Stakeout

(John Badham, USA, 1987)

Surveying a typical contemporary example of a mainstream superfilm (The Witches of Eastwick, 1987), Raymond Durgnat found the surface traces of at least 5 new genres, 7 traditional genres, 3 recurrent themes, 15 variations on two situational premises, and numerous reflections on 8 current cultural obsessions – in an attempt to locate where “surprise, innovation and change” can sometimes occur in popular cinema.

All through Stakeout (and under the spell of Durgnat’s text), I found myself conjuring a similarly gargantuan pattern of intra-film networking. This was partly because it gave me zero else to conjure with; and partly because it’s an instructive exercise in itself – especially at this present moment in 1980s cinema history.

Touchstone Pictures (Down and Out in Beverly Hills [1986], Ruthless People [1986], Tin Men [1987]) seem to be particularly preoccupied with calculating these kinds of patterns for market success – and they obviously calculate them well.

We are dealing, then, with movies that are matter-of-factly heterogeneous – as, indeed, most popular films are these days, and perhaps since a long time ago. But this also entails the fact they face special problems in holding themselves together.

Stakeout, for instance, splits its levels between different genres, tonalities and plot pieces – it’s another attempt at an action comedy, a perilous genre of our time. With John Badham at the helm, there’s another type of potential division in the air: between the skeletal linkages of the scenario (scripted by Jim Kouf) as a whole, and the sort of fill-in, research detail he is usually hired for, and does so well.

Badham as a director very drawn to logistics, layout, functionality (with special emphasis on communications and surveillance technology, as is also the case with Brian De Palma). He’s always figuring out how to exploit an existing location or prop-object for just that extra, special bit of business or nuance of staging. For instance: what does the bottom of a truck actually look like, if you were stuck there? What could you grab onto once the vehicle was moving?

Unlike, say, Jim McBride’s The Big Easy (1986), where all such details join up and party away together into another world that runs parallel to the plot, Badham’s details simply happen, one by one. They don’t get swept up into a vortex, as in De Palma’s thrillers; they go nowhere. They’re just 1980s movie stuff.

In fact, the degree to which Stakeout actually succeeds in managing the action/comedy hybrid depends wholly on Badham’s ability to connect the logistical mania – whenever possible – to the moves of the story. This becomes possible here insofar as the basic narrative skeleton – cops Chris (Richard Dreyfuss) and Bill (Emilio Estsevez) keeping watch on the girlfriend (Madeleine Stowe as Maria) of an escaped convict (Aidan Quinn as Stick) – gives Badham every chance to bring out and show off the techno hardware.

Beyond that, the film’s materials get stickily complex; I shall provide here only two glosses on what’s going on.

First: Stakeout plays two guys off each other. Among the many movies past and present (including The Untouchables, 1987) forming the pertinent background set of possible variations on this coupling, this one offers itself to the mass audience as, most obviously, a reworking of Lethal Weapon (1987). So we have the older-black-stable versus younger-white-unstable opposition of the former transformed into older irascible (Dreyfuss) versus young conscientious (Estevez) here.

Among the many smaller and more fleeting borrowings – moves for which the word genre will hardly suffice anymore as an index – I believe that I see two transformations of elements from Jonathan Demme’s terrific Something Wild (1986): the psycho-killer with dazzling eyes (Quinn), and the problem of how the hero’s lying to the heroine, while falling in love with her, will resolve itself. But there’s a great deal of other networking going on in-between those plot points.

Second: Sue Turnbull and Rick Thompson have described (in Cinema Papers, no. 57) Richard Dreyfuss as “always a site of perverse interest”. I’d have to ask to know exactly what they meant, but I can at least tell you what I find perverse about this actor.

Remembering him as someone who has borne, variously, the signs of a heavily feminised romanticism (The Goodbye Girl, 1977), as well as an extremely agonised load of masculine impotence and failure (Inserts [1975], The Big Fix [1978]) throughout the 1970s, what’s perverse is the attempt to make Dreyfuss, in this career comeback of the mid ‘80s, an almost macho hero. I guess the blockbuster memory of his role in Jaws (1975) is the key industry-motivating factor here.

Stakeout is devoted to this Mission: Impossible of macho rehabilitation. It jokes about it, reflexively and nervously (“I hate this part”). Mainly, it goes the way of Tin Men in swathing Dreyfuss in a cloud of hectoring misogyny. He gets to play with women to an in-film audience of other envious-adoring men. Maria, naturally, gets around 30 seconds to call the stakeout guys a pair of shits – but then it’s back to strict action-image business.

Does that sound like ideology to you? To Badham and Touchstone, it’s probably just … logistics.

MORE Badham: Nick of Time, Point of No Return, The Hard Way, Blue Thunder

© Adrian Martin January 1988