The Mean Season [Blu-ray]

Director: Phillip Borsos Phillip Borsos

Overview

Canadian actor/director Philip Borsos made a couple of interesting films before an untimely death in his early forties, including The Grey Fox (1982) and this crime thriller starring Kurt Russell as police beat reporter Malcolm Anderson. Happily abandoning the Miami Daily for which he's labored for years, he takes a job on a small town paper hoping to take life in the slow lane for a time. Of course, he's soon caught up in a career-making story, after a serial killer (Richard Jordan) likes his account of a murder he's committed and decides to use the journalist as his mouthpiece. As the killings continue, Anderson begins to receive national attention, and the Numbers Killer, motivated primarily by a desire for the limelight, becomes jealous, and decides to kidnap Anderson's girlfriend (Mariel Hemingway) to teach him a lesson. As he has with Anderson, the killer soon develops a relationship of sorts with the woman, and slowly reveals the workings of his bizarre personality while the police search desperately for the pair.

Product Details

Release Date:	06/23/2015
UPC:	0887090101806
Original Release:	1985
Rating:	R
Source:	Olive
Presentation:	[Wide Screen]
Sound:	[DTS 5.1-Channel Surround Sound]
Language:	English
Time:	1:43:00
Sales rank:	17,687

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Kurt Russell	Malcolm Anderson
Mariel Hemingway	Christine Connelly
Richard Jordan	Alan Delour
Richard Masur	Bill Nolan
Joe Pantoliano	Andy Porter
Richard Bradford	Phil Wilson
Andy Garcia	Ray Martinez
Rose Portillo	Kathy Vasquez
William Smith	Albert O'Shaughnessy
John Palmer	Himself
Lee Sandman	Harold Jacoby, Miami Journal Publisher
Dan Fitzgerald	Carl Mason, Editor-in-Chief
Cynthia Caquelin	Ruth Lowenstein, Attorney
Fred Ornstein	Warren Phillips, Attorney
Fritz Bronner	Peter Peterson, Reporter
Mike DeRienzo	Everett Durfee, Reporter
Michael Clay	Ray Sloane, Reporter
Fred Buch	John Burrows, Detective Chief
Bruce McLaughlin	Leonard Pridmore, Medical Examiner
Robert Apte	SWAT Commander
Rodney Barretto	SWAT Commander
Jill Beach	TV Anchorman
Bill Rutherford	TV Reporter
Peter Lundquist	TV Reporter
Connie Hicks	TV Reporter
George Rudolph	WGBS Radio Newsman
Robert Small	Bill Crawford
Nancy Duerr	TV Newswoman
Mark Fields	Reporter
Tim Minton	Reporter
Mary Lou Simo	Reporter
Tamara Jones	Sarah Hooks
Joan Murphy	Mrs. Hooks
Richard Liberty	Mr. Hooks
Paul Nagel	Jogger
Morris Zuckerman	Mr. Stein,Mrs. Stein
Ann Browning	Victim in Matheson Hammock Park,Victim's Infant
Robert Gwalty	Psychiatrist
Christine Page	Elementary School Teacher
Joshua Segal	Schoolboy
Marshall B. Gage	SWAT Commander
Bob Gwalty	Psychiatrist
Lalo Schifrin	Composer

Technical Credits

Leon Piedmont

Christopher Crowe

Phillip Borsos	Director
Leon Piedmont	Screenwriter
Joe Day	Special Effects
David Foster	Producer
Chuck Gaspar	Special Effects
Lawrence Turman	Producer
Richard Warlock	Stunts
Christopher Crowe	Screenwriter
Charles Gaspar	Special Effects

Editorial Reviews

Borsos' engrossing, deliberately paced thriller boasts a career performance by Richard Jordan, but its formulaic finish cops out on the issues the film has raised. Another twist on the theme of the power of the press as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement that Billy Wilder first explored in Ace in the Hole (1951), it adds the pet Hitchcock-ian theme of the secret sharer, suggesting the killer's insane hunger for attention as a distorted reflection of the more carefully concealed ambition of Russell's journalist. Borsos' intelligent, low-key direction plays down the potentially sensational aspects of the story, never showing a murder, and keeping the gore at a discreet distance. Richard Jordan is brilliantly creepy as the disturbed killer, a man so vulnerable within the fascinatingly elaborate system of paranoid delusion he inhabits, that he almost gains his captive's sympathy. Russell, if not entirely credible as a journalist tortured by ethical questions, is convincing as a bereft lover and as a foil for the madman. Andy Garcia is also quietly effective as a detective assigned to the case. While the film never resolves the questions about the uglier aspects of ambition and the quest for fame, it succeeds as an above-average thriller.

All Movie Guide - Michael Costello