.The Collection Project Film of the Day:
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For many years, the sole draw for me of the 1986 sort-of-horror-but-mostly-suspense film The Stepfather (d. Joseph Ruben) was the fact that it was written by Donald E. Westlake, creator of the amoral thief named Parker, and author of any number of classic, brilliant crime novels. When I finally saw the film last year, after it was released, at last, on DVD to coincide with a quickly forgotten remake, I can't pretend that I wasn't let down. Though Westlake gets the lone screenwriting credit, it's no secret that Ruben sort of messed with it afterwards, and it's sort of hard not the think that the basically rote thriller elements of the last third came from Ruben, not Westlake (though maybe that's wishful thinking on my part). Not that Ruben doesn't do a good job actually directing the film -- the reveal of that massacred family at the beginning is superb, for instance -- but the more of Westlake's fiction I read, the more I can't help looking at The Stepfather and thinking "if only", "what if", and etc.
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However, the other thing that happened by the time I got around to watching the film was that I'd become a huge fan of the film's star, Terry O'Quinn, who for the past six years has been mesmerizing on a weekly basis on TV's Lost. O'Quinn is a sublime, effortless actor, and his presence in The Stepfather was almost as big an incentive to watch the film as Westlake's involvement. Unlike Westlake's work, however, O'Quinn's performance is pretty much an unqualified success. The big moment in The Stepfather is towards the end, when Jerry Blake, O'Quinn's character, makes one slip-up while talking to his wife (Shelley Hack) that brings his whole secret world -- as a man who marries into father- and husbandless families, whom he then butchers when his badly skewed, idyllic view of how that family should operate doesn't pan out -- comes crashing down around him. O'Quinn's signature line at that moment ("Waaaait a minute -- who am I here?") is so good, his delivery so beautifully tweaked to expose not only Blake's diseased brain, which we already knew about anyway, but the amount of stuff he keeps in that brain, the stuff he needs to keep straight in order to function, and also the resignation that his plans for moving on are going to have to be speeded up, that the producers of the film, or whoever, did what stupid people always do and blew their film's iconic moment by slapping it on the poster.
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Oh well. It still works like gangbusters, and represents to me one of the finest moments of writing, but primarily of acting, in the psycho-thriller genre, and further points to what The Stepfather might have been had some people not been concerned that the film as originally laid out to them, before the cameras rolled, didn't resemble closely enough all the movies they were trying to cash in on.
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Ah, I'm being cynical. Terry O'Quinn is awesome.
