Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #86 The Osterman Weekend (1983)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like two kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m nearly done with my patron-funded deep dive into the works of Sam Peckinpah, and I’ve just begun a project on the movies of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie.
I love this column because it allows me to directly engage with readers and patrons in a very satisfying manner but also because in the three years that I have devoted the overwhelming majority of my time and energy and passion into this labor of love it is literally the only thing I’ve tried that has brought in income and slowed the never-ending stream of deletions.
In a very real way, Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 keeps this site in business and operating at peak efficiency. That’s why I’m absolutely terrified that Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 pledges have dried up more or less completely as of late and there’s nothing to take its place.
In an attempt to remind y’all that this option exists, and also that the site’s future depends upon it I’m going to try to churn out these bad boys more regularly while simultaneously pursuing The Travolta/Cage Project and 2020: The Year YOU Control Nathan Rabin and writing all of the bonus material for an extended version of the Weird Accordion to Al book due out in just a few short months.
Will I be able to pull it off? I must. I have no choice and it sure does help that I love the work itself, even if I wish there did not have to be quite so much of it. I honestly can’t tell you the last time I watched a movie I did not write about.
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the patron-funded deep dive into the filmography of Sam Peckinpah, for example, even when exploring the master’s lesser films, like his little-loved 1983 Robert Ludlum adaptation The Osterman Weekend.
Peckinpah’s first film in five years, since 1978’s Convoy, perversely the top-grossing film of his career, is one of a number of projects he disowned, citing producer interference and a novel and screenplay he apparently hated.
Then again, Bloody Sam hated a lot of things. He was filled with rage towards the world and its inhabitants, particularly women, and that anger and nihilism informed his outlaw oeuvre on a bone-deep level.
The Osterman Weekend opens with an incongruous wave of smooth jazz followed by a video of Lawrence Fassett (John Hurt) enjoying some soft-core sex with his improbably gorgeous wife.
When the veteran agent goes to the bathroom to shower his wife masturbates feverishly and erotically in a way that feels way too sexual for a macho adaptation of an airport espionage novel.
The Osterman Weekend is a thriller Peckinpah apparently wanted audiences to be able to masturbate to vigorously and often if its regular bursts of gratuitous sex and nudity are any indication.
Of course this wouldn’t be a Peckinpah movie if the sex wasn’t accompanied by violence so while her husband is in the bathroom goons brutally murder the woman before she can experience the magic of orgasm.
This turns out to be the inciting incident for the film although that is not apparent until deep into a third act that gets more ridiculous and implausible and less satisfying by the minute. This is a Ludlam adaptation about the confusing world of Cold War espionage so there are twists upon twists upon twists, many of them insultingly nonsensical.
In his quest to find his wife’s killers, Lawrence tells CIA director Maxwell Danforth (Burt Lancaster) that he’s uncovered a mysterious Soviet spy cell operating in the United States called Omega. The supremely capable Lawrence tells his big boss that he thinks he can potentially turn some of Omega’s agents if he can recruit John Tanner (Rutger Hauer), a hotshot, Mike Wallace-like investigator journalist whose college buddies all seem to have become Soviet agents in middle age.
John’s old pals include Craig T. Nelson as the film’s namesake, Bernard Osterman, a fellow television hotshot with a handlebar mustache so ostentatious and un-Coach-like that it proves a consistent, persistent distraction throughout much of the film.
Osterman describes himself as a “nihilistic anarchist who lives on residuals.” At first Nelson seems profoundly miscast as a verbose, paranoid Los Angeles creative type with a dark side and a desperate need for cash but Nelson is ultimately a dark-humored delight.
Then there’s Dennis Hopper as a doctor with a wife with a “nose problem” as well as a problem keeping her clothes on; she’s a cocaine addict who can always be counted upon to shed her clothing and sexually proposition any many she encounters. There aren’t many women in The Osterman Weekend but you better believe they’re either naked, insane, coked-up or confidently wielding a crossbow.
Chris Sarandon rounds out the cast as the final old college friend to ostensibly betray his country for the sake of a fat payday from the Russians.
Hauer, fresh off his international star-making turn in Blade Runner is a relative straight shooter, a Progressive muckraker who believes in our country’s patriotic ideals, not the shadowy machinations of its secret power-brokers. Besides, what red-blooded American wouldn’t leap at the opportunity to wipe out Soviet interference in their friend group?
Otherwise the conflict in The Osterman Weekend is less between good and bad, American and Soviet, than between bad and even worse, or secretly bad versus secretly good, or at least non-traitorous.
The Osterman Weekend is the closest Peckinpah came to making a Brian De Palma movie. It’s a sleaze and sex-saturated thriller steeped in multiple layers of voyeurism. The house where everything goes down is filled with video cameras affording the sinister spooks of our nation’s sneakiest, most secretive governmental organizations a God’s Eye View on everything that transpires, including, of course, all of the utterly unnecessary yet strangely essential fucking.
The Osterman Weekend once again finds Peckinpah exploring a community of violent and arrogant men. The difference is that it is damn near impossible to buy the film’s central quartet as acquaintances, let alone longtime friends. Then again, people do have a way of growing apart after college, although it is rare for “growing apart” to also involve “everyone else possibly becoming a Commie spy.”
In the third act things take a turn. A shadowy figure who seems like he could very well be a rage-filled renegade out for revenge against a system that has betrayed him in the most painful, agonizingly personal way possible DOES indeed turn out to be a rage-filled renegade out for revenge.
Yet I found The Osterman Weekend surprisingly diverting given its reputation as a faint whiff of a movie that ended Peckinpah’s all-time great career with a whimper. But I found it mildly engaging on the level of a beach read or something you might catch on basic cable on a weekend afternoon.
Even at his worst, most minor and least essential Peckinpah was seldom anything less than watchable. Peckinpah might have been slumming adapting someone like Ludlam but even if he was neither challenged nor particularly engaged by the convoluted story he was telling, his gifts as a storyteller, stylist and director of actors were apparent.
But The Osterman Weekend is also the kind of movie that makes less and less the more you think about it, that cannot hold up to any scrutiny, plot-wise, or it turns to dust. It depicts a shadowy, fatalistic world where furtive figures working behind the scenes kill without remorse and the game is hopelessly rigged by people concerned only with power and then concludes with the good guys winning in a high-stakes public gambit.
The Osterman Weekend was the end of the road for Peckinpah as a film director but it is not the end of our exploration into the man’s works. I still have to do Cross of Iron and Convoy and I would be lying if I said I was not overjoyed at the prospect of re-visiting Convoy despite knowing damn well that it is not a good movie, or even a particularly fun or enjoyable one.
I mean, c’mon, it’s a Peckinpah movie based on a novelty CB trucking song! How can that be anything less than amazing? I mean, sure, I know EXACTLY how that can be decidedly less than amazing but I’ve decided to live in a place of delusional hope because, Christ, sometimes you need it just to get through the day.
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