THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND DIRECTED BY SAM PECKINPAH ANCHOR BAY A FRIEND AND ...

WEEKEND DIRECTED BY SAM PECKINPAH ANCHOR BAY

A FRIEND AND I saw The Osterman Weekend during its initial run in 1983. As the closing credits rolled, we looked at each other and said, "What the fuck was that?"

The movie, based on Robert Ludlum's novel, seemed to involve the CIA, spies and a bunch of people hanging out at Rutger Hauer's place. There were some boobs and some violence, but it was an incoherent, baffling mess.

There were a lot of things we didn't know at the time. For instance, we didn't know it was supposed to be Peckinpah's comeback film. We also didn't know it would be his last. We didn't know about his battle with the producers over the final cut. We didn't know about the free-flowing drugs on the set. All we knew was that it made no sense.

Looking at the film 20 years later (knowing what I know), I'm inclined to be more charitable.

Rutger Hauer plays a political talk show host preparing for an annual reunion with three college buddies—Craig T. Nelson, Dennis Hopper and Chris Sarandon. Days before they arrive, he's approached by the CIA (Burt Lancaster and John Hurt) who tell him his friends are KGB spies, and that it's his job to turn one of them during the upcoming weekend. What's at stake involves an evil Soviet plot known as "Omega," which is never explained.

In terms of plot, let's leave it at that.

Peckinpah was clearly up to some very interesting things. Osterman is the first film I'm aware of that explores in depth the power and treachery of surveillance technology. Much of what you see on the screen is what someone in the film is seeing on a video monitor. At heart, it's a film about paranoia (something Peckinpah understood very well).

The plot still becomes incoherent in the last 20 minutes, but the camerawork is vibrant, the acting solid and, in spite of its Cold War trappings, the issues the film addresses are more relevant today than they were 20 years ago.

Anchor Bay's two-disc set includes a lengthy featurette that goes some way toward explaining what went wrong with the film, and extensive liner notes that fill in quite a few of the gaps. For Peckinpah nuts, the real draw will be the collection of deleted, alternate and extended scenes from the director's original rough cut—from the hallucinatory original opening to the channel-changer conclusion. The snippets are undeniably very rough, but it's clear to see that, even though his film was hardly a lost masterpiece, it was much more interesting than the one that was released.