Lauren Hutton is worth watching in John Carpenter's "Someone's Watching Me!"

Lauren Hutton's creditable work as an actress in the 1970s and 1980s has been somewhat forgotten in recent years as she has returned to her roots as a fashion model by becoming a ubiquitous infomercial hostess and spokesperson for her own cosmetics line.  In her mature years, she has gracefully settled into becoming one of the more accomplished and respected celebrities famous for being famous.  This is a shame, because Hutton was an earthy and appealing presence in movies and TV throughout her acting career, cutting a dashing and insolent figure as she often played worldly and intelligent women.  She did some solid work in movies like Karel Reisz's "The Gambler" (1974) with James Caan, Robert Altman's "A Wedding" (1978), and Paul Schrader's "American Gigolo" (1980) that helped establish her as one of the more successful models-turned-actresses.  However, despite her many accomplishments, I think her best work as an actress came from her lead role in the TV movie "Someone's Watching Me!" (1978), a tense and exciting suspense thriller written and directed by John Carpenter right before he made "Halloween" (1978).  In it, Hutton benefited from a meaty, juicy role that she could sink her famously gapped teeth into that allowed her to play an intelligent and courageous woman, with refreshing elements of humor and vulnerability, who was facing imminent danger at the hands of a sadistic stalker.

In "Someone's Watching Me!," Hutton plays Leigh Michaels, a TV director who has recently relocated to Los Angeles after the acrimonious end of a long-term relationship in New York.  She moves into a high-rise apartment building, unaware that she has become the object of a stalker who, the audience realizes from the prologue, has gotten away with harassing and murdering other women by making it appear that they've committed suicide by leaping to their deaths from their apartments.  The stalker watches her from the opposite building through his telescope; terrorizes her with menacing phone calls; enters her apartment unit while she is out; leaves notes at her front door; and sends her gifts in the mail, including a telescope and bathing suit, under the guise of enrolling Leigh in a promotional travel agency contest urging her to guess the location of her ultimate destination.  Leigh is initially unsettled by the stalker, but eventually mounts a formidable defense against him with the help of her co-worker Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau) and new boyfriend Paul (David Birney), who are concerned about Leigh's safety.  At one point, Leigh deduces which apartment the stalker is watching her from and goes across to investigate, as Sophie watches from Leigh's apartment.  When Leigh peers into the stalker's telescope, he sees the stalker enter her apartment, sneak up behind Sophie and murder her.  However, he leaves behind no traces of the crime by the time Leigh has rushed back to her apartment, which causes the police to disbelieve her when she reports Sophie's murder.  Leigh and Paul ultimately learn that the stalker is actually a city inspector of apartment buildings who, as part of his job, has knowledge and access to every structure in the jurisdiction.

 
On her own, Leigh breaks into the stalker's home and finds evidence linking him to his crimes.  She calls Paul and notifies him of her discovery.  Paul tells Leigh to meet him at the police station to present the evidence to the authorities, but Leigh first returns to her apartment in order to retrieve a bugging device she found earlier in her apartment that matches one in the catalogue of surveillance equipment she found in the stalker's home.  At the apartment, she finds a typed suicide note the stalker has prepared for her and discovers that he's locked her into her unit, disabled the phones and shut off the power.  By this point, Leigh realizes that the stalker has benefited from harassing her from afar, that he's afraid of getting too close to her, and she dares him to come out and show himself.  She smashes a window in her apartment to call for help, only to have the stalker, an insignificant-looking middle-aged man, finally emerge from the shadows and attack her.  Leigh clings to her drapes as the stalker attempts to push Leigh out the broken window.  She finally grabs a shard of broken glass dangling from the sill and stabs him in the back with it.  The stalker lunges at Leigh one last time as she jumps out of the way and he leaps to his death.  As she triumphantly looks down from upon her perch, Leigh ruefully comments "You got too close."

A taut and straight-forward thriller that puts many current, explicitly violent R-rated thrillers and horror films to shame, "Someone's Watching Me!" benefits immensely from John Carpenter's solid writing and directing, and from Lauren Hutton's impressive lead performance.  In the kind of role where she is almost always on-screen, Hutton confidently carries this movie by courageously allowing the audience to see Leigh's strengths and vulnerabilities.  Still bruising from the end of her romantic relationship in New York, Leigh is rather flippant and abrasive in the early scenes of the film, in an attempt to demonstrate a veneer of wit and confidence to her new friends and co-workers and to convince herself that she's going to be OK.  Nevertheless, we like her from the get-go due to her disarming candor, fierce intelligence, and human weaknesses.  Carpenter has given Hutton an ideal part that accentuates all of her strengths as an actress and personality, and gives us a fine example of the sort of roles that Hutton should have been frequently offered.  One of Hutton's best scenes in the movie is not a thriller/suspense moment at all, but a nicely nuanced moment when Leigh meets her future boyfriend Paul for the first time.  Leigh spots Paul reading a newspaper at a bar, cheekily walks up and introduces herself, and then walks away.  Leigh immediately turns around, walks back up to Paul and says to him "Hey there!  Haven't we met before?"  We realize that Leigh, for all her looks, intelligence and success, feels the same insecurities as anyone else when they meet someone they're attracted to for the first time.  Hutton makes sure that Leigh has no sense of entitlement about herself, which is why the audience is completely on her side when her ordeal with the stalker begins to take hold of her life.

What I also like is how Hutton effectively demonstrates how the stalker has unsettled her life in a way that most people would be able to identify with.  She begins to lose some of her wit and spirit as we realize the extent to which Leigh's sense of security, confidence, peace of mind, and personal safety has started to erode.  Compare Hutton's finely nuanced work in "Someone's Watching Me!" with the shallow performance of Morgan Fairchild in "The Seduction" (1982), where Fairchild plays a newscaster stalked by a persistent fan, and you see the extent to which Carpenter and Hutton were able to accomplish great things with Leigh's character.  In "The Seduction," Fairchild acts in an entitled, petulant manner to being stalked, as if she's annoyed that her manicure has been interrupted.  In "Someone's Watching Me!," Hutton effectively creates a character whose life has been turned upside down, but whose strength and resolve eventually allow her to effectively fight back against her stalker.  When Leigh calls the police to tell them about her stalker, and is told that they can't do anything unless he actually threatens her and that she should call them back in case he does anything further, a frustrated Leigh sardonically retorts, "In case he does anything?...Well, if he kills me, you'll be the first to know!"  Because Leigh has somehow managed to retain her sense of humor under difficult circumstances, we realize that the stalker has found a formidable opponent and that, even though she'll look to her boyfriend Paul and friend Sophie for moral support, she will ultimately be able to resolve this situation on her own.

 
In another of Hutton's best scenes in the movie, Leigh is driving in her car, attempting to flee from her apartment, when she hears a recording of Sophie's murder emanating from a walkie-talkie the stalker has placed in the back seat of her car.  As Leigh attempts to reach behind her to turn the walkie-talkie off, she pulls the car off to a side street and breaks down as she finally allows herself to grieve over Sophie's death and over the crisis that has enveloped her life.  Hutton always stood out from other actresses from the 1970s, who projected a neurotic and eccentric image reflective of the "Me Generation," by projecting a cosmopolitan sophistication and assuredness more in-keeping with the leading ladies from the classic era of Hollywood.  In this scene, Hutton is finally given a scene where she can go for broke as an actress and demonstrate feelings of rage, grief, frailty, and sadness as Leigh is finally at wit's end over being stalked.  We see the extent to which the stalker has almost broken her spirit.  And yet, because we already like Leigh's character very much, we eagerly wait to see when she will eventually pull herself together and take control of her life again.  It's one of the finest moments of her career and gives us further example of the untapped potential Hutton had as an actress. 

And Hutton doesn't disappoint in the finale when she finally confronts the stalker and puts an end to her nightmare.  When she returns to her apartment, finds the typed suicide note he has prepared for her, we see Leigh's mounting anger and sense of resolve as she realizes he finally has gone one step too far even for her.  Hutton projects a look of disgust and bemusement for her stalker as she says aloud to him "You're hiding aren't you?  You're afraid of me.  You're afraid to get too close.  Come on.  Face me.  I'm still scared.  You've got a good chance."  Hutton smiles slightly, as she realizes that she has finally tapped into her stalker's vulnerability and weaknesses.  When the stalker doesn't respond to her, Leigh angrily continues "Just like that?  I don't even get to see who you are?"  Leigh is appropriately outraged at realizing the cowardice of her stalker and that he doesn't even have the guts to take her on, face-to-face, on a level playing field, but prefers to come at her from a distance or sneak up from behind.  We realize that the stalker, actually, never had a chance against Leigh because her forthright and direct personality were her inherent strengths against his cowardly harassment of her and that, if given an opportunity, she would easily put him in his place.  And she does, at the end, when he attempts to shove her out her window, she finally stabs him in the back with the shard of glass, just as easily as he would have attacked her from behind, and puts an end to his reign of terror.

 
When Carpenter finally shows us who Leigh's stalker is, he brilliantly reveals him to be a slight, balding, wimpy-looking, middle-aged man with no sense of genuine character or strength to his face.  (Carpenter takes advantage of the narrow framing required for television movies at the time to allow the stalker to sneak up on Leigh without warning.)  In a brief close-up of the stalker, Carpenter provides the audiences all the back-story we need to explain why this insignificant-looking man would derive such pleasure from exerting control over the lives of others.  We sense that the stalker was likely a meek, wimpy man in his own regular life and was only able to have any sense of strength about himself by trying to take control of other women's lives from afar.  He was, in essence, a coward, which is why it is such a pleasure for the audience to see such an inherently stronger person like Leigh finally put this milquetoast in his place.  When Leigh looks down from her apartment window, after the stalker has fallen to his death, she has almost a look of compassion and pity for him, as if she now realizes that he was no match for her from the start.  Lauren Hutton's work in "Someone's Watching Me!" is unique in the horror/suspense genre in that it's only in retrospect we realize the heroine was always stronger than her stalker from the get-go and that she would ultimately triumph over him.  In a sense, the audience should have been more concerned about his safety than about hers.  As mentioned earlier, because the 1970s was filled with neurotically self-indulgent actresses who were incapable of projecting strength and resolve, it becomes apparent how Lauren Hutton was the only person who could have effectively played Leigh Michaels in "Someone's Watching Me!"

"Halloween II": The Ideal Cut

The first time I ever had any true understanding of what post-production and editing meant on a motion picture was when I saw the TV version of "Halloween II" (1981).  Universal syndicated an alternate version of this movie to independent TV stations starting around 1984.  I saw it on the local KCOP Channel 13 in Los Angeles on Halloween of that year (it still plays frequently on AMC and can also be found on YouTube).  It was startling to see how different both versions of this film were.  Detailed descriptions of the differences between both versions can be found here and here.  In general, both versions follow the same storyline:  Moments after surviving her attack by Michael Myers in the first "Halloween" (1978), Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is rushed to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital where she is under the care of the medical and nursing staff.  Meanwhile, Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) continues searching for Michael's whereabouts as the small town grows hysterical upon learning of the murders he has committed earlier in the evening.  Unbeknownst to all of them, Michael has followed Laurie to the hospital and begins systematically picking off the personnel and staff at the hospital until only Laurie is left.  The movie ends with a fiery confrontation between Michael, Loomis, and Laurie.

It's been documented through the years that producer John Carpenter was dissatisfied with the version of "Halloween II" that director Rick Rosenthal turned in.  In an effort to keep up with the vigorous slasher movie competition then in-vogue, which were much more explicitly violent than his original "Halloween" ever was, Carpenter supervised additions and reshoots where he added one murder, pumped up the violence in other scenes, and purportedly cut down on scenes establishing character development.  The TV version is purportedly closer to what Rosenthal had intended for this film.  One general difference between both versions of this film is that the theatrical cut of "Halloween II" moves fast, has some exciting and scary moments, but leaves you feeling cold.  Even though it's a well-made movie, especially compared to other slasher movies in the early 1980s made in the wake of the original "Halloween," it doesn't have the personality and heart of the original movie.  The first "Halloween" distinguished itself by creating a trio of teenage girls that the audience enjoys spending time with.  In the theatrical cut of "Halloween II," you never get to know the Haddonfield Memorial Hospital staff who are tending to Laurie.  As a result, the theatrical cut never quite generates the same level of suspense as the first film because you are never allowed an opportunity to care about these new protagonists.

All of that changes in the alternate TV version.  In this cut of the movie, you get to spend considerably more time with the hospital personnel who, in the other version, came across as mere ciphers.  This is not to say that they have become fully dimensional characters, but we now get a better sense of who they are so that their deaths and/or survival matters more to us.  In this cut of the movie, the additional scenes with head nurse Mrs. Alves (Gloria Gifford) allows her to come across less of a stern task master, and more as a hard-working professional who expects all the nurses under her supervision approach their work with the same level of maturity and high-standards that she brings to her work so that their patients can rest comfortably.  This is underscored by the little vignette, added to the end of the scene early in the movie when Laurie is brought to the ER, where Mrs. Alves draws the curtains as Laurie is being undressed and prepped for surgery, and orders the ambulance attendants out of the room.  We see how Mrs. Alves remains sensitive to Laurie's privacy and modesty.  We also spend more time with nurse Janet (Ana Alicia) so that we get a better sense of her mild hysteria and nervous disposition.  Because Janet in the TV version appears to be the only nurse who has any genuine sense of concern or doom about what may happen to them all, based on what Michael Myers has done earlier in the day, she becomes a more vulnerable and sympathetic character than she was in the theatrical version due to her heightened awareness.  Cliff Emmich's likeable security guard Mr. Garrett also gets a few extra scenes where he responds to the news reports of the teenagers murdered in the first "Halloween" by speculating that it must have involved youths under the influence of controlled substances.  This helps to better establish him as an old-fashioned, no-nonsense, traditional kind of guy.

Tawny Moyer's nurse Jill comes across as the most put-together, most professional of the younger nursing staff in the TV version, as the additional scenes help establish that she is the only one that Mrs. Alves does not scold in the course of the evening because she makes no mistakes.  Pamela Susan Shoop's appealing nurse Karen also benefits from the additional scenes.  In the TV version, she comes across as less of an irresponsible flake and becomes a more feisty, level-headed, and quirky individual.  Ford Rainey's Dr. Mixter, who virtually disappears in the theatrical version until Janet finds him dead in his office, has more scenes that help to establish his concern over whether he tended to Laurie's wounds properly.  The added scene where he is trying to reassure himself that he did all that he could in treating Laurie's wounds, and that her scar won't be that noticeable, allows the character a sense of humanity and vulnerability that wasn't there at all in the theatrical cut.  And Lance Guest as Jimmy, the sympathetic young ambulance attendant who is established as a potential love interest for Laurie, benefits in the TV version by virtue of the fact that the original, scripted ending of the film is reinserted in order to allow him to survive.  In the theatrical version, Jimmy appears to have died from head wounds sustained from slipping on Mrs. Alves's blood on the hospital operating room floor.  (More about this later.)  That version of the movie ends with the seeming sole survivor Laurie, desolate and alone, in the back of the ambulance as it takes her away.  In the TV version, Jimmy reappears in the back of the ambulance with Laurie, his head wrapped in bandage, but otherwise all right.  The sight of Jimmy alive brings Laurie to tears, as the TV version ends touchingly on a more upbeat, hopeful note.  (This gives the movie's use of "Mr. Sandman" over the end credits an entirely different nuance.  Rather than eerily underscoring how, as it does in the theatrical version, Laurie will remain forever haunted by her encounter with Michael Myers, this TV version ending makes the song ironically upbeat, and makes Michael an inadvertent Cupid for Laurie.  As sick as it sounds, Michael's violent actions in the previous 24 hours have put virginal, repressed Laurie on the path to finding a prospective love interest.  After everything she's been through during that day, the poor girl genuinely deserves a break.)  The only person who does not appear to benefit from the additional scenes in the TV version is senior ambulance attendant Bud (Leo Rossi), who comes across as crass and sardonic as he does in the theatrical cut.

The additional TV scenes also help to resolve some glaring plot holes that remain unexplained in the theatrical version.  In the TV version, it is established that Laurie's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Strode, were at the Country Club Halloween party with Dr. Mixter, and that they left the party before Janet, who forgot to contact them there before going on her break, was able to reach them.  (Janet is shown in the TV version being scolded by an irritated Mrs. Alves over this.)  In the theatrical version, the nurses try to reach the Strodes to no avail.  It's never explained that one reason why they appear to be missing is because Janet forgets to call them at an opportune time.  In the second-half of the theatrical version, the hospital becomes dark and shadowy without explanation, something that I recall a few critics in print reviews complained about.  In the TV version, it is established that Michael Myers cut the power to the hospital and that the dark and shadowy lighting that results is due to the emergency generator kicking in.  And, as mentioned earlier, the TV version helps shed light on the ultimate fate of Jimmy, who appeared to lose consciousness in his car after sustaining his head injuries from his fall.  In the theatrical version, he passes out in his car in Laurie's presence.  We never get the impression that his head injuries were enough to kill him, so it is confusing at the end of the movie when the theatrical version never goes back to address what ultimately happened to him.  

However, even though the TV version helps to resolve the ultimate fate of Jimmy, it also creates its own share of flaws reflected in the fact that his scenes at the end of the film were restructured to create an entirely different impression as to how he was injured.  I much prefer the sequence of events in the theatrical version where Jimmy finds Mrs. Alves has bled to death in the hospital operating room, slips on her blood and hits his head on the hard floor, staggers to his car (where Laurie is hiding), tries to start it up to get them to safety, and loses consciousness.  The TV version has none of this.  Instead, it re-edits and reassembles the scenes and individual shots where Jimmy is seen wandering around the hospital, and slips from Mrs. Alves's blood on the ground, to create the impression that Jimmy is still wandering around looking for Laurie during the final confrontation between Dr. Loomis, Laurie, and Michael Myers, and that he sustained his head injuries from falling backwards because of the explosion Dr. Loomis sets off to kill Michael.  It simply seems lame in the TV version that Jimmy doesn't seem to notice the gunfire and shouts of excitement coming from Dr. Loomis and Laurie during their battle with Michael.  There was no need to re-edit the sequence of events just to set up Jimmy's reappearance in the ambulance at the end.  The set-up for Jimmy's reappearance was done well in the theatrical version and should have remained intact.  (I would love to find out what motivated the person at Universal in charge of preparing the TV version of "Halloween II" to make this change.) 

I also don't like the fact that the fate of Mrs. Alves, Janet, and Dr. Mixter remain unresolved in the TV version, which gives the impression that they have disappeared from the hospital without explanation.  Because of the revisions made to Jimmy's scenes in the last act, the scene where he finds Mrs. Alves strapped to the gurney, the blood drained from her body, is mostly excised from the TV version.  (You can see a brief, blink-and-you'll-miss-her shot of Mrs. Alves's lifeless body on the gurney in the quick shot used in the TV version to give the impression that Jimmy was knocked to the ground by the sheer force of the explosion at the end of the film.)  Concurrently, the scene where Janet finds Dr. Mixter's lifeless body in his office, and is then killed by Michael, is deleted entirely from the TV version.  The net result is that it gives the impression that these characters may have, inexplicably, gone AWOL in the course of the evening.  This completely contradicts what's already been established about them earlier in the film as being conscientious medical professionals.  The TV version also reassembles the sequence of events in the opening act of the movie.  Rather than starting the movie, as in the theatrical version, with a pre-titles sequence highlighting the finale of the first "Halloween," and then launching into the memorable opening credits, the TV version flips this by starting with the opening credits and then segue-ways into the closing scenes from the first film.  In so doing, we lose Dr. Loomis's hilariously blunt retort to the neighbor complaining that he had been trick-or-treated to death that night--"You don't know what death is!"--that helps kick off the sequel in high gear.

Another problem with the TV version is that it is indeed too tame for its own good.  With its re-dubbed dialogue (covering up any sort of strong language) and its toned-down violence, the TV version plays like a Movie of the Week that is too timid to really cut loose.  In addition, the sequence of the introductory scenes in the first half hour of the TV version are assembled in a manner considerably different than the theatrical cut so that its pacing and flow feel awkward in comparison.  If this was how Rosenthal's cut of the movie played, then one begins to understand why Carpenter made alterations to the movie in post production.  In that sense, I don't mind Carpenter's addition of Alice (Anne Bruner), the teenage girl left alone at home who has an unfortunate encounter with Michael Myers moments after the opening credit sequence in the theatrical version.  The scene helps to set the tone of horror and mayhem for the rest of the movie as we now see that Michael is expanding his rampage from the limited circle of characters in the first film to a wider group of individuals.  In the TV version, we briefly see Alice at home as Michael watches her from outside, but the sequence goes nowhere and proves pointless as we immediately cut back to the hospital and are left with the impression that nothing dire happened to Alice.  The exclusion of Alice's death causes the first act of the TV version to be a bit too loose and meandering for at least a half hour.  Whoever was editing "Halloween II" for television should have kept the scene in, but toned down the violence, in order to help set the tone of impending doom for the rest of the movie.

Because the TV version has its shares of considerable flaws, there is no way anyone can consider it an ideal "director's cut" that properly reflects Rick Rosenthal's (or even John Carpenter's) vision.  It is unlikely that Rosenthal intended to have the fates of Mrs. Alves, Janet, Dr. Mixter and Jimmy altered to such a drastic degree.  It is too bad that the recent Collector's Edition Blu-Ray and DVD of "Halloween II" from Scream Factory did not attempt to create an "Ideal Cut" of the movie that incorporates the best qualities of both the original 1981 theatrical cut and the later 1984 TV version into one film.  (Though I give Scream Factory big kudos for including the TV version among its considerable extras.)  It would be nice to see a version of "Halloween II" that features all of the character development scenes underscoring the camaraderie among the Haddonfield Memorial Hospital Staff, without the weird alterations to the storyline concerning Jimmy's injuries, and with the requisite R-Rated elements of strong language and violence still intact.  (However, I am fine with the notion of deleting the nudity from Pamela Susan Shoop's whirlpool bath death scene.  Even though Shoop is a lovely woman, I understand from interviews she has given that she was uncomfortable with the nudity and that that is the only element she regrets about making the movie.  The TV version edits the scene in a smooth way where the nudity is implied, but Shoop's modesty is protected.  I have no problems keeping that out, but leaving the other R-rated elements in.)  Given the continued interest and popularity in the "Halloween" series, especially this film, it is surprising that no one has considered doing the sort of "Ideal Cut" of the movie as I have suggested.  If the theatrical cut in 1981 featured both Rosenthal's character development, as well as Carpenter's effectively chilling contributions, I have a feeling that it would have been much better received by critics and openly acknowledged as a worthy follow-up to its classic predecessor.