Beyond (2011/Anchor Bay Blu-ray)/The Odessa File (1974/Sony/Image Blu-ray)

 

Picture: B-/B     Sound: B-/C+     Extras: D     Films: D/C+

 

 

There was a time when Jon Voight was on the cutting edge of acting and a big star whose reign started in the late 1960s with Midnight Cowboy and continued with a memorable wave of roles with Coming Home and the remake of The Champ.  Since then, he has appeared in smaller films and as a character actor in blockbusters and other works.  He recently returned to thriller territory with Josef Rusnak’s Beyond (2011), while one of his earlier classic hits has arrived on Blu-ray at the same time.

 

Beyond has Voight as an old detective trying to find and protect his grandchild and he is so desperate that he allows a supposed psychic guy help him, but all this really turns out to be is another tired child-in-jeopardy romp and badly directed by Rusnak, who already did an even worse remake of It’s Alive (a 2008 dead-on-arrival mess), The Thirteenth Floor (yawn!) and unnecessary sequel in Act Of War II, so he is nothing more than a big hack.  Teri Polo, Dermot Mulroney and anyone unlucky enough to catch this waste of time with Voight looking bored and this viewer feeling that way and worse early on.  This just gets dumber and dumber.  There are no extras.

 

On the other hand, we have the far more talented Ronald Neame with the thriller The Odessa File (1974) which was a critical and commercial hit for he and Voight about reporter Peter Miller (Voight) who in late 1963 (as Kennedy is assassinated) has to deal with an old man who has apparently committed suicide.  Turns out this man knew an ugly truth about an organization called Odessa operating in Germany who was keeping the Nazi legacy alive and would kill anyone who got in their way.

 

With Germany split at the time, they intend the unification to be secretly a white nationalist affair, but Miller intends to find out more about them and stop them if he can and if he can avoid getting killed.  Like Three Days Of The Condor, some of the moments in the film hold it back from having the impact of a truly great thriller like The Parallax View, but this is a top rate production with some nice surprises and great locales.

 

Voight is really good here and is joined by a strong cast that includes Derek Jacobi, Maximilian Schell, Maria Schell and Peter Jeffrey.  Kenneth Ross (Day Of The Jackal, Thomas Harris’ Black Sunday) adapted the Frederick Forsyth (Dogs Of War, Day Of The Jackal) book as a screenplay with George Markstein, an expert spy writer whose amazing resume includes Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, Secret Agent/Danger Man, U.K. hit series Special Branch and Edward Woodward spy classic Callan.  That makes for a top rate screenplay and he is also good with suspense and mystery, of which you can add the great Rivals Of Sherlock Holmes series to that list  Most of these programs are reviewed elsewhere on this site.

 

Even though the Cold War aspect is dated (more than I remembered), it is still more than worth seeing at least once, especially on such a superior Blu-ray.  There are no extras here either, unfortunately.

 

 

The 1080p 2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image transfers in both cases are as good as these are going to look.  Though Beyond uses the old RED ONE camera, it helps that the underrated Hawk Scope lenses were also used, but that still cannot help the color limits, detail issues, motion blur and lack of depth, including some of this a culprit of the stylizing that is as tired and clichéd as the script.  On the other hand, Odessa was shot in real anamorphic 35mm Panavision by the great Director of Photography Oswald Morris (The Man With The Golden Gun, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, the original Sleuth, Fragment Of Fear, Kubrick’s Lolita, The Seven Per Cent Solution) knows this genre very well and uses the widescreen frame very effectively.  Though we get grain, color, detail, depth and a nice print all add up to a surprisingly winning presentation.

 

The Dolby TrueHD 5.1 on Beyond is a mixed affair with sound more towards the front speakers and dialogue more in the center channel than it should be, while the PCM 2.0 Mono mix on Odessa is as clean and clear as it is going to get for a monophonic optical theatrical film.  This is one of the few films Andrew Lloyd Webber ever scored, making for some unique music choices.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo