Os Visitantes

Untypical material for Kazan: this curiously amateurish amalgam of ACT OF VIOLENCE (1948) and THE DESPERATE HOURS (1955), updated for the Vietnam era, is unworthy of the director's unquestionable talent (despite being written by his own son!) and emerges as a pointless talking marathon - in which the dialogue is muffled most of the time anyway, because of poor sound recording!

Patricia Joyce comes off best from the hand-picked cast, which includes James Woods' debut role as the wimpish hero(!) and Steve Railsback as one of his two revenge-seeking war buddies; these actors must have thought that they had it made when they were chosen by Award-winning director Kazan (who had, after all, virtually discovered Marlon Brando, James Dean and Warren Beatty) to feature in his next movie but, unfortunately for them, THE VISITORS sank without trace despite being an official entry in that year's Cannes Film Festival!

While the film could easily have turned into a nasty shocker in the vein of THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972) - which might even have been preferable in the long run - the story just meanders on towards a lame and inconclusive ending. At least, the film's snowy setting provides a nice pictorial backdrop...

Slow and creepy, The Visitors is a very low budget story about two Army buddies, newly released from the stockade after serving their terms for rape, who drop in on the comrade responsible for their conviction. Very slow, but rewarding, and definitely worth a look as an unsung classic of 70s cinema.

I recently saw this obscure film on cable and was not ready for the disturbance it set in me afterwards. It is a basic retelling of many story's we've seen before, (old army buddies come back after the war to seek redemption on the friend that did them wrong) but it was a bit of a stand out in the it has a very unexpected, shocking ending. It explores the violence and the tension of the situation well, moving slowly and methodically, which works for a while but then falls short, as you have to say "enough all ready" and get on with it.

Decent performance by a young James Woods and also by Steve Railsback in his first film (who later goes on to star if the cult classic "Life Force". All and all, if you can get past the amateurish production value, an OK exploration of violence and invasion that just takes forever to get going. If you liked Michael Haneke's "Funny Games" (though I particularly didn't) I would recommend this film.

If you look at this in terms of Kazan's career and the way he puts his own experience in every film (even though I'm sure he'd rather not, but he just can't help himself), this is a masterpiece. If you look at it in terms of commercial cinema, you might describe it as an interesting failure. (Leonard Maltin's book describes it as a BOMB.) All I know is that I was on the edge of my seat screaming at the television, it must have had something going for it.

The filming has a "Night of the Living Dead" kind of quality, and is just as harrowing. I wish I didn't relate to Kazan's misanthropic view of humanity, but I do. If you think you're an expert on what makes a good movie, skip this, it's not for you. If you're interested in looking at the dark and fascinating side of people who do evil things, don't miss it. A depressing but great movie. At least someone knows enough about this stuff to put it in a film; the bad part is when we have to live through it.

This Kazan family project shot at their own home was poorly received at the time, no doubt because no one was ready for a bleakly negative fictional portrait of returning Vietnam vets yet, when the war was still going on. (Hollywood wouldn't really start dealing with the war until a few years after it was over, with "Coming Home," "Deer Hunter," "Hamburger Hill," "Boys From Company C" and other films starting around 1978.) But now it's stripped-down unpleasantness can be appreciated as potent, and adventuresome in its low-budget indie style production (with then-unknown actors) coming from such a fabled mainstream filmmaker.

There's a very long buildup that is successfully tense, as veteran James Woods' old army "buddies" (Steve Railsback, Chico Martinez) turn up uninvited at his rural home, or rather the house of his well-off writer father-in-law (Patrick McVey), who's letting his daughter (Patricia Joyce) live there with Woods and their baby son. It's a tense reunion, because Woods had testified against his fellow soldiers after they'd abducted, raped and killed a young Vietnamese woman, and the visitors just finished a prison stint as a result. It's made worse by the father-in-law, a blowhard who quickly gets drunk, "bonding" with the newcomers at the expense of the son-in-law he thinks is a "damn hippie" or something.

Could could see this as a sort of sequel to "Casualties of War," even if that movie was made 16 years later, in that both were loosely based on the same real-life incident, and this film takes place after the events of "War"-when the perps had been convicted, and Sean Penn's glint-eyed sergeant has promised some kind of revenge against Michael J. Fox's "squealer." Penn is really chilling in that film, and so is Railsback here as basically the same character, though he also gets some dialogue that provides some psychological depth-the movie isn't black & white in moral terms, painting the visitors as simple villains. All the actors here are very good, and every character (except the baby of course) is allowed a degree of weakness or flaw that keeps its dynamics from becoming that of a crude home-invasion-style thriller.

Basically it's a "nothing happening" movie for most of its runtime, but all the while gradually pulling the tension tighter and tighter until it seems inevitable that the worst will happen. Probably the reason "The Visitors" was so disliked at the time wasn't just because it was unpleasant politically and otherwise, but because when the worst does happen, it's not cathartic-it just rubs in the general air of no-win negativity--a rub-your-face-in-it quality underlined by the lack of any musical scoring whatsoever. American movies had mostly been dealing with Vietnam war guilt in roundabout ways via revisionist westerns ("Soldier Blue," "Little Big Man"), counterculture dramas ("Billy Jack") and so forth, but this was a discomfitingly more direct statement. Not sure if it's a great movie, but it's certainly an underrated one that reflects the uneasy mood of its time as well as any.