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[Photo: Sony Pictures]
In a controlled performance, Greg Kinnear stars as the late TV actor Bob Crane in Auto Focus. Rita Wilson portrays Crane’s first, straightlaced wife. |
By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published October 31, 2002
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Auto Focus presents a dark and sometimes morbid look into actor Bob Crane's Hollywood life, sexual exploits and still-unsolved killing.
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Hogan's Heroes fall guy Sgt. Schultz probably knew "noth-ink" about what the TV show's star, Bob Crane, did away from the set. Neither did millions of viewers who knew Crane only as Col. Robert Hogan, the wisecracking leader of World War II POWs in a comical Nazi prison camp.
Crane's tousled hair, crooked smile and easy charm made him seem like such a nice person. Apparently, the same qualities made him anything but nice in real life. When the TV cameras stopped rolling, Crane's home video equipment heated up, recording sexual exploits with an assortment of women willing to follow "Hogan's" orders. A nasty pastime led to his still-unsolved killing in 1978, bludgeoned in an Arizona motel during a dinner theater tour.
Paul Schrader's Auto Focus is an unflinching, if unsurprising, examination of Crane's Hollywood life, Scottsdale, Ariz., death and all the kinky stuff in between. The story has been told in sanitized television specials and Robert Graysmith's book, the basis for Michael Gerbosi's economical screenplay. Schrader doesn't add new information. Instead, he painstakingly -- sometimes morbidly -- recreates the obsessions that ruined Crane's career and family, and ended in the actor's death.
As with any film biography of a famous person, success hinges on a convincing central performance. Greg Kinnear is perfectly cast as Crane, sharing the same clean-cut, conspiratorial TV appeal. There is a slight physical resemblance, and sometimes Kinnear cocks his eyebrow or juts his chin just right and you swear Schrader has inserted the real deal. But Kinnear also proves to be a flexible dramatic performer, portraying a man gradually eroding from within. That crooked smile devolves from a chummy expression to a seduction tool to bitter resignation to defeat. It's a marvelously controlled performance.
Even better -- possibly because we don't know his character as well -- is Willem Dafoe's portrayal of John "Carpy" Carpenter, who had the best motive and opportunity to kill Crane, yet was acquitted in 1993. Carpenter introduced Crane to strip clubs, then the prototypes of home video recording. They worked as a team, Crane procuring women and Carpenter running the camera equipment and joining the action. Dafoe is almost too easy to cast in such a sleazy role, yet he adds a compelling level of hanger-on desperation, a pathetic blowhard who'll never be as smart or sexy as he claims.
Rita Wilson as Crane's first, straightlaced wife is the film's -- and Crane's -- closest connection to "normal life," a Donna Reed type of homemaker. Maria Bello portrays his second wife as a sexually liberated sort who still wasn't enough to satisfy Crane's cravings. Two sources of conscience, Crane's agent (Ron Leibman) and priest (Don McManus), are summarily dismissed by Crane, even as he's begging them for help.
Schrader makes us voyeurs to a series of come-ons and sexual encounters, at first titillating, yet handled so casually that we begin to feel the same kind of bored emptiness that Crane must have felt. Aside from one distracting fantasy guilt trip, Schrader stays on a dark, descending path, with the color in Fred Murphy's cinematography degrading as steadily as Crane's morality. Auto Focus isn't much more than an uncensored E! True Hollywood Story, but it's juicy, well-acted gossip.
Auto Focus
- Grade: B-plus
- Director: Paul Schrader
- Cast: Greg Kinnear, Willem Dafoe, Maria Bello, Rita Wilson, Ron Leibman
- Screenplay: Michael Gerbosi, based on the book The Murder of Bob Crane by Robert Graysmith
- Rating: R; strong sexuality, frontal nudity, harsh profanity, violence
- Running time: 104 min.
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