A man enters a rural town for a humdrum purpose and everywhere he turns he finds mystery. People answer elliptically. No one is friendly. Puzzling things happen. Objects aren't where they're supposed to be. Records are missing. Why, it's almost as if the villagers were -- covering up some secret! When these things are done right, they can be genuinely effective. "Bad Day at Black Rock" is simple but gripping. "The Wicker Man" is unforgettable -- the original, not the loathsome remake. Even a low-budget TV movie like "Evidence of Blood" can do the job. And no one can finish reading Shirley Jackson's story for the first time without a gasp. She offers no real explanation. As someone said of another short story writer, ""Hemingway walks the reader to the bridge that he or she must cross alone without the narrator's help."
The problem is that Jackson's is a short story, and short stories about mysterious and unexplained events can be stellar as long as they remain short. Look at Hemingway's "The Killers" -- nasty, concise, horrifying.
But when you turn a short story into a feature-length movie, you have to pad it out, tell the back stories, parse the synecdoches, fill in all the blanks that made the original so enthralling.
That's the problem the film makers ran into here. Those back stories and ellipses. "The Lottery" is littered with them. And they're not too interesting either. As the hero, Cortese, is making his escape with Keri Russel towards the end -- long AFTER what SHOULD have been the end -- they have a kind of philosophical exchange in which Russell defends the practices of her small town by counting the vices of the big city that Cortese has come from. It's a stupid brief. It makes as much sense as an argument in favor of the euthanasia of the mentally ill or the unemployed. ("At least we're pruning the herd.") A couple of good character actors appear in this film -- William Daniels, M. Emmet Walsh, Veronica Cartwright. It's beneath their dignity. Salome Gens gives an outstanding performance in her brief appearances.
As the puzzled visitor, Dan Cortese is okay. He brings a certain professionalism to the role. He's darkly handsome in a conventional way, and a bit over-muscled. But make up has made a mistake that they didn't make with Keri Russell. Cortese has been given, not an ordinary haircut, but the kind of carefully styled grooming that was popular among West Coast celebrities at the time, a sort of pattern in which the man's hair is swept back into a wavy loaf over his occiput, suggesting the sagittal crest of an extinct reptile. Keri Russell's russet tresses are alternately straight and curled -- and very long. She has the features of a kewpie doll and is quite attractive. How much of an actress she is, is hard to tell from this hollow attempt to make a long film out of a gem of a short story.
The problem is that Jackson's is a short story, and short stories about mysterious and unexplained events can be stellar as long as they remain short. Look at Hemingway's "The Killers" -- nasty, concise, horrifying.
But when you turn a short story into a feature-length movie, you have to pad it out, tell the back stories, parse the synecdoches, fill in all the blanks that made the original so enthralling.
That's the problem the film makers ran into here. Those back stories and ellipses. "The Lottery" is littered with them. And they're not too interesting either. As the hero, Cortese, is making his escape with Keri Russel towards the end -- long AFTER what SHOULD have been the end -- they have a kind of philosophical exchange in which Russell defends the practices of her small town by counting the vices of the big city that Cortese has come from. It's a stupid brief. It makes as much sense as an argument in favor of the euthanasia of the mentally ill or the unemployed. ("At least we're pruning the herd.") A couple of good character actors appear in this film -- William Daniels, M. Emmet Walsh, Veronica Cartwright. It's beneath their dignity. Salome Gens gives an outstanding performance in her brief appearances.
As the puzzled visitor, Dan Cortese is okay. He brings a certain professionalism to the role. He's darkly handsome in a conventional way, and a bit over-muscled. But make up has made a mistake that they didn't make with Keri Russell. Cortese has been given, not an ordinary haircut, but the kind of carefully styled grooming that was popular among West Coast celebrities at the time, a sort of pattern in which the man's hair is swept back into a wavy loaf over his occiput, suggesting the sagittal crest of an extinct reptile. Keri Russell's russet tresses are alternately straight and curled -- and very long. She has the features of a kewpie doll and is quite attractive. How much of an actress she is, is hard to tell from this hollow attempt to make a long film out of a gem of a short story.