The Disappearance

Trailer—The Disappearance

Gloomy thriller/mystery starring Donald Sutherland as Jay Mallory, a cool and calculating hitman. When his wife Celandine (Francine Racette) disappears he thinks she has left him, as their relationship was stormy at best. He's offered another hit but after a meeting with an associate he thinks his last hit has something to do with his wifes disappearance. He's told to kill a man called Deverell, but at first refuses. It turns out that Deverell (Christopher Plummer) is the organisations boss and he knows that Mallory is there to kill him. He takes Mallory's gun off him and his about to shoot him when Mallory fatally knives him. Back home he finds Celandine has returned, it was her that requested Mallory to kill Deverell as she was having an affair with him and had discovered that he was Mallory's boss. Out shopping Mallory is bumped off at the end of the film by an unseen assailant. Decent film spoiled only by flashbacks, great cast though that also includes John Hurt, Davids Warner and Hemmings, Peter Bowles and Virginia McKenna.

With a stary cast and some great Montreal location footage, this had the potential to be an enjoyable thriller, but is plodding and slow. It's very generic in the category of movie thrillers with Donald Sutherland playing a role he's played over and over again, an overly serious man with a criminal agenda involved in situations that seem to be impossible to get out of. Here he is a hitman whose wife has disappeared, and when he's assigned a hit, he finds out that the people involved are possibly behind his wife's disappearance. Of course he takes this as an opportunity to seek revenge, and pray you think that would leave two lots of chase sequences and shootouts and intrigue, the result is a movie that is painfully slow for much of the time. With David Warner, John Hurt, Christopher Plummer and Virginia McKenna in support, it's a major disappointment to see good actors wasted in a film that moves slowly to resolve each situation Sutherland finds himself in. The photography is good and the editing tight, but the plot seems to be giving the indication that the writers thought very highly of themselves as they put the script together. It's another film that thinks it's much more intelligent and complex than it is, and the result is a convoluted mess that is totally disappointing. Roman Polanski's 1987 thriller "Frantic" is a much better film with a similar premise. There are reasons why certain films fall Into obscurity, and this is an example of one.

***SPOILERS***Canadian thriller with a shocking scene in it where a box of Kellogs Cornflakes, my favorite serial, being shot to pieces as it's used by the person bring shot at as a human shield. The film has to do with this top Canadian hit-man Jay Mallory, Donald Sutherland, who's two timing wife's Celandine, Francine Racette, disappears on him and instead of being happy & relived, she's wasn't worth the trouble, he goes all out in both Canada & the UK to find her and bring her back to him.By the time the movie ends we have no idea on which side Celandine is on but by then her husband, who was by then completely out of the picture, couldn't care less. After doing a number of "Shy's"-hit-jobs in Canadian mobster talk- Mallory is given a job or "Shy" to do in England by his boss Deverell, played by Christopher-known to his friends as "Chris the Plummer"- Plummer, that sounds a bit fishy to him.As Mallory soon suspects it's Deverell who's setting him up and is using his lost wife Celandine to do it. As we soon see Celandine's psycho act of her losing her mind is to throw off all suspicions on what she's really up to which by the time the movie is over she doesn't know herself. ***SPOILERS***The deadly serious Jay Mallory starts to lose his touch as a 1st class hit-man and lets his guard down for the first and last time by him thinking that he can quit the mob and live to tell about it. The ending tells it all shot in the Canadian dead of winter that he as well as we in the audience not to mention the Kellogs Corn Flake serial box never saw it coming. It was foolish for Mallory to feel that his life as a hit-man was far behind him not realizing that those that he hit have friends and relatives who won't forget what he did as well as the mob whom he by leaving it he tried to double-cross!

I had never heard of the "The Disapperance", but then again there are very few movies from the late 70s that come to my mind at all. But I do like Donald Sutherland and I try to see much of his contributions to film. This movie almost made me give up. I found the beginning confusing, the setting boring, and the flashbacks frustrating. However for Donald's sake I struggled through. The feelings I experienced may well have been the intended design. As the story progresses, it does become more interesting. The plot has some nice changes and I found myself more encouraged to concentrate on the developments, and eventually was actually enjoying the movie. I don't know if I would watch this a second time, but I am glad I survived it the first time. The ending didn't surprise me, but if you are a fan of Donald's as well, you should try "The Disappearance" and see how you feel at the end of it.

This film does a fine job of putting the viewer into the position of the main protagonist, Jay Mallory. It isn't until the climax of the film when Mallory and Christopher Plummer's character, Deverell, meet that the viewer can understand the disjointed, roller-coaster ride that Mallory has been on. The haunting piano music beautifully reflects the tension of the film. The support cast is made up of outstanding English and European actors who give the feel of the film the pace so often brought to the screen of excellent non-US films.

The good: excellent cast of actors. I mean these actors were the creme de la creme during the seventies and eighties and even beyond. And we get to see some excellent acting performances. This is an ACTOR'S movie! The photography is of high quality as well, with many still shots without any words, that reveal the hand of a master at work. Any bad? Unfortunately this movie is bogged down by ENDLESS flashbacks, that got on my nerves after half an hour. I get it, this story is like a puzzle and what better way of slowly revealing the plot than by using flashbacks. BUT there is a limit on how many flashbacks I can see, before I get annoyed by them. Still worth a watch for the Donald Sutherland fans, because he gives one of his best performances.

Ostensibly, it should be hard to understand why certain movies slip into obscurity despite being loaded with talent, but then you come across a case like this one and the possibility suddenly becomes not just plausible but inevitable. On paper, this Anglo-Canadian "existentialist" thriller certainly had potential: an impressive cast – Donald Sutherland, David Hemmings, John Hurt, David Warner, Christopher Plummer and Virginia McKenna – was mouthing the words of screenwriter Paul Mayersberg under the guidance of director Stuart Cooper (the man behind recent Criterion DVD release, OVERLORD [1975]) and being lit by the late great cinematographer (and frequent Stanley Kubrick collaborator) John Alcott; besides, the whole thing was being overseen by producer Hemmings himself. So, where did the film go wrong? Well, for starters, the central mystery itself is not very interesting: the neglected wife of brooding Donald Sutherland – the No. 1 hit-man for an enigmatic espionage organization – is forever threatening to leave him and does exactly that at the very start of the film; unfortunately, while Sutherland is very good in his role and literally the best thing in it, the actress playing his wife (Francine Racette) is as stiff and unappealing as one of her husband's handiwork. This fact renders the knowledge that Racette is none other than Sutherland's own wife in real life as well almost impossible to believe, since this is hardly borne by their interaction here – least of all during a fragmentary sex scene that ludicrously apes Nicolas Roeg's DON'T LOOK NOW (1973) which, of course, also starred Sutherland! Actually, I had seen Racette act previously in two notable films – Dario Argento's FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET (1971) and Joseph Losey's MR. KLEIN (1976) – but I can't really say if her efforts were any better there. For the record, THE DISAPPEARANCE proved to be Racette's penultimate film before retiring to raise her three children with Sutherland. Thankfully, although most of them are practically extended cameos, the supporting cast – of whom, I thought, John Hurt comes off best – does keep one watching…but, again, the utterly predictable double surprise ending closes the film with a whimper instead of a bang. Equally to blame for the film's ultimate failure is Stuart Cooper whose direction is pretentious to a fault and, unsurprisingly, he too faded exclusively into TV-movie limbo soon after; for what it's worth, many years ago I did get to watch two of his TV ventures – A.D. (1985) and THE FORTUNATE PILGRIM (1988) – both of which were large-scale productions. Having said that, screenwriter Mayersberg is himself well-known for his non-linear scripts but the would-be audacious time-jumping techniques abused here merely attempt to imbue an obscure and thin plot with some elusive sense of significance; incidentally, even if the 88-minute version I watched was 12 minutes short of the original, I doubt that the missing footage would made things any clearer! Unfortunately for the viewer, Stuart Cooper is no visual stylist like Nicolas Roeg, much less a master film-maker in the league of Alain Resnais! Besides, given the structure and themes of the film, at times I couldn't help but unfavorably compare it to John Boorman's vastly superior POINT BLANK (1967)...

The good: excellent cast of actors. I mean these actors were the creme de la creme during the seventies and eighties and even beyond. And we get to see some excellent acting performances. This is an ACTOR'S movie! The photography is of high quality as well, with many still shots without any words, that reveal the hand of a master at work. Any bad? Unfortunately this movie is bogged down by ENDLESS flashbacks, that got on my nerves after half an hour. I get it, this story is like a puzzle and what better way of slowly revealing the plot than by using flashbacks. BUT there is a limit on how many flashbacks I can see, before I get annoyed by them. Still worth a watch for the Donald Sutherland fans, because he gives one of his best performances.

source: The Disappearance