On Screenpix

Vaguely adapted from the novel The 13th Man (1977) by Murray Teigh Bloom

Unfortunately, the director spends too much time doing homages to Hitchcock
movies -- Vertigo, The Birds, Psycho, Dial "M" for Murder, To Catch a Thief,
and North by Northwest -- that the plot is left to wander and there isn't
enough suspense.

A movie reviewer wrote, "No other leading actor can create so much
tension out of such modest material."

The backstory is told as a dream remembered by Harry Hannan (Roy Scheider)
to his psychiatrist; he's been an in patient for close to four months. He's
a spook just across the border in Mexico who arrived a few days early to
meet a contact. His wife Dorothy (Sandy McLeod), taking some time off,
travels with him. They're having a romantic dinner in a cantina when he
spots the contact who has brought several armed men with him. He pushes
his wife to the floor but she's already taken a bullet; she dies.

The constant camera jostling and refocusing is annoying as fuck.

Harry gets out of hospital and sees his government contact. He doesn't
get the self-destructing tape recorder. He gets a tube of lipstick meant
for a young girl. But the note is left blank. His loving boss Eckart
(Christopher Walken) isn't welcoming him back and doesn't think he's fit
for work.

He's paranoid, but people are literally following him. His brother in
law, also a work colleague Dave Quittle (Charles Napier, all-purpose
villain) hates his guts, blaming him for Dorothy's death and reminding
him he opposed the marriage. But Dorothy hadn't been at the restaurant
while Harry was on assignment. The ambush was days before the meeting
with the contact.

Eckart asked Quittle to assess Harry's mental state, not that Quittle is
biased or anything. Quittle is ordered to kill Harry.

Meanwhile, Harry returns to his apartment, actually owned by his agency,
to find they've given an indefinite rental Ellie (Janet Margolin), a
doctoral candidate in anthropology at Princeton, who is researching at
American Museum of Natural History.

She gives him a note. He thinks it's written in Greek, but she tells him
it's in Hebrew she cannot read.

Janet Margolin was an actress I always liked. She never had a big career
but she was often a guest star on a tv drama and did both comedy and
dramatic movies. The only tv series I can remember her in as main cast
was Lannigan's Rabbi, killed after a pilot and four episodes. She is not
the sister of Stuart Margolin, although both were in the pilot. She died
at age 50, ovarian cancer.

I found her looks appealing but she wasn't extremely beautiful. There is
a cocktail scene later in the movie and she's wearing a flattering red
dress and looks very attractive indeed.

He shows the note to a rabbi who tells him it's actually Aramaic written
in the Hebrew alphabet. It says "Avenger of blood", and it's something
about justified revenge killings that must be carried out in a
proscribed manner as the biblical character Goel had. Or I guess Goel is
more of a job of a relative who obtains redemption for a murder. It's in
Leviticus and other books.

After Harry leaves, the rabbi calls somebody...

Harry tries to convince Ellie to leave and gives her cash for a hotel
and promises to give her more cash to find another rental apartment. He
tells Ellie people are trying to murder him and doesn't want her to get
killed.

She won't leave. Why?

She convinces Harry to see her friend Richard Peabody (a very blond John
Glover) at Princeton. On the train, Harry notices Quittle and an old man
following them. Ellie tells him a story about her grandmother, brought
to America as a white slave...

Peabody has a collection of these notes. All the men who had received
them died accidentally shortly after receiving them; Peabody concludes
it's murder. Frustrated Harry cannot see how he's connected to these
men.

Harry is lured into a trap; this is the belltower scene. Of course it's
Quittle. For no reason that makes any sense, Quittle is trying to get
Harry to follow him to the top of the tower. Harry simply throws the
circuit breaker switch to turn on the bells. In the cacaphony, Quittle
cannot keep his balance and falls. We get an extended shot of gulls in
the tower but the movie doesn't have the budget to train them to attack.

The old man is at the body!

His name is Sam (Sam Levene). Levene is an old actor from Broadway,
movies going back to the '30s, and some radio and tv. Sam tells Harry
that he's part of a committee trying to stop the murders.

Harry has been getting a ZM clue in several places. They are led to a
location that has the ZM mark. You are required to turn off your brain
entirely with the mystery in the script since none of it works.

Now, this absolutely cracked me up. ZM is a reference to a business
association of... brothel owners! This used to be big business. ZM was
sort of a legitimate front, and took care of bribes. Sam thinks his
grandfather owned a number of brothels and there were actually a dozen
or more in the business association.

They sort of figure out the connection among the murdered men. All are
grandsons of the brothel owners in the business association.

Meanwhile, we see Ellie (using another name, I guess her grandmother's)
putting on more makeup than she's worn in all her other movies. She's
wearing slutty lingerie and playing a prostitute. We get the reveal that
she's the murderer, and kills Bernie Meckler (one of the ZM grandsons)
by drowning him in a bathtub.

Peabody has been set up as the red herring but the script doesn't make
it work at all. They decide to break into his office at Princeton but
Harry is in the office next door, Ellie's, and finds she's been
researching the men of ZM and their decendants. She has assembled
photographs of the prostitutes, likely shown to clients to choose from,
and sees a partial nude of a woman who looks exactly like Ellie, which
must be her grandmother.

Ellie is enacting revenge REVENGE upon the grandsons of the men who were
involved in human trafficking and prostitution.

No one ends up searching Peabody's office at all and he returns,
slamming the door in Sam's face and never noticing that Harry is
searching the office next door.

Back in the apartment, Harry interrupts Ellie's shower a la Psycho, then
starts making love to a reluctant Ellie, who considers killing him with
a scissors she had just been using a la Dial "M" for Murder, and finally,
she decides to join in the lovemaking.

He then gets her to head to Niagra Falls, and we get a chase through the
very long hallways in the hydro plant and see tours of the falls. In their
confrontation, Ellie tries to convince Harry that she loves him but Harry
intends to turn her in. There's a scene in which she's hanging off a ledge,
reminiscent of both North by Northwest and To Catch a Thief. Harry grabs
her but she isn't exactly cooperating and falls to her death.

Scheider is always great, and he's treating this movie like it's highly
suspenseful, but the script lets him down and the director clearly
doesn't give a shit about making suspense. Imitating Hitchcock doesn't
make you Hitchcock.

Glover and Napier and Walken make a good supporting cast but don't have
much to do. Miss Margolin does a number of nude scenes throughout the
movie. It never occurred to me she'd ever done nude scenes, but it's the
'70s and it was perfectly acceptable for actresses to do nude scenes.
Her breasts were quite attractive.

The script's biggest let down is that there's simply no reason for Ellie
to be in the movie, so when it's revealed that she's the murderer, it's
exactly what the audience anticipated.

I forgot to mention the Miklos Rozsa score. It sounds like a '50s movie
score. In fact, he's trying to sound like Bernard Hermann.

Rozsa had scored Spellbound (1945); Hitchcock hated the score.