UNHOLY TERROR 'UNDER SIEGE': A FOOLISH FORAY BY NBC

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000807570039-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 21, 2012
• Sequence Number: 39
• Publication Date: February 8, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/11/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807570039-6
APPEAE5 I
TV Preview
WASHINGTON POST
8 February 1986
Others rooting around in the cast include
George Grizzard as "Warren Richards," a
three- or four-fisted newspaper editor who
never really figures in the story until the
end, a la "Three Days of the Condor";
Beatrice Straight in a ludicrous cameo as
the secretary of state's wife; and, on the
purely hilarious side, Lew Ayres as a Walter
Cronkite figure who comes out of retire.
ment to "cover" the army-base bomb; b
Unholy Terror
'Under Siege': A Foolish Foray by NBC
By Tom Shales
wa51""6tu" Poet Staff wmer
Entertainingly awful at times, but
4irtually never quite convincing;
''I !Under Siege," the three-hour NBC
Sunday night movie, at 8 on Channel
4, sounds a warning to America:
ice the facts of the terrorist age or
risk having to sit through more
Alms like this. Woe is we.
The movie conjures yet another
qot-so-distant future, one in which
Hal Holbrook has been elected
president of the United States
(things nearly as strange have hap-
pened), and the head of the FBI,
Peter Strauss, is of all things a
bleeding-heart liberal who worries
about the civil rights of accused ter-
rorists. In the course of the movie,
this former police chief will actually
take to the streets in hot-foot pur-
suit of a bus on which an escaping
terrorist is sitting. You wouldn't
expect a Third-Worlder to do any-
thing so bourgeois as take a cab,
would you?
As the film opens, a horrible sui-
cide, bombing occurs at an army
base, this time not in Beirut but in
Bladensburg. Indeed, "It was bigger
than the Marine barracks in Bei-
rut," says Stan Shaw as an FBI man
in one of the film's rather tasteless
topical references. The massacre at
the Munich Olympics is similarly
invoked later. All the references are
designed to impose credibility on a
story that resists most such
attempts, perhaps because the
director, Roger Young, couldn't or
wouldn't give the film the tough,
pseudo-documentary crackle of a
good political thriller like, say, "Sev-
en Days in May." The subject mat-
ter is sensational and incendiary,
yet the film still seems padded and
squishy.
One problem for viewers is deter-
mining through whose eyes we are
supposed to see the story. There
are no characters with whom to
empathize. Strauss' FBI chief is a
whiner and a bungler, and a plot to
"IS y
standing in front of the scene and reciting
humanize him with a subplot about adopting his autobiography. If only this were sup-
a child with wife Victoria Tennant is com- posed to be funny.
pletely transparent. The screenplay, by As an excuse for inflicting their unsavory
three Washington Post writers-Bob Wood- fantasy on the great American viewer, the liams
and
Har wood -n dditionvtlo Alfred So a ach eves a authors include a message, voiced by good
surly sort of conviction only in the last third, guy Strauss. He says the people in the Mid-
east are not like you and me. "We insist on
during scenes of bickering and maneuvering dealing with them as if they were the same
in the White House, whepowerful he president's as us. We'd better wake up," Strauss says.
men include an excessively ) Unfortunately, by the time he sa
(Mason Adams) and a wildly hawkish secre- ys it, it may
tary of state (E.G. Marshall, demoted from be well past the point of waking up for many
the presidency he held in "Superman"). Paul still positioned at their TV sets.
Winfield plays the secretary of defense and Everyone in the movie suspects the Irani-
Fritz Weaver is the director of the CIA. ans have masterminded the terrorism
How little or how much these characters (apparently "Libyans" cannot be dubbed in
are based on real political figures is not going as a last-minute update), but the culprit
to be a very passionately played guessing turns out to be "French-Algerian." He's a
game even inside the Beltway. But the mean little critter named Abu Ladeen
White House stuff plays more effectively (Thaao Penghlis), who sits in an empty loft
than the terrorist shtick. in Detroit reciting threats into a tape
After the initial bombing, terrorist acts recorder. One of them is "I don't think the
escalate. It is the bad luck of the filmmakers few of us can change the world, but we can
that, with the memory of the shuttle trage- make America suffer." It sounds like some-
dy still vivid, their film includes a terrorist thing that might have been said at a net-
warning that "Americans will fall from the work story conference during the early pro-
sky." Perhaps more off-putting is the fact duction stages of-you guessed it-"Under
that the airplane bombings involve a cheap Siege."
fake-out regarding the welfare of the FBI
director's wife. Later, there is a blatant bor-
row from "The Godfather," a sequence that
pointlessly crosscuts from the christening
of a baby in a church to acts of random vio-
lence in the streets.
The cheekiest terrorist act depicted in
the film is the rocket bombing of the Capitol
dbme. But not to worry, the dome bombed
via special effects is really the Little Rock,
Ark., capitol dome. When a character earli-
er says, "Hard to believe this is Washing-
ton," the knowledgeable viewer is quick to
agree. Obviously a TV movie budget pre-
cluded more realistic effects. That is proba-
bly just as well. Even if we overlook the fak-
iness of the bombing, it's hard not to
chuckle at the president's response. He's
sort of peeved, as if White House squirrels
stole one of his golf balls. "They bombed the
Capitol," he grumps. "Crying out loud, I
don't like it!" The filmmakers never do man-
age to synthesize an impression of wide-
spread outrage.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/11/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807570039-6