A Major Disappointment

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Blistering performances.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Paul Verhoeven like Dario Argento and Brian DePalma, is a film-maker who likes to answer his critics via his work. After having worked in films that were approached in a more realistic and naturalistic milieu (1973's 'Turkish Delight', 1980's 'Spetters'), Verhoeven found in a novel by Gerard Reve a perfect collective of ideas that suited what would become his cinema; dark eroticism, religious imagery, the Catholic tension of woman worship and misogyny, death, and the grip ideas of the fantastique can have on the mind. He completely embraced the 'Giallo' approach and blends sex and death in a delicious cocktail of suspense and imagery in 'The Fourth Man'.A tale of seduction and paranoia is told via a writer of lurid pulp fiction, Gerard Reve (yes the novelist names the lead character after himself!). Appearing as a keynote speaker at a book seminar, he responds to a questioner who asks how he can still be a Catholic with all science has taught us; "Being Catholic means having imagination!" Catholic, homosexual and alcoholic, he is bursting with emotional tension, ripe for hysteria; "I lie the truth, until I no longer know whether something did or didn't happen." Over the opening credits a spider traps flies in its web, religious iconography is introduced as the web is spun over a crucifix. Verhoeven quickly establishes the fact that Reve has a dark psyche and darker fantasies, such as strangling his male lover with whom he shares a mutual loathing; he quickly and constantly slips into 'Walter Mitty' like daydream fantasy. When he takes a train to the seminar illustrates well Reve's mind-set; he reads a billboard 'Jesus Is Everywhere,' as a young mother boards the train. She offers her son an 'apple' and fashions a circle out of the peel, which as she manipulates it for a moment resembles a halo over the baby's head.Linking sex and death and self-destructiveness is achieved when Reve asks a gentleman at the station if he has come to collect him. The man replies "I doubt it" as a coffin is wheeled towards him; the following discussion establishes the corpse had a beautiful death, as he was about Reve's age and died in bed "on top of some senorita in Spain." As a homosexual it is curious as to why Reve becomes interested in Christine Halsslag. She does have short hair, but is also voluptuous; he covers her breasts with his hands when they first have sex; as he ejaculates he exclaims "through Mary to Jesus!" Coincidence comes into play when Reve discovers Christine is seeing Herman, a man that Reve bumped into before catching his train. He wants to meet Herman; "What a body… what a piece!"Reve essentially ends up as the requisite 'Giallo' outsider, who finds himself in the position of trying to solve a mystery; 'did Christine kill her previous husbands?' His sight is certainly brought into question. Verhoeven has fashioned a world that at times borrows the lurid surrealism of Argento's 'Suspiria', and photography that frequently mimics the soft focus over saturated white flaring of a DePalma film of this era. There is a nice bit of eyeball gouging in a car accident that would be at home in an Umberto Lenzi 'Giallo.'Loosely remade by Verhoeven in Hollywood as 'Basic Instinct'; he considers 'The 4th Man' to be a 'spiritual prequel.'

Paul Verhoeven's earlier Dutch thriller follows a superstitious writer (Jeroen Krabbe) who meets an eccentric woman attending one of his public seminars and begins an affair with her; while staying at her home for an extended period, he is plagued with disturbing visions and incidents, and becomes infatuated with one of her other male lovers.Fans of Verhoeven's neo-noir classic "Basic Instinct" should find plenty of interest here, as the films cross paths in terms of some thematics and the cinematic aspect of the lover's triad, though "The Fourth Man" is actually a much better film in some ways. While not as remarkably violent as some of his other work, it is a solid and transfixing thriller that is as perturbing as it is engaging; as off putting as it is erotic. Verhoeven wears influences on his sleeve, clearly drawing on ye good old days of American Hollywood noir with spatterings of Alfred Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman for good taste. The touches of surrealism are prevalent enough to arrest the audience, but are still left in an inconspicuous enough territory to be debated and thought provoking. Never does the film edge into gaudiness, which is another remarkable feat here— the surrealist colorings are wholly immersed in the reality of the story, blending into an endless portrait of premonitions, fears, and paranoia that is still firmly anchored in a cohesive plot.Remarkable performances here from Jeroen Krabbé and Renée Soutendijk, as well as Thom Hoffman's understated performance as the object of Krabbé's intense sexual affections. Among a multitude of other things, the film is truly a pioneer of queer cinema, brazen in its depiction of male homosexuality and laden with surprisingly baffling religious, supernatural, and feminist themes that are difficult to decipher in spite of their obvious existence within.No less, "The Fourth Man" is one of the most transfixing thrillers of its time, brilliantly crafting the surreal alongside the darker aspects of film noir, all taken to understated extremes. While many people probably think of David Lynch as the first filmmaker to do this, you may be surprised to know that Paul Verhoeven was toying with similar elements back in Netherlands in the 1980s; while Lynch infamously took this to subconscious levels, Verhoeven rather leaves us somewhere in the middle— in a dream, or maybe in a nightmare. 9/10.

I don't know if I'd consider it a masterpiece of not, but it's damn near close; it's extremely well made, artistic, suspenseful, intricately plotted, thematically challenging and full of bleak foreshadowing and sexual-religious imagery. There's also some great camera-work from Jan de Bont, an atmospheric score from Loek Dikker and outstanding acting from Jeroen Krabbé and Renée Soutendijk, the latter giving one of the most sneaky, subtle 'femme fatale' performance I've ever seen. Like many other European movies, this movie has an unashamed, non-judgmental attitude toward sex, nudity and the complexities of sexuality and has zero reservations about mixing it all up with religious and/or surrealistic (some would say blasphemous) images. In other words, if you can't bear the thought of seeing a lust-driven homosexual envisioning the object of his carnal desire as Jesus crucified on the cross before the two of them go at it inside a cemetery crypt then this might not be the movie for you. What surprised me more is how this bizarre movie managed to completely dodge being a pretentious mess. It mixes the abstract/surreal/parallel fantasy-reality scenes and somehow makes it all work. Like any good mystery, you can see the pieces slowly falling into place as the movie progresses. There is NOT an out-of-left-field resolution here. The movie has direction, there's no needless filler and once it concludes, you begin to understand the purpose of what may have confused you earlier. If you like the work of Ken Russell and David Lynch, I can almost guarantee you will love this movie. Hell, if you have no idea who they even are, you still might like it.I'm not going to spoil the plot by getting too detailed, but the film's opening shot - through a web as a spider catches its prey - sets the stage as Krabbé, as unshaven, smug, bisexual writer Gerard Reve (interestingly, also the name of the writer whose novel this is based on) crosses paths with a wealthy, mysterious, sexy woman named Christine (Soutendijk, melding androgynous stylings with Simone Simon-like innocence/cuteness that's pretty unnerving), who may be a literal 'black widow' responsible for the deaths of her three previous husbands. The two become lovers and move in with one another, but we're led to believe (through Christine's bizarre behavior and the frequent appearances of another woman - played by Geert de Jong - who may or may not actually exist) something terrible is boiling under the surface. When another of Christine's lovers, the young and "beautiful" Herman (Thom Hoffman), shows up at the house, things take an unexpected turn. And that's all you need to know.THE 4TH MAN was a huge art-house success in much of the world, but didn't make it over to the US until 1984, where it was awarded the Best Foreign Film of the year from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. The most common video is the Media release, which has been horribly dubbed. Try to avoid that one and head straight for the newer subtitled Anchor Bay DVD release. Since coming to America, Verhoeven's career has had its ups and downs. He has made a few decent films (Flesh & Blood, RoboCop) and some lousy ones (Showgirls). In fact, Verhoeven's big hit Basic Instinct is almost like a less interesting, junior league version of The Fourth Man. Soutendjik also tried her hand at acting in America and since GRAVE SECRETS (1989) and EVE OF DESTRUCTION (1991) were the best offers she was getting, she headed right back home to the Netherlands.

This is the last Dutch language film Paul Verhoeven made before going on to make mainstream Hollywood films "Basic Instinct," "Robocop," and "Total Recall," among others. He sets the stage by opening this story with a black widow spider catching prey in her web before we meet Gerard Reve, an annoying self-centered writer with a morbid imagination. Gerard has been invited to be the guest speaker at a Literary Club meeting in sea-side town an hour or so from Amsterdam. Verhoeven lets us have glimpses of how Gerard's imagination twists reality. Asked if writers are a bit close to insanity he admits when he reads the newspaper "and it says 'boom' I read 'doom,' when it says 'flood' I read 'blood,' when it says 'red' I see 'dead.'" When he tells a story enough times he begins to believe it; "I lie the truth." He accepts an offer to be the overnight guest of the Club treasurer, a beautiful wealthy salon owner. As he gets to know her and learns her husband has died, he begins to imagine she is 'a black widow.' Is this his more of his reality twist or is she a murderess? This is a psychological drama and in recounting which of these old films have stuck in my memory, I figured out is my favorite gender. Looking at his body of work it is seems to be Paul Verhoeven's too, and he is a master in making us question our own understanding of reality. It's a nice change of pace from the usual Hollywood fare. I saw it in 1983 and it is a film that "stuck."