Eureka (1986) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy)

Scoop's comments in white.

I don't know if any movie ever had a better real-life story as its source material.

Harry Oakes was a young man from New England who followed the classic dream of riches. After obtaining a university degree and attending medical school for a couple of years, Harry dropped out to make his fortune as a gold prospector in the 1890s. He followed the possibilities around the globe: to Australia and New Zealand, to Death Valley, to Alaska and Canada, living in poverty and hardship, narrowly avoiding death for twenty years. A lesser man might have given up. Almost any other college man would have given up after two decades of a miserable, hardscrabble existence among ruthless uneducated men and prostitutes. Harry was not any other man. He set his sights on achievement, and was not afraid to pay for it with his own death, if necessary.

His determination ultimately paid off. Following rumors and opportunities, he figured out a way to work an unworkable claim underneath a frozen lake in Canada. He raised enough money to do what was necessary, and found one of the largest motherlodes in North America in the caves under that lake. In 1917 he had arrived in the area with $2.65 to his name (about like thirty bucks today). In 1918 he was earning $60,000 per day, which is equivalent to about three quarters of a million dollars per day in today's currency.

He soon found out that there was a price for having achieved his dreams. His entire life had been based on aspiration, and he was lost and purposeless without something to work towards. He was not psychologically suited to be idle, nor was he socially prepared to join the life of the leisure class. Twenty years of survival existence, living alone or with roughnecks, had left him unpolished, distrustful, ill-mannered and irascible. And he was alone.

He then began a new stage of his life, gadding about the world in search of inspiration. On a cruise he met a cultured, attractive young woman. Mankind's most common bond, that between powerful men and beautiful women, occurred. When they married, Harry was 48, short and ugly, ill-tempered but rich. Eunice was 24, cultured and lovely. The match worked. Harry and his wife raised three sons and two daughters. Harry soon took his young family to the Bahamas, where the tax laws were most favorable to someone in his position. Within a fairly short time, his real estate holdings included more than half of the island of Nassau. Harry and Eunice became integrated into the Nassau social set, which centered around the Duke of Windsor, the former king of England. Harry was still cantankerous, but was also generous to excess, and he was much loved by the poor of the island.

Life on Nassau was anything but idyllic. Harry found two major sources of grief.

1) His eighteen year old daughter met and married an idler, a handsome member of the European titled set, a "Count" whose only known interests were partying, womanizing, and yachting. Harry's daughter could not have picked a man more dissimilar to her father, who was the ultimate rough and ready self-made man, so her father and her husband despised each other, as evidenced by loud public rows.

2) Some very powerful men in Miami wanted to turn Nassau into a Caribbean Vegas, complete with slick hotels and lavish casinos. Harry opposed their development plans, and had the clout to block them. These were not the kind of men who take "no" for an answer. The Miami group was headed by the notorious mobsters, Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, the childhood friends who had assembled the most cohesive and enduring organized crime enterprise in American history.

In 1943, Harry was found murdered, beaten to death, his body burned to a crisp.

Killed by the mob? Killed by his son-in-law?

Harry's son-in-law was arrested and tried, but even Harry's daughter, who knew him better than anyone, thought him incapable of such an action. The evidence against him was circumstantial, the investigation was bungled (some say deliberately, to cover up mob involvement), and the Count was set free.

Harry's daughter, now known as Nancy Tritton, is still alive as far as I know. "The fabulously rich and difficult Nancy Oakes", as one critic called her, seems to have spent her entire life replaying the same mistakes over and over again. She had her marriage to the Count annulled in 1949, and some years later married another seedy aristocrat, this time a German Baron. Having made herself a countess and a baroness as well as an heiress, she soon separated from the German and married another famous playboy, the fun-loving Patrick Tritton, upon whom is based Dickey Umfraville, a character in Anthony Powell's "A Dance to the Music of Time". That marriage failed as well, and her matrimonial inclinations seem to have stopped there.

The Oakes family estate still holds vast amounts of wealth and property in the area of Lake Ontario. HOCO Enterprises (formerly Welland Securities) is today one of the largest owners of real estate property on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. "HOCO" is the acronym for the Harry Oakes Company.

Court TV did an elaborate and detailed report on the background behind the Oakes murder trial. The murder remains unsolved to this day.

What a story for a movie! Right?

In concept, it seemed like a no-brainer that should have proceeded directly to the Oscar Night stage, and the casting was perfect. Gene Hackman played crusty old Harry Oakes, and the parts of his spoiled daughter and her handsome, amoral Count were played by Theresa Russell and Rutger Hauer. Joe Pesci played Meyer Lansky, and Mickey Rourke played the soft-spoken but lethal Lucky Luciano.

Although the script changed everyone's names, (would you want Lucky Luciano's friends mad at you?), the story was clearly Harry's, almost down to the last detail. There were only two changes of any significance.

1. For some reason, the part of Harry's wife was re-imagined. Instead of the beautiful and cultured young woman who met Harry after his ascent into wealth, the script chose to make her a bored alcoholic.

2. In real life, the Count stayed with Nancy Oakes for six years after the trial. In the film, the Count made love to her once more, discussed the future with her, then waited for her to fall asleep, rowed out to his yacht, and sailed off. That was an excellent embellishment, in my estimation, allowing the director and his team to layer in a heavy dose of romanticism, and to come up with a brilliant closing image (right), which capped off some exquisitely imagined photography throughout the film.

I know what you must be thinking. "With a great story like this, magnificent cinematography, and a perfect cast, why have I never heard of this movie, and why is it rated a bottom-scraping 5.4 at IMDb?".

For you experts, the answer is "Nick Roeg". For the rest of you, the short answer is "because it isn't that good", but those words will just prompt you to ask "why?", so let's get to the meat of it.

• The first problem is that the stories of Harry Oakes and Nancy Oakes are not one story, but two separate stories that intersected only briefly, when Nancy's husband was accused of killing Harry. Since the Count was exonerated, that fleeting intersection was of minimal importance. By combining the two stories into one, the screenwriter and director painted themselves into a cinematic corner. They were painting a portrait of Harry Oakes, absorbing the audience into his Citizen Kane existence, when Harry was suddenly dead, and the movie still had a lot of running time left. Harry's death just drained all the energy from the film, not just because we were focused on Harry's story and it was already over, but also because Gene Hackman was the only actor in the film who truly had the gift to breathe life into the pretentious dialogue and make it sound like human speech instead of human speeches. Once Hackman was gone, the damned movie seemed like one of those hollow European art films where people deliver sonorous speeches while looking out of the window. The post-murder story of Nancy Oakes was an anti-climax in the story of Harry Oakes. It was particularly irritating since it was totally ambiguous. Nobody knows to this day who really killed Harry Oakes, and the script maintained the mystery, so everything shown after the murder was essentially hogwash except for the one great romantic moment pictured above.

• The second problem? Well, I think I mentioned the rhetorical dialogue a couple of times. This film really called for a no-bullshit director who could tell the story in an interesting way and allow the situations to present their own meanings. I think Clint Eastwood would have been perfect, inasmuch as he was extraordinarily successful with a similarly long and rambling story in The Outlaw Josey Wales. Instead of Clint, we got artsy-fartsy Nick Roeg, a confused story teller with no good sense of a strong campfire tale. The characters kept trying to intellectualize with philosophical musings and long speeches, all of which served to try to reveal points which were already evident (or should have been) in the plot and visuals.

The film is separated into three acts, like a classical tragedy. In Act One, Harry is in the Yukon prospecting, and this all leads to his strike. In Act Two, Harry and his family are trying to find some meaning to their lives in the Bahamas, and this all leads to his death. Act Three is the trial, and it really leads nowhere, except to an unexpected "not guilty" and an inconclusive ending.

In the trial scene, with the down-to-earth Hackman already dead and buried, we are left with Hauer and Russell exchanging lofty, philosophical, poetic, dreamy thoughts about their life together, supposedly while she was on the witness stand and he was acting as his own lawyer. (Very realistic court procedure! The judge and lawyers just sat patiently as they made goo-goo eyes at one another.) The director brought this act out of left field and tried to turn this part of the film into something like Murder in the Cathedral. Except for the richly imagined final minute, all of Act Three could have been handled better with a word slide telling us the result of the trial.

The first part of the film was also strange, actually surrealistic, but was so brilliantly filmed that the surrealism worked. It is a nearly wordless portrayal of a frostbitten Harry striking gold underneath the frozen lake, climaxing with Harry being swept away by a river of gold generated by an explosion. Act One constitutes one of the most impressively filmed and imagined sequences in film history, and is nearly perfect except when Harry and his fortune-telling prostitute are speaking. When director Nick Roeg could concentrate on images and poetry, he was brilliant, as he was through most of this sequence. It was in the natural interaction of people and the simple logic of storytelling that Roeg was overmatched. Roeg was a classic example of the Peter Principle, a brilliant cinematographer who worked his way up to a directing job, and settled in there, at his level of incompetence. By the way, Roeg, now 76, is still at it. He will have a new film out in 2004, Adina, "a philosophical horror film that explores love, sex and death across the universe." Well, I guess he's changed his ways. Nothing pretentious about that.

Actually, the second part of Eureka also suffered from a multitude of oddball digressions. The Count was into some kind of native pagan rituals as well as Kabbalah, and this generates plenty of pseudo-mystical baloney and hifalutin' conversations which serve little purpose.

Ultimately, it should have been Harry's story, and it should have ended with Harry's death, sculpting a sad commentary on a man who achieved everything he had dreamt of for the first forty years of his life, and then could never find a way to enjoy it, because the process of achieving his dream changed the man who dreamt it in the first place. And the director should have let us see that point for ourselves inside of the story, instead of having the characters deliver soliloquies about it.