FRIDAY NIGHT MOVIE: WHO? (1973) ELLIOTT GOULD

aka Roboman, The Man in the Steel Mask is an early 70s paranoid thriller oddity. It came out the same year as Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye; Elliot Gould starred in both.

as Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye (1973)

A top American physicist attends a conference in East Germany but ends up in a suspicious car accident. He is forced to get re-construction surgery in East Germany and gets metal implants. The rest of the film is Elliot Gould’s US Agent trying to figure out if he is the real deal or a spy for the Germans. Trevor Howard co-stars as a Russian general.

Released in 1973 after a prolonged dry spell for Gould, “Who?” is a decidedly minor blip in Gould’s overall career. A rather gentle drama about a gentle, misunderstood man.

An American physicist who gets in a car wreck during a visit to Russia, after which surgeons replace his face, organs and the bulk of his limbs with those of a cyborg. For the rest of the film (based on Algis Budrys’ novel), a government agent (Gould) and his team try to figure out if the scientist’s mutation story checks out or if he’s actually a Russian spy.

 

Gould had more to say about the time period in which he shot “Who?” than the film itself.

“When Bob [Altman] was putting together ‘California Split,’ thinking we were gonna do it with Steve McQueen, at that point I was in Munich making an interesting B-movie called ‘Who?’ Maximilian Schell showed me his picture ‘The Pedestrian,’ and in it, he says, ‘The closer you are, the less you can see.’ As I said, I was more than just confused, I was so ignorant as to how [the industry] worked.”

Director: Jack Gold
Screenplay: John Gould (based on the novel by Algis Budrys)
Producer: Barry Levinson
Elliott Gould            Sean Rogers
Trevor Howard     Colonel Azarin
Joseph Bova        Lucas Martino
Edward Grover     Finchley
John Lehne          Haller
James Noble        General Deptford

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