Toxic Effects

RAGE Directed by GEORGE C. SCOTT Screenplay by PHILIP FRIEDMAN and DAN KLEINMAN

Dan Logan is one of those grave, gritty Westerners whose dignity seems to have been whipped into him by the prairie wind. He is a sheep farmer, not poor but far from prosperous, a widower and a careful father. Camping out with his son Chris (Nicolas Beauvy) he awakes in the morning to find the boy sweating, bleeding from the nose, comatose. In the field all around him are the sheep, many dead, some still dying. Logan rushes Chris to the hospital and is advised by his personal physician and old friend (Richard Basehart) to admit himself as well. Chris convulses and dies. Logan, purposely isolated, is not informed.

Roughly to this point Rage is a tight, tense suspense melodrama, rigorously and shrewdly staged by Scott, here directing his first feature film. Scott shows a sharp instinct for depicting edgy, nagging uncertainty and isolating a look or a gesture that takes on indefinably ominous implications, as when two doctors quickly clutch each other's forearms in a cabalistic grip. He also plays Dan Logan, with a kind of distance that seems to be restraint at first but comes to look very much like indifference. His performance, like the movie, becomes with each new scene grimmer, more muddled and finally hysterical.

Chris Logan's death is due to the toxic effects of a new chemical being tested in the area by the Army; Dan, also infected, probably will not live out the week. He learns all this, after days of bureaucratic soothing and sedation, when he sees Chris' clothes being carried out of the hospital in a clear plastic bag. Logan breaks out, vowing vengeance on the officials and the doctors who have lied to him. He blows up the plant where the chemical was manufactured, then, although slowed by the poison, heads for the Army base to take the same kind of reprisal there.

What might under different circumstances have been an act of blind heroism or brutal revolution begins to look like a mere deranged impulse. The very fact that Dan's death is imminent means that he is not really putting himself on the line or taking any risk: his actions are morally hollow. The deadly chemical apparently is being tested by the Army for military use, but this point, once made, is quickly buried. (The Army curtailed "open air" testing in 1969, but did not completely eliminate it.) In Rage it is not necessarily alarming that the military conducts such tests, or that it might use the chemicals to sub due or even to slaughter. It is merely a pity that the tests happen to kill Dan Logan and his boy.

A lot is wasted: a good--if perhaps too pat--idea, and some fine supporting performances, especially by Martin Sheen as an unctuous Army surgeon, Barnard Hughes as a frightened public health official, and Robert Walden as a callous clinician out from Washington to observe. Scott's direction is precise and more than promising. What Rage lacks is real tough-mindedness and courage, qualities it perhaps once had but seems to have lost somewhere along the way to the Army base.

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