The Carey Treatment

Lance: Well, I guess that was one way to start. The Carey Treatment is most definitely 100 minutes of movie.

Off the top of my head, here are a couple of things I really liked...The opening credits were fantastic. James Coburn driving his wood-paneled station wagon up 128, through the Allston tolls, along Memorial Drive with the Polaroid building in the background and the compulsory crew team on the Charles River (although he either must have got lost or turned around somehow since he was heading toward the Pru tunnel when he went through the Allston tolls, not the Allston-Cambridge offramp). And I appreciated seeing the only Chinese guy to appear in TV during the 70s (James Hong) and the only Irish cop to see the front of a camera during the same period (Pat Hingle) playing a Chinese guy and an Irish cop. There must have been something else...

Scott: This movie actually had some things going for it. All of those things, of course, were needlessly squandered, but they were there in theory. First off, it stars James Coburn, who is totally awesome. He's also one of those actors who is more awesome in the public imagination than in reality; a quick glance at his IMDB profile will show that he was in a vast amount of crappy movies and very few good ones. The Carey Treatment is not one of those good ones. This despite the fact that it also had an interesting premise, something even more surprising when you realize Michael Crichton was involved.

The story is that a girl dies from a botched abortion, and Carey tries to exonerate the abortionist and find the real killer. Considering this movie came out in 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, and it should have been a third rail, hot button film. Instead it was a flat, lame, extended episode of Quincy, only with James Coburn doing a bunch of fairly inexplicable 70's swinger things. I'm pretty sure I saw Chrissy Snow in the background of the party scene.

The movie also suffers from little details like the plot not starting until 15 minutes into the film, a subplot about Carey hooking up with a dietician that had nothing to do with anything else in the film, and a really flimsy core mystery that revolves around random coincidence. On the plus side, Coburn's character is one of those late 60's-early 70's anti-hero types, meaning he's a charismatic asshole for no reason who does stuff like abduct a 15 year old girl and subject her to psychological torture via a high speed station wagon ride in order to intimidate her into giving him info for his goofy investigation. But then, who hasn't, right?

Special props have to be given to the inclusion of a place called Sullivan's Steam Bath, which is apparently where everyone from Southie goes to get an Irish massage. The tense showdown between Coburn and his chief suspect takes place here in an epic sequence where the muscled lad oils Coburn down and gives him a vigorous body massage while ominous music plays, and I was pretty sure they were about to get it on when Coburn instead punches the guy in the bread basket for no reason and stalks out.

Overall, this movie was one Bruce Jenner short of a bad CHiPs episode (if such a thing ever existed). It should be noted, though, that only one character in the film used a fake Boston accent, instantly making The Carey Treatment significantly better than, say, Quiz Show.

Lance: Totally agree about the accents. I hate fake Boston accents. Either you have one or you don't (and I don't) and trying to put one on is always a disaster. It's only a matter of degree.

This movie would have been better off as a two part TV miniseries, since it was half love story and half murder mystery. The two plots were barely connected, if at all. Perhaps Peter Carey in Love and Peter Carey: Pathologist for Hire on consecutive weeks in a non-sweeps period. For instance, there is a scene at the party hosted by Carey at his Beacon Hill residence (complete with deli trays, cold chili and potato salad; how gauche). The scene centers around a conversation Carey has with a lab tech who gives him the cold shoulder. Following the rejection, Carey returns to have what amounts to a heart-to-heart with his dietician lady friend who laments the fact that Carey was talking with what she considered to be a worthless slut. All of this takes about 10 minutes and has nothing to do with the murder mystery (although the lab tech resurfaces later in the movie so perhaps it is meant as some sort of foreshadowing...and perhaps I'm giving the movie too much credit).

Oh, the other thing the scene has to do with the murder plot is that some unknown fellow heads upstairs to the sleeping quarters. We're supposed to think this is just a swinger looking for a good time, but it turns out the guy is hiding in the closet waiting for Carey to come up after the party ends (this is the guy with the fake Boston accent). Following a scuffle, the intruder gets punched in the nose by Carey, tumbles over the railing to the floor 10 feet below, and somehow ends up with only a broken nose (from Carey's punch) and the opportunity to have a heart-to-heart about the girl's murder with the guy he just jumped.

(Not to get all caught up in the accent, but the guy with the fake accent is the son of a wealthy doctor and his wife, both of whom have English accents, and the nephew of a "confirmed bachelor" who speaks with a similar accent. How does a guy growing up in that family end up with what is supposed to sound like the classic Boston accent?)

Finally, the film contains what might be the oddest and potentially most disturbing dream sequence I've ever seen. The 15-year-old victim is in the mortuary being autopsied by John Hillerman (speaking with an American accent which begs the question...is he an American who played a Brit in Magnum PI, or a Brit playing an American here? Hmmmm...[note: He's American]) As Hillerman carves her up, we get a closeup of her face that bleeds in to a slow motion sequence of the teen frolicking in the surf in a bikini. Huh? It's fairly easy to infer that the Hillerman character is a pedo-necrophiliac lost for a moment in a fantasy, but I think this is supposed to be a way to tug at our heart strings by showing us the vitality lost in this senseless abortion gone wrong. Either way, it's mondo-creepy.

Scott: It should be mentioned that the car chase I alluded to earlier -- where Carey shanghais Jan Brady and races around the North Shore in his station wagon like a deranged soccer mom -- had some sequences filmed out of state. We slowed the film down to determine just where on the North Shore it was taking place and instead discovered what appeared to be a route marker for California state highway 68. I have a hunch, however, that the sequences with Coburn and his reluctant Lolita were filmed in MA and only the stuntwork (including an honest-to-god "jump over an open drawbridge") was done in CA. Just a guess.

And one final note from my end: the dead girl had a giant poster of Ringo Starr in her bedroom. The one where he's got a bird perched on his finger. Maybe it's the fact that he's not wearing a shirt, or maybe it's the dead, soulless eyes staring emptily from his melon, but I swear this picture was taken half a second before Ringo unhinged his jaw and swallowed the bird whole. And if that had been the death Coburn was investigating, maybe this film would have been worth watching.

Tags: James Coburn Jennifer O'Neill Blake Edwards The Carey Treatment 1972