Out of the cycle of 1970s buddy cop action comedies like The Super Cops, Cops and Robbers and Freebie and the Bean comes Busting, a 1974 effort soon releasing on DVD. Elliott Gould and Robert Blake play the Los Angeles vice cops who often ignore the law in order to get their man. In this case, the man is Alan Garfield, a scuzzy mob kingpin. The cops’ vice squad antics involve busting prostitution rings, gay bars and massage parlors. While the film could easily fated into the obscurity of others of its time and ilk, it sticks out today thanks to its energy, its cynicism and its principal characters’ reckless disregard for the law. Additionally, the film boasts a great cast of supporting actors that includes Antonio “Huggy Bear” Fargas, Michael Lerner, Sid Haig and former model Cornelia Sharpe.
The movie, just coming to DVD now, was the first feature written and directed by Peter Hyams. The filmmaker went on to have a decades-long career as a workmanlike director, usually delivering solid genre films with a glossy sheen. Beginning with 1984’s 2010, he’s been one of the few directors who also act as their own director of cinematography—Steven Soderbergh is another.
But Hyams’ life belies his mainstream-styled career. Born in 1934, he is the grandson of Sol Hurok, the Russian-born performing arts impresario who managed and promoted the likes of Marian Anderson, Van Cliburn and Andres Segovia. Before his involvement with the movie industry, Hyams played jazz drums with the likes of Maynard Ferguson and Bill Evans, and studied art and music in college. He became a CBS newscaster in Chicago and a war correspondent during the Vietnam War.
Hyams got his screenwriting start penning the script for T.R. Baskin with Candice Bergen, then on the TV movies Rolling Man and Goodnight My Love. For all its verve, Busting never caught on with audiences, so Hyams followed with Our Time (1974), a period coming-of-age tale with Pamela Sue Martin and Parker Stevenson, and Peeper (1976), a Michael Caine-Natalie Wood private eye spoof with a screenplay by W.D. Richter (The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai) and jewelry provided by my Aunt Bootsy (no kidding—she was a jeweler in Beverly Hills).
Hyams was batting a shabby 0 for 3, but he got out of his slump with 1978’s Capricorn One, an action-packed thriller about a fake mission to Mars. It was put together on a sizable budget by Lord Lew Grade, and true to the British producer’s works of the time (The Cassandra Crossing, Escape to Athena), Capricorn One showcased an all-star cast—and an eclectic one at that. Elliott Gould played the smartass reporter who uncovers the conspiracy in which astronauts James Brolin, O.J. Simpson and Sam Waterston go along with the government plans for a staged Mars landing, under threat that their families will be killed if they spill the beans. Add Telly Savalas as a cartoonish crop duster who thinks everyone is a pervert, Hal Holbrook as a NASA boss and David Huddleston as a well-connected congressman and you have a potpourri of paranoia, star power, expert chase sequences and comic book shenanigans that clicked with audiences.
Basking in the post-Star Wars glow, Harrison Ford decided to join Hyams for Hanover Street (1979), a poorly reviewed weepie set in World War II-era Britain that starred Ford as an American flyer who falls for a British nurse (Lesley-Anne Down) who happens to be married to a British undercover agent (Christopher Plummer) working against the Nazis. While the old-fashioned picture tanked in theaters, it picked up a fervid following in the early days of VHS rentals.
While Hyams’ batting average got stronger over the rest of his career, it became indicative of his work that a strong film or two could be followed by a clunker or two. Outland (1981), one of his biggest hits, presented Sean Connery as a space marshal on one of Jupiter’s moons who discovers that the workers on a mining project have succumbed to an addiction to meta-amphetamines. Eventually, Connery finds himself facing off solo against a group of drug dealers, reminiscent of Gary Cooper encountering the black hats in High Noon.
Wrote Vincent Canby in the New York Times: “It’s also a movie of unexpected pleasures, including some uncommonly handsome science-fiction sets, a straightforward narrative that recalls ‘High Noon’ without that film’s holy seriousness, some wonderfully effective chases through the darkest interiors of this huge, hermetically sealed moon camp, plus two staunch, robust performances by Mr. Connery and Miss (Frances) Sternhagen. Outland is what most people mean when they talk about good escapist entertainment. It won’t enlarge one’s perceptions of life by a single millimeter, but neither does it make one feel like an idiot for enjoying it so much.”
The film has amassed an even stronger following over the years, which makes its present DVD presentation from Warner Brothers (cruddy non-anamorphic transfer) all the more disappointing.
Hyams tuned up for his next big sci-fi outing with The Star Chamber (1983), a John Grisham-meets-Michael Winner thriller in which trial judge Michael Douglas, frustrated with letting criminals go on technicalities, joins forces with a secret society of other embittered arbiters to dole out capital punishment against the guilty. The film’s premise proves provocative throughout most of its running time, but eventually lapses into standard thriller material.
Who could ever conceive a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s mind-blowing, landmark science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Hyams recounted in an interview a few years ago that the chairman of MGM called him and told him to read Arthur C. Clarke’s sequel to the book that inspired Kubrick’s classic. Hyams agreed to do the film on two counts: he wanted to inject politics into the American-Russian relations depicted in the book, and he needed Kubrick to give the film his blessing. Both came to pass, and Hyams took the assignment with the intention of making 2010: The Year We Make Contact as unlike 2001 as he could.
In fact, Hyams–the producer, writer, director and cinematographer on the film—used a straightforward, narrative style to explore many unanswered things featured in the original. Here, a joint American-Soviet expedition respectively led by Roy Scheider and Helen Mirren (and joined by John Lithgow and Bob Balaban) investigates the remains of the abandoned Discovery, the downed spaceship in which the Hal 9000 malfunctioned, as it’s about to be sucked into the gravity of Jupiter.
Hyams managed to get his politics across—America and the Russians are about to go to war on Earth—while delving into the monoliths and other mysteries of the original. Yet there are other perplexing issues—Star Child, anyone?—not approached in 2010.
Mixed reviews and fair but not spectacular box-office returns followed. Hyams next took his talents to a series of enjoyable genre films. After he directed a 1985 episode of Steven Spielberg’s TV anthology Amazing Stories with Gregory Hines as a stage psychic who helps track down a serial killer, Hyams and the actor/dancer reunited for Running Scared (1986), a high energy action-comedy in which Hines teamed with Billy Crystal as wisecracking Windy City cops who return from their Key West vacation to discover that drug kingpin Jimmy Smits is back to his old tricks. One of the film’s highlights is an amazing chase on the Chicago Elevated tracks.
Hyams thereafter recruited Connery for The Presidio (1988), in which the Scottish actor played an army colonel stationed at San Francisco’s military base who partners with adversarial MP-turned-police inspector Mark Harmon to track down a murderer. To raise the stakes and antagonism level is the fact Harmon is dating Connery’s daughter, played by Meg Ryan. “A murder mystery/action picture with bankable stars filling out standard-issue characters, The Presidio follows the big studio formulas for empty-headed entertainment right down to the last cliché,’ commented Washington Post critic Hal Hinson.
Next, Hyams tackled Narrow Margin (1990), a remake of Richard Fleischer’s lean 1952 film noir, with Anne Archer as the state’s witness to a mob murder who’s pursued by Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Gene Hackman, criminals and the authorities on a peril-fraught railroad ride throughout the Canadian Rockies. The film is not earth-shattering but a solid thriller, with some dandy action scenes shot on a train chugging through the picturesque mountains.
After a brief excursion into satire with the 1992 TV spoof Stay Tuned (which featured a short segment animated by Chuck Jones) , Hyams knocked out two films with Belgian martial arts phenom Jean-Claude Van Damme. 1994’s TimeCop, a convoluted but exciting sci-fi actioner, offered JCVD as a cop from the future who journeys into the past to save his late wife (Mia Sara) and stop an unscrupulous senator (Ron Silver) from winning the U.S presidential race. Based on a comic book, the film proved to be a solid hit, allowing Van Damme to flex his acting muscles at the same time as his martial arts mitts. It also led to a direct-to-video sequel and TV series.
Timecop also inspired the regrouping of filmmaker and star for 1995’s Sudden Death, a highly entertaining and totally ludicrous action yarn in which JCVD played a fire marshal that must thwart the plot of terrorist Powers Boothe to take the vice president and his daughter hostage at the Pittsburgh Civic Arena during the seventh game of the Stanley Cup Finals.
During this comic book film not based on a comic book, JCVD is pressed into action on ice as the Pittsburgh goalie (fulfilling a dream of his), and a terrorist has a nasty fight in a concession kitchen dressed as the Penguins mascot. Sudden Death, which plays like Die Hard in a hockey arena and was co-written by one of the owners of the Pittsburgh Penguins, scored mildly at the box-office and didn’t necessarily help to further its star’s reputation as a real actor.
Hyams fared better with genre fans with his next effort, 1997’s monster-gone-amuck-in-a-museum movie The Relic. Penelope Ann Miller played a Chicago museum biologist who joins forces with friendly policeman Tom Sizemore when the premises are threatened by a monstrous creature from South America with animal and reptile characteristics and the need to chew through human skulls. To heighten the suspense, the mayor allows a scheduled black-tie gala at the museum to proceed despite the threat.
For what it is, The Relic delivers the “B” movie goods and is a lot of fun. But Hyams seems to have lost his sense of pleasing audiences with his last few films. For 1999’s End of Days, Hyams stepped in for departing helmer Marcus Nispel at pal James Cameron’s insistence, but his handling of the big budget Arnold Schwarzenegger-battles-Satan saga failed to click. Wrote Janet Maslin in The New York Times: “End of Days, which is as incoherent about its mysticism as it is about anything else, interrupts stretches of doomsday exposition with the inevitable chases and shootouts and beatings that are its raison d’etre.”
2001’s The Musketeer, a reboot of The Three Musketeers with former model and future Grey’s Anatomy star Justin Chambers as d’Artagnan and some Hong Kong-styled aerial work added for good measure, did so-so business in American theaters. Perhaps its release a few days before September 11, 2001 didn’t help matters.
As for what types of films he prefers, Hyams said, “I have a predilection for movies that are larger than life. I love movies that are exotic. I love going to a theater when the lights go down, and I never sit past the fourth row because I don’t want to see the edges of the screen, and the movie takes you some place. I love movies that are thrilling.”
A Sound of Thunder (2005) only made a brief pit stop in theaters before hitting video and cable. Based on a much-lauded short story by Ray Bradbury, the film starred Ed Burns and Ben Kingsley in a tale about a process that allows the wealthy to hurdle back into time and hunt dinosaurs. When one of the hunters ignores the strict rules of the service, it sends “time waves” causing a mutant evolution of various creatures. What could have been a thought-provoking science fiction effort in which themes of intelligent design and evolution could easily be a part of became a chintzy affair, despite a not-so shabby $80 million budget. Nobody expected Jurassic Park here, but the special effects are consistently unimpressive, the pace plodding and the rear screen sequences warring with Kingsley’s hairpiece for downright obviousness.
Looking to rebound from the critical dismissal and less than $2 million U.S. box-office returns of A Sound of Thunder , Hyams reteamed with Star Chamber lead Michael Douglas for 2009’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, a curious remake of Fritz Lang’s 1956’s film noir in which the issue of capital punishment was a major theme. This plotline has been dropped in this tale of a crusading TV reporter (Jesse Metcalfe) who hopes to expose corrupt, politically ambitious district attorney Douglas. While getting romantically involved with an assistant DA (Amber Tamblyn), Metcalfe conceives a complex scheme to frame himself as the murderer of a prostitute in order to get the goods on Douglas.
Less-than-enthusiastic reviews met Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, which spent time on the shelf while waiting for its limited theatrical release. Also in 2009, Hyams worked as a cinematographer on his son John Hyams’ film, Universal Soldier 3: Regeneration, featuring Dad’s former partner in cinema crime, Jean-Claude Van Damme.
So, now, at the age of 68, can we expect more from the versatile Peter Hyams, a man with a truly up-and-down career, and one of only a few with the capability to shoot, write and direct his own movies?
The ever-skeptical filmmaker has said: “I’ve never done anything that’s totally worked for me. It has always been very painful to watch what I’ve done. Filmmaking, by definition, is a process of failure and because of that I always seem to be looking for the blemishes in my work.”
Critics and audiences would second the notion of seeing blemishes in Peter Hyams’ films. But they have also taken them to some wild places and introduced them to some memorable characters, blemishes and all.