Film Review - An Enemy of the People

Following the success of The Towering Inferno, Steve McQueen was technically the biggest actor in the world, wanting $6m for a role. Sadly, between his laziness (well, to be fair he was screwing Ali McGraw, which probably made time fly) and various bouts of bad luck he ended up not being in anything and, after four years of inactivity (which included turning down roles in Apocalypse Now and what would become Heaven's Gate), began to lose his standing.


Come 1978 he needed a comeback vehicle but rather unconventionally pushed for an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's morality play An Enemy of the People, partly due to his desire to branch out and tackle more celebral material than his sixties/seventies action fare. When he handed it in to Warners they were rather non-plussed by the gentle tale of a principled scientist protesting against pollution in a small Norwegian town hungry for tourists. That McQueen himself is nearly unrecognisable behind a beard in the lead hardly helped and, after briefly pitching it with a poster featuring better-known McQueen roles in one of the more desperate promotional pushes in cinema history, buried the thing. 

The film did finally resurface on Warners' excellent but transatlantically challenged Archive series and, having long wanted to see it, I promptly stumped up for the DVD.. As a big fan of Steve McQueen I wanted to love this film as much as he plainly did, but it just can't be done. Technically everything is very worthy - good sets, adequate direction, nice photography and a cast full of respectable character actors. McQueen also does good work as Stockmann - he's miscast but the sheer effort he's putting in to making middle age work for him rather than against gives the performance a sort of underdog charm. Sadly, It's not the sort of tour-de-force that the film needs to make it interesting.

Ibsen's play is a bit of a relic in film terms and there's just no real drama or suspense. You can guess the entire narrative from the back-of-box synopsis and even at its' slight length the thing drags horribly before a freeze-frame ending that feels very movie-of-the-week.