!

PURSUIT: A FASCINATING MICHAEL CRICHTON ARTIFACT FROM THE TRANSITION BETWEEN THE PRE-COMPUTER AND COMPUTER ERAS… AND A STONERS’ FAVORITE WAITING TO BE DISCOVERED.

We’ve all experienced it by now: We re-view a well-remembered film from our childhood, and are forced to realize how young and naïve we were when we viewed it… and just how much society and entertainment have changed since the original screening.

Perhaps it was because Michael Crichton had died just a month before, and I had experienced a surprisingly huge regret at his passing… or perhaps it was just that I hadn’t seen this particular film in well over 35 years and remembered it well, or thought I did. Whatever the reason, I picked up, for 3 dollars, the DVD of “Pursuit,” a VERY obscure ABC “Movie of the Week” from 1972, distributed on disc by MGM. Ever since, even as I write this article, I’ve been forced to marvel at how consistently this modest little thriller functions as a time capsule: incredibly prescient, quaintly naïve, and unintentionally funny all at the same time. If “Mystery Science Theatre” were still around, I could understand how this movie could pose a problem for their staff: it’s too technically good to totally dismiss as trash, and yet the evolution of society, entertainment, and science have turned it into the cinematic equivalent of an eight-track tape… appreciable for the melodies it contains, but laughable in its technological obsolescence.

It’s also fantastically noteworthy as a souvenir of the extraordinary and rather strange career of author Michael Crichton, the best-selling author with a medical degree who first entered the public consciousness with the almost unprecedented success of “The Andromeda Strain” in the late Sixties.” Strain” was an anomaly amongst Sixties bestsellers: it was science-fiction, but heavily grounded in the known science of the day, explained in understandable and entertaining terms, paving the way for such other medically trained novelists as Nicholas Meyer and Robin Cook. “Pursuit,” is based on a throwaway Crichton novel, “Binary,” written under the pseudonym of John Lange, just as Stephen King used to write second-tier novels under the name of Richard Bachman. In another precursor to King’s phenomenal success, Crichton became the first best-selling author, in MY memory anyway, to be allowed to direct a movie based on his own work (from a screenplay officially credited to Robert Dozier). To my knowledge, only Nicholas Meyer (The Seven-Percent Solution,” “Time after Time,” “Star Trek II,” and “The Day After”) and King himself (“Maximum Overdrive”) have been awarded similar largess due to their popularity.*  While King never earned a second chance at helming a feature, “Pursuit” was successful enough to convince MGM to let Crichton direct and write “Westworld,” an astonishingly tidy little sci-fi thriller that single-handedly revived the career of Yul Brenner, and made his black-clad gunslinger image even more iconic than in “The Magnificent Seven,” a pretty tall order when seriously considered. Crichton made one other well-regarded techno-thriller, “Runaway” with Tom Selleck and Gene Simmons, and then seemingly just staggered into box-office and creative dead ends such as “Looker,” “The 13^th Warrior,” and “Physical Evidence.” And all this happened before the notable “third-act” of his career, which included his “Jurassic Park” trilogy with the accompanying cinema juggernaut franchise… and a little thing which he produced called “E.R.”.   

“Pursuit” is the single-minded story (there are NO subplots) of Steven Graves, an FBI agent shadowing James Wright, a political extremist who dismisses both Democrats and Republicans as identical, differing in name only. At a ridiculously slow pace by today’s surveillance-thriller standards, it becomes glaringly obvious to the FBI that Wright is planning to obliterate an unnamed San Diego-based political convention and the President in attendance, through the use of a binary gas, an exotic concept mostly unknown to the public at the time.

The film both suffers and benefits from its place in history. It’s the first film I remember seeing that focused on domestic terrorism. In 1972, the concept was not just exotic; it was pure science-fiction. While Wright is clearly patterned after Lyndon LaRouche, it would be at least another decade before news stories about “survivalist compounds” would convince the public that legitimate threats to America could be internal. The fact that Wright can actually escape from an FBI interrogation by walking past the questioning agents while pretending to use an ashtray and then saunter through a door with no further security posted outside is a huge groaner for a modern audience, but in 1972 it seemed sort-of plausible, because the concept of an American trying to kill masses of Americans was still unheard-of: the FBI agents in the film can actually be excused for their naivete, IF you’re viewing it as a citizen of the early Seventies.

(Because the film’s FBI agents are so hilariously slow in seeing the real nature of Wright’s plot and dealing with it, I am consistently surprised that this film hasn’t become a favorite of America’s stoners, wishing to create their own “Mystery Science Theatre” in their living room. The film even contains a “4:20” reference between two agents that makes you wonder what Crichton was doing when he wasn’t on the set, even though it pre-dates the popularization of that term by a full-decade. The whole film is just one long “bong-game” waiting for the right couch potatoes to appreciate it. The typical Jerry Goldsmith score, shiny, insistent and polished compared to the rest of the production, seems out of place, and just made for stoners to mock.)

“Pursuit” is also the first film in my considerable cinematic memory to feature a digital readout across the bottom of the screen, a full thirty years before the debut of “24.”

The device is inconsistently used (making it another “bong-game” possibility), but its mere appearance is rather startling considering the film’s age. Digital readouts were still VERY new and exotic in 1972; take it from someone whose brand-new clock radio still featured hands circling numbers.

Also considered  VERY new in 1972, the concept of plastic explosives, crucial to the plot, and binary gas, the subject of explanatory technobabble that must even explain the meaning of the word “binary” itself to the audience… exceedingly quaint in today’s digital world. The film is also the initial reference I remember to the virtual invulnerability of cockroaches to disasters.

(Oh, additionally, “Pursuit” is an artifact due to the complexion of the actors involved. By this time, after the debut of “All in the Family” on CBS, African-Americans were regularly penetrating TV in bit parts at the very least; but “Pursuit” is ENTIRELY white, and the inclusion of Jewish actor Joseph Wiseman seems the only concession to the concept that America isn’t entirely composed of WASPs. {Martin Sheen would not publicly acknowledge his birth name of Ramon Estevez for another few years, and boy, does he look pasty in this film!})

Finally, “Pursuit,” is the first film I remember seeing that posited the possibility that information can be stolen from government computers (by the Martin Sheen character), and the first time the word “on-line” was used in a computer-context in a movie. If anybody can cite an earlier example, I’ll gladly modify my statement.

The psychological discourse of “Pursuit” is also unique for the time, although nutty by modern standards.   Wright’s entire motivation for his terrorist attack seems to be a fear of “impotence,” strictly defined here as the inability to act. It’s to the movie’s benefit that then-current broadcast standards didn’t allow more explicit discussion of this corny and simplistic notion on the obvious sexual level… but again, it amazes me that the film hasn’t become a cult movie for chronic consumers of cannabis because of this aspect. Also, the concept of an FBI agent seeing a psychiatrist seemed fairly new in 1972, an attempt to further sophisticate the battle of wills between two almost-equals. The entire “poker-player against poker-player” concept is referenced ludicrously often by Grave’s superior, making such observations appear to be his only real job.

“Pursuit” has several quality problems that can be attributed to a virgin director. Twice, Crichton uses a voice-over to remind us of what a character has previously said… but the sound-level is so low and unsure that it’s almost unintelligible (It’s amazing that no supervising producer noticed this!). Also, there are some wonderfully ham-handed moments, such as a news announcer’s assessment that the President is protected against everything EXCEPT a major disaster, followed by a quick cut to the two tanks of gas. The “act breaks” where commercials were once inserted are achingly funny in their cliff-hanger nature, typified by William Windom’s line, “They have not been able to reach the President!” A climactic explosion is basically a very primitive optical effect followed by actors falling to the floor while someone shakes the camera and someone else releases an unconvincing smoke plume.

Two or three performances seem to have, rather amazingly, stood the test of time. An astonishingly young Martin Sheen appears in a brief key role, and Joseph Wiseman, forever enshrined as the craggy Jewish actor who played one-handed villains of unspecified “oriental” origin in both “Doctor No” and “Enter the Dragon,” is thoroughly enjoyable and creditable as the perpetually gloomy gas expert. Ben Gazzara, best remembered for the TV series “Run for Your Life,” and his films with John Cassavetes, is much less deadpan than usual (perhaps responding to his brilliant co-star) playing with understated humor the already clichéd role of the FBI agent who does crossword puzzles for fun and sees every assignment as an intellectual contest between two opponents. William Windom, as Gazzara’s petulant superior, has most of the worst lines in the movie, but is well remembered by fans of the original “Star Trek” series and the James Thurber homage, “My World and Welcome to It.” 

But the real joy here, and again I’m stunned that this performance hasn’t become a favorite of stoners, is E.G. Marshall as Wright. I don’t remember the source of the quote, but someone once remarked that if you slice ham thinly and skillfully enough, you can no longer tell that it’s ham: this is the work that proves the saying. This interpretation, incredibly, would work equally well in a good-movie or a bad one… and “Pursuit,” as I’ve described it, is more than a little bit of both. Whether you like “Pursuit” or deride it, Marshall is untouchable: Remarkably, he somehow seems to both underplay and overplay this role at the same time, aided by the fact that his balding, incredibly average appearance constantly surprises audiences when passion flows from his seemingly passionless facade: an extraordinary man in an ordinary body. Marshall’s pleasure in portraying Wright is palpable in every frame. The gleam in his eye when he confronts Graves person-to-person is absolutely puckish. He also manages to sell the clichéd “impotence” motivation. His performance, rather subtle visually, and entirely nuanced vocally, serves as a prescient artifact to his cult status among then-young radio listeners as the best-remembered host of the “CBS Radio Mystery Theatre,” the long, cherished, last gasp of radio drama on commercial airwaves. Just watching him, and listening to him of course, conjures a smile. Marshall, whom some younger readers might remember as a doddering surgeon during the first seasons of the Nineties series “Chicago Hope,” excelled in two types of characters: men of supreme intellect and character, as in his classic TV show “The Defenders,” and total whackjobs with a thickish veneer of civilization, as in “Pursuit.” If you’re unfamiliar with him and you want to see more of this extraordinary performer, I’ll recommend that you watch Sidney Lumet’s film of “Twelve Angry Men,” George Romero’s “Creepshow” (in a scenery-chewing “Tales from the Crypt”-like story about a millionaire battling cockroaches, which really has to be seen to be believed), and his cinematic swan song as an ancient husband (of a much younger wife) betrayed by a friend in Clint Eastwood’s “Absolute Power,” which is practically a love-letter from director-to-actor. Also, MP3 copies of his “Mystery Theatre” work are readily available. You’ll mourn his death anew with each performance you discover.  

“Pursuit” remains forever maimed by it’s own prescience, but the quaintness of it’s virginal approach to subject matter that would soon become clichéd… and the performance of E. G. Marshall make it a uniquely nostalgic and pleasurable time-waster… as well as a nice homage to Michael Crichton, whom many of us remember as the man whose unprecedented media-crossing made the later omnipresent success of Stephen King possible.

Warren Stone