BEFORE: Treat Williams carries over from "Howl". I wish I could have followed the David Strathairn link to "Nomadland", but my linking chain seems to have other ideas. Now, I'm not sure when exactly I'm going to get around to watching last year's Best Picture Oscar winner, but it's on the list, so I'll get there somehow, I have to believe that. Today's film is the second oldest one taking up space on my DVR, I recorded it in back in May of 2019, and I desperately need to free up some space. So that kind of takes priority for me - look, "Nomadland" is always going to be there - it's on Hulu now and it's probably going to be on cable some time in the future, and maybe by then it will be more linkable. If not, then I have the option of watching it first thing next year, like I did with "Parasite" this year. We'll see, I guess.
And Happy Birthday to both Peter Dinklage AND Shia LaBoeuf, neither one is in today's movie but they've both starred in FOUR of my movies so far this year...
THE PLOT: A speculation on the fate of the famous hijacker, who parachuted with his ransom and disappeared into the mountains, has Cooper following a meticulous plan to disappear into anonymity despite the best efforts of a dogged insurance agent.
AFTER: I've just bounced back almost 40 years into the past, to a film released in 1981. Tomorrow I'll dip back even further, but then I'll spring back to a film from 2019 - thank God for actors with very long careers, like Treat Williams, Robert Duvall and Donald Sutherland. They've made what I've chosen to do possible. But now I'm wondering if I've made the right move by scheduling this film today - I could have dropped it, and saved it for late September, as it's one of the few links (through Ed Flanders) to the movie I want to kick off October with. It also could have allowed me to squeeze in one other horror movie, "The Children of the Corn". So watching this one today leaves me with just one actor that will take me where I want to be on October 1, and that's Fred Willard. He's in three other movies on my list, so I've at least still got a chance to get there, and in several ways - but hey, the watchlist is always changing, and the hope of proper linking always springs eternal.
But this is a strange film, that's for sure. In 1981, nobody knew for sure who the elusive D.B. Cooper really was, or even if that was really his name, so bereft of any hardcore evidence, somebody wrote a novel that was extremely speculative, and then some other somebodies decided to turn that into a movie, because hey, maybe this is really what happened, only it wasn't. Was the public so desperate with Cooper-Mania that they'd spend their money on seeing a film that didn't even have one toe in the waters of reality? There's a documentary on my list now about the whole D.B. Cooper mystery, and I can't link to it now, but maybe I can get to it some time in the future and really learned what happened - or do we still not know?
Either way, it seems very irresponsible to have released this film in 1981 without any kind of legal disclaimer saying that it's a total work of fiction. Isn't that what got James Frey in trouble, when he wrote "A Million Little Pieces" and claimed it was all true? Universal Pictures fell just short of admitting this story was all B.S. by offering a million-dollar reward at the time for anyone who could provide information that would lead to the arrest of the real D.B. Cooper, only nobody ever claimed it.
According to this film (and only to this film, I suspect), Cooper was really a Vietnam veteran named Jim Meade, somebody who could plan a mid-air heist and also have the wherewithal and the resources to parachute into Washington State right at the start of hunting season, and easily make his way to a place where he had stashed disguises and hunting gear, so that he could blend right in and escape the forest on a jeep with a fresh deer carcass. However, he didn't plan on his old Army sergeant Bill Gruen figuring out his plan in advance somehow, and hiring himself out to the insurance company that was responsible for covering the loss of the stolen money.
I'm sorry, but even as a fictional story this is all quite far-fetched, to say the least. So many questions remain unasked and therefore unanswered, like how did Gruen know about the heist in advance, which was really the only way he could have been there when the plane landed at the airport? Then we've got the history of rivalry between these two fictional men, which stretches back to their boot camp days, and now 10 or 12 years later, they're up against each other again? This reminds me of "The Hunted", another film where the two leads have such a long history together that they each know how the other one thinks, but there are SO many people in this world that it becomes, like "What are the ODDS against this taking place?"
And then from Washington state there's this cross-country trek that's a constant pattern of "Cooper gets away, Gruen catches up, Cooper gets away again, Gruen catches up again" and before long, we're outside Tucson, Arizona in an aircraft salvage yard - was Cooper planning to live there with his girlfriend inside a fuselage? What happened to their plan to go live on a tropical island? Then it's a seemingly endless parade of stolen cars, hijacked aircraft, broken-down pick-up trucks.
There's also another interested party, Remson, played by Paul Gleason, most famous for portraying the high-school principal in "The Breakfast Club" - he functions as the comic relief here, always showing up to get the drop on either Meade or Gruen, but then losing the upper hand and ending up locked in a car trunk or covered in tires somehow. That's all very weird, he's a weird character who screws everything up in weird ways and honestly I'm not sure why his character even exists, other than as a time-filler. Come to think of it, the whole chase sequence across several states is almost nothing BUT time-fillers.
NITPICK POINT: if Cooper started in Washington state and needed to disappear, why on earth would he head for Mexico when Canada was RIGHT THERE, with an unprotected border? Remember those inmates that escaped from Dannemora Prison in upstate New York? They had the same idea, I guess, that agents would be patrolling the Canadian border, looking for them, so better to do the unexpected, and Mexico's just a quick 2,000 miles away...it makes sense, but it also doesn't.
I could continue with a whole bunch of N.P.'s, I'm sure, but now I'm thinking that I DON'T want to learn too much about the real D.B. Cooper case, because there is that documentary I can watch. But I just want to quickly confirm that although the case is considered inactive by the FBI after a 45-year investigation, no conclusive evidence about the hijacker's fate or real name has ever surfaced. A boy discovered a pile of banknotes hidden along the Columbia River in 1980, but that's it. So I'm left with the question over why this film exists in this form in the first place...
Also starring Robert Duvall (last seen in "Widows"), Kathryn Harrold (last seen in "Into the Night"), Ed Flanders (last seen in "MacArthur"), Paul Gleason (last seen in "She's Having a Baby"), R.G. Armstrong (last seen in "Reds"), Nicolas Coster (ditto), Dorothy Fielding, Cooper Huckabee (last seen in "Pee-Wee's Big Holiday"), Howard K. Smith (last seen in "Nashville"), Christopher Curry (last seen in "Sully"), Ramon Chavez, Sanford Gibbons (last seen in "Tombstone"), Pat Ast.
RATING: 4 out of 10 hunting rifles
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