Man In The Glass Booth

The Kidnapping... The Masquerade... The Murder Trial...

Director Arthur Hiller (Love Story, Silver Streak), working from screenwriter Edward Anhalt´s (Becket) adaptation, transforms actor/playwright Robert Shaw´s The Man in the Glass Booth into a film the Los Angeles Times dubbed, "daring, outrageous, utterly provocative, endlessly ambiguous and strikingly effective."

Millionaire Jewish entrepreneur Arthur Goldman (Maximilian Schell) benevolently rules his financial empire from a penthouse apartment overlooking Manhattan. Seemingly at the edge of sanity, Goldman holds forth on everything from Papal edicts to ex-wives, from baseball to his family´s massacre in a Nazi concentration camp. When Goldman remarks on a blue Mercedes continuously parked outside his building, Goldman´s captive audience of assistant (Lawrence Pressman) and chauffeur (Henry Brown) dismiss their boss´ anxiety as encroaching paranoia. But each of Goldman´s passionate, seemingly capricious ravings are transformed into a shocking, inadvertent deposition when Israeli agents capture Goldman and put him on trial as Adolph Dorf, the commandant of the concentration camp where Goldman´s family was supposedly exterminated. In a trial scene of unrelenting intensity, Academy Award winner Schell (Judgement at Nuremburg) crafts what The Detroit Free Press called "a white-hot lead performance," mutating from eccentric Goldman to sociopathic Dorf and beyond. The riddle of Dorf´s true identity becomes wrapped in an enigma of cunning self-treachery and single minded obsession.

Veteran cinematographer Sam Leavitt enables Hiller to coax a vividly personal and electrifyingly intelligent dual portrait out of Schell. The Man in the Glass Booth is a timeless drama of surprising intimacy and indefatigable courage, "possessing," declared the LA Times "a remarkably resilient sense of lightness for all the profound questions it ponders."

Upplagd i sortimentet: 18 Maj, 2006