Hardcore (1979)

The movie starts with overly religious Calvinists in Iowa. They seemed cheerful, but if I had grown up there, I probably would have run away to become a pornographic film star myself.

George C Scott stars as a widowed Dutch Reform businessman. His daughter disappears on a church sponsored trip to California. He hires seedy private eye Peter Boyle to find her.

Boyle appears in Iowa. He has an 8mm film he bought in California which George C Scott needs to see. This is where the film's tagline, "Oh my God! That's my daughter!" came from.

"Turn it off! TURN IT OFF!" George C. Scott says, something they referenced years later on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

George C Scott eventually fires Boyle and sets out to find his daughter himself. He descends into the nightmarish world of pornography and prostitution.



The movie may have been vaguely autobiographical. Schrader grew up in the Dutch Reform Church. Then went to California and made movies like this and Auto Focus, about Bob Crane's pioneering work in amateur video pornography.

"I'm with people who love me now!" Schrader might have told his family if they had come to rescue him.

Dick Sargent, the second Darrin on TV's Bewitched, has a major supporting role as George C Scott's brother-in-law.

The movie perpetuates a couple of myths. I think I saw it when I was in high school, probably when it was shown at the university. It was the first time I heard it claimed that undercover cops can't legally deny being cops if you ask them directly. It also presented "snuff films" as a real thing.

Might make a good double feature with Shohei Imamura's 1966 film, The Pornographers. It was a bit more upbeat. It's just people trying to make a living at the extreme low end of the movie industry. I'd hate to see some Japanese version of George C. Scott beating information out of them.

Hardcore is kind of a Christmas movie, too. Starts out during the Christmas season. You could really one up those people who watch Die Hard as a Christmas movie.

Both are available on The Criterion Channel.

Auto Focus

I sat and watched Auto Focus last night. I had seen it once several years ago. I thought it was good, but I liked it less this time. About Bob Crane's spiral into depravity which apparently led to his murder in 1978.

I saw him in Disney's Superdad (1973) when I was a kid. I liked it okay, but my taste in film wasn't fully developed. Maybe Superdad would make a better double feature with Hardcore. There was a scene, if I remember correctly, where Bob Crane rescues his daughter from an abstract painter. I liked that scene because the painter waves a gun around. I was 11 and liked movie violence. It turns out to be a squirt gun loaded with paint. Auto Focus reveals that Crane was playing drums in strip clubs for fun at the time, something Disney might have fired him for back then.

Things have changed. In 1995, Disney cheerfully employed writer/director/convicted child molester Victor Salva.

There was some discussion in Auto Focus that a sitcom set in a Nazi prison camp was in incredibly bad taste. My father didn't let us watch it. Producers of the show clearly knew it was a problem. The German main characters were played by Jewish actors, Werner Klemperer, John Banner and Leon Askin. French actor Robert Clary had survived concentration camps as a teenager.

One good thing about Hogan's Heroes was that the General Burkhalter kept threatening to send Colenol Klink to the Russian Front. They more or less acknowledged that the Soviets did most of the fighting in that war.

Auto Focus is also available on The Criterion Channel.