It starts out, deceptively enough, in a comfily domestic mode, painting a relationship between middle-aged husband and wife that is warm but not without sudden passing chills, and a relationship between father and son that is cool but not openly nippy. The mode changes drastically when the husband and father, having dozed off with Len Deighton's Berlin Game steepled on his chest, is awakened by a call from Paris, where his vacationing wife has turned up missing. Father and son, who have had little enough to say to each other on a fishing trip, take the next plane out, and what follows is unbargained-for fulfillment of the wife's parting wish that the two men use her absence as a chance to get to know one another better. There turns out to be much more to the father than just his lumber business and his sententious words-to-the-wise; much more to him, that is, than the stereotyping labels affixed to him by his college drop-out son. Revelations that the old man can speak French, that he is known in some circles by the nickname Duke, that he was once even an operative for the CIA -- these and others make a graphic demonstration of how little the typical know-it-all child really knows his parents. But though the developing father-son drama gives a certain added resonance to the concurrently developing spy drama, it is quite right that the former developments should take a back seat to the latter; quite right that they should largely be deferred till later. To want more thrashing-out and hashing-over on the home front is to want a different sort of movie. It is compliment enough to say that the personal drama doesn't crimp the excitement. With Gene Hackman and Matt Dillon; directed by Arthur Penn. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd
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