The Anderson Tapes
Sometimes a film is so remarkably prescient that it doesn’t really matter that it’s not very good. Sidney Lumet’s The Anderson Tapes is a perfect case in point. It’s sloppy, poorly plotted and often ineptly acted but what it manages to do is very interesting. A couple of years before the Watergate revelations, Lumet’s imagery creates a world in which everyone is being bugged, to one extent or another. The narrative is propelled forward by taped conversations in which all the participants seem to have been caught unawares.
It’s such a powerful theme that Lumet’s inability to make anything of it seems particularly disappointing. The tapes turn out to have little relevance to the plot and only in one scene at the end does the bugging really come into its own. One suspects that the tapes are there simply to mask the fact that this is a very conventional heist movie indeed and not a particularly good one. It’s paced inconsistently so that the headlong rush of the first twenty minutes suddenly slows to a crawl - particularly disastrous since there are few twists and turns to speak of. Worse still, the characterisations are often wildly off the mark with the usually reliable Martin Balsam embarrassing himself as an ultra-camp interior designer. It’s also a weirdly tossed-off piece of filmmaking. Arthur J. Orintz’s cinematography is TV-movie flat, making little of the New York locations and Lumet’s legendary speed seems to have led to some uncorrected fluffs in the dialogue. I’m also unconvinced by the odd switches in tone towards the end, when the light-hearted comedy-thriller turns into a bleak morality tale.
But there are compensations. Three in fact. Firstly, there is Frank J. Pierson’s dialogue which, when not overdosing on the epithet “Fag!”, is often very witty indeed. Secondly, Dyan Cannon is perfect and very sexy, if underused, as the female lead. Most of all, though, there’s a commanding performance from Sean Connery as the mastermind of the heist. His natural style and charisma holds the film together and actually makes it seem like something is at stake. Virtually single-handed, he makes the film worth catching up with.