Living in exile in Paris after eluding a controversial charge of statutory rape in America, director Roman Polanski seemed professionally adrift during the 1980s, making only one film (the ill-fated Pirates) between 1979 and 1988. Then Polanski found inspiration--and a major star in Harrison Ford--to make Frantic, a thriller that played directly into Polanski's gift for creating an atmosphere of mystery, dread, escalating suspense, and uncertain fate. Set in Paris (Polanski couldn't go to Hollywood, so Hollywood came to him), the story begins when an American heart surgeon (Ford) arrives in the City of Lights with his wife (Betty Buckley) for a medical convention. They check into a posh hotel, and in a brilliantly directed scene, Ford takes a shower and emerges to find that his wife has vanished. This mysterious disappearance--and a confusion between two identical pieces of luggage--leads Ford into the Paris underground and a plot that grows increasingly dangerous as he approaches the truth of his wife's disappearance. The plot gets too complicated, and the pace drops off in the cluttered second half, but in Polanski's capable hands the film is blessed with moments of heightened suspense in the tradition of classic thrillers. --Jeff Shannon
(15 votes)
2.
Roman Polanski’s FRANTIC is an engaging thriller in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock. Harrison Ford plays Richard Walker, an American heart surgeon vacationing with his wife, Sondra (Betty Buckley), in Paris, where he is to attend a medical convention. Sondra suddenly and unexpectedly disappears from the couple’s hotel room while Richard is taking a shower, and when she doesn’t return after several hours, he decides to report the incident. But neither the French police nor the U.S. embassy offers much help or even appears particularly interested in his dilemma. On the brink of despair, Walker decides to embark on an investigation himself, aided by Michelle (Emmanuelle Seigner), a carefree, seductive gamine who is also mixed up in the case, as he discovers after tracing back to her a mysterious piece of switched luggage that he suspects his wife’s kidnappers are after. When the mismatched duo finally succeed in tracking down the perpetrators, it becomes apparent that the stakes in this extortion scheme are far higher than they imagined. Ford, cast somewhat against type, gives a credible, low-key performance as the anxious Walker. Polanski also cowrote this suspenseful film, assigning the female lead to his young wife (Seigner).
(15 votes)
3.
Ford plays an American doctor whose wife suddenly vanishes in Paris. To find her, he navigates a puzzling web of language, locale, laissez-faire cops, triplicate-form bureaucrats and a defiant, mysterious waif who knows more than she tells.
(15 votes)
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