Auto Focus

Let's face it: Bob Crane was a lightweight actor, whose one-note portrayal of Col. Hogan in the unlikeliest sitcom hit of the 60s made him a household name. Personally, I never understood the appeal of either "Hogan's Heroes" or its star.

Greg Kinnear taps into Bob Crane, though, from the first frame.

The viewer learns that the pre-Hogan Crane was an affable, lovable kind of guy whose LA radio show had a big following. His agent sees him as a combination of Jack Lemmon and Jack Benny, a potential star of fluffy sex comedies with a benign sort of sex appeal and a knack for snappy one-liners All of that was a vast overestimation of Crane's talents.

Crane reveled in the fame that "Hogan" brought him, but he seems never to have taken a long view of his career. When the show ended he was left rudderless and idle, having slowly cut the ties that bound him to ordinary life -- his work, a stable home life, and his religious faith.

While he coasted, Crane took advantage of the easy, cynical charm he conveyed on screen to lure women. By the dozen. I think he probably enjoyed being the least likely man in Hollywood to skulk strip clubs looking for prey, and to devote thousands of yards of videotape to his exploits with them. But his naivete is telling: Crane allows himself to be led into a netherworld by John Carpenter, (Willem Dafoe), who teaches him that putting sex on film is more fun than having it. And there is a brief scene where Crane meets a dominatrix and reveals himself as not quite savvy enough to play this game to win.

Addictions tend to claim those who are on the way up or the way down. Even before Peg Entwistle famously jumped off the Hollywoodland sign in 1922, there have been scores of aspirants to fame or has-beens whose compulsions have killed them, leaving their work on screen the least compelling,least-remembered part of their lives.

Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear) is a radio DJ in Hollywood looking for acting work. In 1965, he gets an offer for an unconventional project. It's a comedy in a Nazi POW camp. Hogan's Heroes becomes a big hit. He befriends home video salesman John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe) in a strip club. Unlike his public wholesome image, his interests in strippers, sex, and home video are heightened by Carpenter and his state-of-the-art cameras. It's a toxic friendship of easy women, sexual proclivity, and hidden videos. In 1970, he divorces his wife Anne (Rita Wilson) and marries his co-star Sigrid Valdis, real name Patricia Olson (Maria Bello). Crane and Carpenter's friendship based on their sad common interest degenerates.

Director Paul Schrader often dives into the darker side of humanity. It's a sad portrait well delivered by Kinnear. On the other hand, the movie is not always great at delivering the danger and tension. For half of the movie, Bob Crane is not threatened with discovery. This keeps the tension low. It's got a chipper tone which is weird. It would have been nice to speed up the first half. It takes too long to get to his downfall. Willem Dafoe is equally strong and necessary for this movie to work. There is interesting work here but this should be more intense.

After a while, I really did get more of what director Paul Schrader was aiming for with Auto Focus, the tale of males caught in some sort of odd damnation of both free will and morality. It's more like a drug movie, only here the drug being the opposite sex, and almost a singularly male ego-trip, instead of common narcotics. But it's also a very fine character study where the idea of character is taken into consideration, of how much one can seem a certain way, but then be stuck in with flaws and insecurities and, ultimately, temptation. The last of which is what Schrader puts into focus early on, but then after a while when temptation is gone, the film becomes a direct plunge into complete debauchery. And appropriately, like with all addicts, for a while nothing seems wrong at all about all of this.

Greg Kinnear is definitely in one of his best parts here, as he plays someone who is an actor who keeps his actor-like charms off the set as well. In Hollywood, away from the confines of Connecticut, his Bob Crane lands the lead on Hogan's heroes, but can't resist the first temptations of the night-life. This comes, in an introductory way and then throughout as a tag-along/counterpart, with John Carpenter (not the director, played with the best match by Willem Dafoe of being a creep and alluring at times), who shows him the ropes and hooks him up with video equipment. But as Crane goes deeper into his sexual drives, divorces, marries again and divorces again, his acting career and his livelihood seem to slip away. The themes of being perversely the 'All-American Male' are accentuated by Kinnear's Crane in voice-over as he talks about the unbridled joys of sex, and in an interview with a Christian publication he says 'I don't...make waves'. By the last third of his story, however, into the rot of the 70s, he's lost touch with the reality of his pleasures- or rather necessities.

Auto Focus isn't at times an easy movie to sit through; it's even cringe-worthy in a couple of scenes (notably for me was when he guest stars on a celebrity cooking show, only to keep on his sexually-driven side with audience members). Then there are other scenes (i.e. 'you have fingers up you-know-where', and the genital enhancement) where male masculinity is questioned, and in very peculiar ways between Crane and Carpenter; Crane is homophobic, but then what exactly is Carpenter's function? More than anything, less than being a friend, he becomes a kind of unintentional pusher, where the draw of going out on the town becomes a crux for both of the men. What's just as fascinating then is how Schrader aligns this with his style- the first half is mostly very slick and professional-looking, almost like an HBO bio-pic or something. But then as the characters lose a grip on everything except themselves, there's a hand-held, distorted view to everything. There's lots of nudity and on-screen sex (some blurred out, likely by MPAA request), yet Schrader gets something more shocking, in the mind at least, as Carpenter almost becomes the antagonist in a way as the story winds down (the last phone call marks this most).

Auto Focus has the ideal of the usual biographical drama of a somebody in Hollywood who soon loses himself to becoming a nobody, but there's plenty under the surface that makes it more intriguing. Crane's two sides to his persona- the celebrity one, and the personal 'lifestyle' one- become one and the same after a while, Kinnear being able to make such a near-irredeemable person somewhat sympathetic (or at the least very watchable). And Carpenter's more truthful, emotional, and scary turn is made palatable by Dafoe's equally nuanced performance. It's not great, but it's a near-classic of the tale-of-such-and-such-star when so many don't take in what's deeper into account. A-

Wow, is Greg Kinnear nothing short of amazing in this film or what! An incredible performance as Bob Crane, seriously virtuoso. When, towards the end, he visits his agent and is all messed up, and starts saying "sex is normal. I'm normal" - Kinnear reaches a pinnacle in his young film acting career. I have always felt that actors ascend to the next level of craft and stardom when they breakthrough with a biographical role; see - Denzel Washington in Malcom X, Ben Kingsley in Ghandi, Robert Downey Jr in Chaplin, Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. And now Greg Kinnear has made that leap with Auto Focus, a well-crafted and seductive film by Paul Schrader, Hollywood's last bastion of non-sugar coated filmmakers. Basically the story of Hollywood's most intriguing unsolved murder, Auto Focus also pulls back the curtain on "good guy" Bob Crane's lecherous and painfully discombobulated private and secret life. What is also amazing about this film is how is records the birth of video and the VCR. Bob Crane turns out to be one of the pioneer "users" of this technology. When we see or hear video, video cameras, or VCRs, we probably automatically think of home movies, recording episodes of Star Trek, or the Star Wars prequels' lack of cinematic quality. When Bob Crane heard about video cameras and VCRs, he automatically thought of sex. Though the film makes no mention of it, it is quite prophetic in showing us how the technology of video created hard-core pornography and turned it into a billion dollar industry. If you think about it, nothing has profited more from video than porno, and nothing ever relied so dearly on video like porno. Bob Crane instinctively felt this, though he never was a pornographer, so to speak; he knew that sex and video can go hand in hand. Unfortunately, this was also his downfall. Like most Paul Schrader writ or directed films, by the end you get that queasy feeling, the feeling you get at the end of Goodfellas, the feeling of sadness that this great ride is over and the feeling of emptiness and loss that all that greatness came crashing down. Bob Crane's descent into moral madness can be sickening, especially when juxtaposed with Hogan's Heroes. I almost felt the desire to shower, to cleanse myself after viewing this film. I love movies that produce reactions from me, movies that linger for days. This is one of them.

As anyone who is reading this knows, this was the story of TV's Bob Crane, star of "Hogan's Heroes," a popular show in the 1960s. The story of Crane, the one that makes him a subject of a major motion picture of his life, are two things: 1 - the good-guy TV hero was, behind the scenes, a huge sex addict; 2 - he was murdered, with no one ever convicted of the crime. To this day, it is still unsolved.

The movie hints very strongly that the killer was Bob Carpenter, played here by Willem Dafoe. Carpenter was a close friend of Crane's. Greg Kinnear does a credible job of portraying the television star.

However, the part about Crane's murder is only dealt with in the final minutes of the film! That was very disappointing and I was hoping to find out something or at least be given more information. They just kind tacked this on the end of the film.

Most of the film was about Crane's and Carpenter's escapades with women.....lots of women, beautiful and big-chested women, which you see in abundance in this film. Dafoe is the sleazy friend who introduces Crane to the beginning of the VCR age. That led to a whole bunch of sex-on-film and really whetted Crane's big sexual appetite.

Anyway, for people who watched "Hogan's Heroes," and there were plenty, this is a bio of him and perhaps, for those who know nothing about his death, who killed him.