The 1981 film, The Survivor, opens with a group of school children watching as a plane crashes in the distance. Of the 301 people on the plane, 300 die. Somehow, the only survivor is the pilot, David Keller (Robert Powell). It’s rare for a pilot to be the sole survivor, especially in a crash as severe as the one in this film. Even more shocking, David walks away without a scratch on him or any memory of what happened in the minutes before the crash.
Though the airline wants to keep David hidden away until after it has determined what caused the crash, David insists on helping with the investigation. He is haunted by strange visions and the sound of screaming passengers. He has to know if the crash was his fault or if there was a bomb on the plane. While the tabloid press tries to take his picture, the families of the victims blame him for the crash. “There he is,” one angry woman shouts at a funeral service that is overseen by Joseph Cotten (in his last film role), “the pilot who walked away!”
When one of the tabloid photographers gets a little bit too aggressive in his attempts to take David’s picture, he finds himself pursued by a ghostly apparition of a little girl. The photographer is so frightened of the little girl that he stumbles in front of a train, which has to rank right up there as one of the dumbest ways that someone can die in a horror movie. Later, the photographer’s girlfriend tries to look at one of the pictures of David and her hand is promptly chopped off by a paper cutter. That’s not quite as bad as stumbling in front of a train.
As David tries to understand what is happening, he realizes that he’s being followed by a woman named Hobbs (Jenny Agutter). Hobbs says that she is a medium. She witnessed the crash and now, she’s in contract with the spirits of the dead. At one point, David and Hobbs suddenly start trying to strangle each other. They manage to break free of whatever has possessed them but it’s obvious that these spirits are not fooling around. (That said, the attack begins and ends so abruptly that, for those of us watching, it inspires more confusion than fright.)
The idea behind The Survivor is an intriguing one. The film was directed by David Hemmings, the British actor who is probably best-remembered for starring in the 60s classic, Blow Up and in Dario Argento’s classic Deep Red. Along with co-founding Hemdale Films, Hemmings also directed a handful of movies. Unfortunately, intriguing premise aside, The Survivor is not one of Hemmings’s better directorial efforts. There are a few effective visuals and Jenny Agutter is well-cast as Hobbs but the film’s pace is extremely slow and Robert Powell seems to be more bored than enigmatic as the title character. The film’s plot calls out for an all-out grindhouse approach. Hemmings’s instead gives us a stately and rather self-important film that ultimately feels like a lesser episode of some obscure 70s anthology show.
That said, this film does feature Joseph Cotten in his final film appearance. He only has two scenes but he brings a quiet dignity to the role of the Priest. The film doesn’t really work but Joseph Cotten and Jenny Agutter give performances that survive the wreckage.
Through the Shattered Lens 