The Osterman Weekend (1983)

One of the consequences of streaming services' insatiable appetite for content is that you find yourself encountering films that you have barely given a thought to in twenty or thirty years.  Thus, this weekend I found myself watching The Osterman Weekend (1983), Sam Peckinpah's last film and an adaptation of Robert Ludlum's second published novel from 1972.  I've discussed here before how ill-served Ludlum has been by film adaptations of his works, (although I doubt he was complaining as he was doubtless well paid for the movie options), the main problem being that a two hour running time can never do full justice to his dense plotting and the complex conspiracy theories he invented to underpin these plots.  In general, they have fared better as multi-part TV adaptations, (The Rhinemanm Exchange, The Apocalypse Watch and The Bourne Identity), where the plots have room to breath.  Which isn't to say that the film adaptations can't be successful: an entire franchise has been built on the 'Bourne Trilogy', although the first three films, while ostensibly based on the three novels, in reality take only the premise and a few plot elements and characters from them.  Likewise, The Osterman Weekend - which I hadn't seen since its UK TV debut in the mid eighties - takes the basic concept from the novel, along with several of the characters but tries to substitute its own complex conspiracy driven plot for that of the novel.  The problem is that the movie's plot makes no sense whatsoever.  No matter how you look at it, none of it stacks up - John Hurt's rogue CIA agent's harassment of Rutger Hauer and his friends brings him no closer to his goal of bringing down bis boss: he ends up having to kidnap Hauer's family and blackmail him in order to do this, something he could have done at the outset.

Interestingly, the film's writer was apparently surprised that this version of his script - which he seemingly regarded as a first draft - was used as a shooting script.  Indeed, Peckinpah himself disliked the script and pressured the producers to allow him to rewrite it.  But his version was rejected after the first few pages were seen by the producers.  It is rumoured that Ludlum himself - who, despite experience of the movie and TV industries had originally decided to avoid direct involvement in the adaptation - offered to rewrite the script for free, an offer apparently not taken up.  The Osterman Weekend represents probably the only occasion where - in a Ludlum adaptation -a more complex plot rather than a simplified one, was substituted for that of the source material.   Both versions start with the premise that John Tanner (Rutger Hauer in the film) is told that one or more of his three closest friend - who are due to spend the weekend with him as his family - are suspected of being a deep cover KGB agent.  In the course of the weekend he is supposed to try and find which of them is the guilty party.  At this point, book and film diverge, (I'm basing this on my recollections of a novel I last read some years ago - I've been unable to locate my copy to check these details).  While the film then turns this into a complex revenge plot on the part of an aggrieved CIA agent to expose his director as having ordered the assassination of the agent's wife, the book, as I recall, presents it all as a bluff by the authorities to convince the real deep cover KGB agent (who is believed to live locally), to expose themselves by convincing them that one of Tanner's friends might be able to identify them.  Although some scenes carry over from novel to film, their repurposing to serve a different plot leaves them feeling contrived and arbitrary.

With a decade having passed between the book's original publication and the film adaptation, the producers' desire to update the plot and tap into the post-Vietnam anti-establishment feeling, is understandable.  Certainly, the film, at times seems to trying to make some kind of statement about contemporary America, but is unsure exactly what it is.  The way in which everyone seems to be watching everyone else on TV courtesy of surveillance cameras provides some striking imagery and Tanner's closing spiel to his audience, (he is a TV interviewer in the film), urging viewers to question what they've seen and switch off, seems to indicate a desire to say something about the role of the media in manufacturing political narratives.  But none of this is properly developed, so it ends up seeming like a glib throwaway line with which to end the movie, implying but not elaborating upon its supposed themes.  That the finished film has this sort of uneven feel might well be down to the fact that, in typical Peckinpah fashion, the director fell out with the producers in post-production and the final edit was taken out of his hands.  The Osterman Weekend had represented a last chance for Peckinpah to prove that he was still capable of delivering a commercially viable film after his well-documented problems while shooting Convoy (1978) and he did complete it on schedule and on budget.  The problem lay with the fact that he had included several scenes designed to 'satirise' the film and its subject matter, all of which were excised by the producers after test screenings of the original cut garnered unfavourable audience reactions.

It is interesting to compare The Osterman Weekend with another spy thriller, The Killer Elite (1975), that Peckinpah had made as a director-for-hire.  While both were based on novels, Killer Elite is not only a better adaptation, retaining most of the involved plot and characters from its source, despite relocating the action from the UK to the US, but it unfolds its plot with far greater clarity, never quite losing the casual viewer and ensuring that it all, more or less, makes sense.  Moreover, stylistically Killer Elite is far more obviously a Sam Peckinpah film, exhibiting most of his signature directorial flourishes.  (I know that many critics disagree and regard Killer Elite as one of Peckinpah's weakest films - with many scenes allegedly supervised by assistants while the director was incapaciated by drugs and alcohol - I'm still prepared to champion it.  As a piece of commercial film-making, it still rates as a polished and superior example of the seventies action genre).  By contrast, it is often hard to discern that The Osterman Weekend was directed by Peckinpah, with only the briefest of slow-motion action and none of the usual explorations of masculinity and his typical juxtapositions of idealistic honour and compromise in the face of real world corruption and brutality seem muted.  The post production editing seems to have emasculated the film.  Which isn't t say that it isn't entertaining in places.  Many of the performances are actually very good and it certainly looks good, but the script is confused, failing to deliver on its initial promise.  Peckinpah was already in ill-health when he shot the film and he died the year after its release, leaving it as an underwhelming epitaph to a remarkable career.  Still, it did make money, almost recouping its costs in the US, performing strongly in Europe and becoming something of a hit in the then relatively new medium of home video.