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November 6, 2008
Michael Crichton, R.I.P.
The obituaries for Michael Crichton — who died yesterday at the age of 66 — stressed his position as one of the most popular novelists of our time. That he was, with an unbroken string of highly entertaining and often very provocative thrillers.
But, I happen to be equally fond of two movies Crichton directed in quick succession four decades ago that seem to have fallen off most people’s radar: the brisk and very scary medical thriller, “Coma” (1978) and the magnificently designed and photographed historical caper film, “The Great Train Robbery” (1979).
In the handful of films he directed, Crichton proved himself to be as good with actors as he was with the mechanics of plotting. The marvelous French Canadian actress Genevieve Bujold gave a terrific performance as the imperiled heroine in “Coma” and Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland make for a delightful pair of crooks in “The Great Train Robbery.”
Crichton also eased Michael Douglas’s way from TV stardom in the 1970s to big screen stardom in the following decade. The actor’s performance as Bujold’s boyfriend in “Coma” (above) displayed the slightly offbeat mix of charisma and moral ambiguity that would power most of the actor’s subsequent star vehicles.
“Coma” was adapted from a Robin Cook novel about a diabolical conspiracy within a Boston hospital involving the murder of healthy patients in order to harvest their organs for sale to wealthy international clients.
The movie was part of a wave of 1970s paranoid thrillers, but Crichton brought humanity and humor to an otherwise grim genre.
“Coma” was one of the rare 1970s thrillers centered on a female character and Crichton seemed unusually sensitive to the character’s position within a male-dominated hospital (the writer-director earned his medical degree from Harvard before he turned to fiction with the 1970 best-seller “The Andromeda Strain”).
If there had been more Hollywood opportunities for actresses in the late 1970s — the decade was largely dominated by male star vehicles and “buddy” dramas and comedies — Bujold could have become a major star rather than a fine character actress.
Crichton continued to direct the occasional film in the 1980s, but he gave up that sideline in 1989 after directing the disastrous “Physical Evidence.” A project that was intended to be a sequel to the 1985 hit “Jagged Edge” — with Glenn Close and Robert Loggia reprising their roles as a San Francisco defense attorney and her crusty investigator — wound up as a barely released Burt Reynolds-Theresa Russell bomb.
Posted by Joe on November 6, 2008 5:29 PM
