Director: Costa-Gavras
Writers: Costa-Gavras and Donald E. Stewart, based on the book The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice by Thomas Hauser
Stars: Jack Lemmon, Sissy Spacek, Melanie Mayron and John Shea
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Index: 2025 Centennials.
Jack Lemmon was nominated for an Oscar on eight films. The first was for Mister Roberts in 1955, for which he won as Best Supporting Actor, and I coincidentally watched that this week as prep for its sequel in Jack Nicholson’s First Thirty. Now I’m watching Missing for his centennial, as it was the last of the eight nods, this time as Best Actor. He lost to Ben Kingsley for the year’s biggest picture, Gandhi.
It’s also a rather timely film, given the news of late, as it’s the true story of a coup, in Chile in 1973, when the U.S. aided the removal of the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende, in favour of a brutal military regime run by Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
More specifically, given that most of those names, like Allende, Pinochet and even Chile, are carefully never mentioned in the film, it’s a look at the effect of such a coup on a family. The missing man is Charlie Horman, a writer from New York state, and much of the movie is dedicated to the search for him by his wife Beth and his father Ed, the latter of whom has flown out specially after not getting answers he likes from the powers that be back home.
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