Les Visiteurs

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...

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.

Really wanted to like 'The Visitors' so much more. Am a great admirer of Elia Kazan, really like to love almost all his films (his best work being iconic classics and even lesser work is watchable) and deeply respect his directing of actors, of which he is rightly considered one of the best at and it is obvious in almost all his films. Also have often gotten a lot of fun out of James Woods', in his debut here, ability to steal every scene he is in in most of his films, regardless of my negative feelings of him as a person he is always a lot of fun to watch.

'The Visitors' just didn't do it for me, though it does have its moments. It is Kazan's penultimate film and is the only one to actually properly not feel like it was directed by him, this could easily have passed for being mistaken for a film from somebody else entirely. The subject was really intriguing and difficult and could have made for a hard-hitting and emotional experience, but not near enough is done with it despite the promising start. Being somebody that dislikes concept-wastes, that did frustrate me. As far as Kazan's work goes, 'The Visitors' to me is one of his worst.

As said, 'The Visitors' has good points. The scenery is both beautiful and unforgiving, which suited the subject brilliantly. The music is suitably ominous, again fitting. The film starts off very suspensefully and intriguingly, and has moments that are quite shocking. The best scenes are actually the ones that are the hardest to watch.

Scenes that will be too upsetting for some. The dog murder and the rape being the most memorable. 'The Visitors' sees Woods at his most vulnerable, subtle and touching without showing signs of inexperience, words not usually commonly associated with Woods' performances generally. Not a bad thing just to say, just an observation. Steve Railsback plays his even meatier role with steely intensity. Patricia Joyce and Patrick McVey are also very good, McVey being the most experienced of the four and that experience shows.

Kazan's usual directorial brilliance unfortunately doesn't really come through here in 'The Visitors'. Here it was like he was uninterested in the material or not at ease with it, all his other films were far more engagingly, intensely and tastefully directed, whereas this just didn't feel like a Kazan film visually or tonally. 'The Visitors' is also perhaps his least accomplished film visually, scenery aside. Despite having serious problems with 'The Sea of Grass' and from memory 'The Last Tycoon', at least they were well made, visually this was uncharacteristically amateurish work. Very sloppy and disorganised, which cannot be said about Kazan usually.

Despite the promising start, 'The Visitors' badly under-explores the great idea it has. The hard-hitting and emotion only come in spurts, most of the time it's dreary and meandering furthermore done in bad taste. The pace is at its worst interminably dull and there is far too much talk. None of it really that interesting. The story lacks atmosphere and the complex subject matter could have done with a far more pull no punches and nuanced approach, as it comes over as indifferent and bland generally apart from some good moments. There is not really that much interesting about the characters, the only character to get some development is Nickerson.

On the whole, watchable for curiosity and completest sake but not a great or good representation of Kazan. 5/10

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.

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.