The Last Embrace

In 1979, Jonathan Demme was still a cutting-edge director and The Last Embrace was his first effort at a completely commercial assignment. Very much in the Hitchcock vein, The Last Embrace is an intense suspense film concerning Harry Hannan (Roy Scheider), a government agent recovering from a ...more

Jonathan Demme's first big-budget studio production is an interesting precursor to his 1991 success The Silence of the Lambs. The style of the film is deliberately Hitchcockian -- right down to the bell-tower reference to Vertigo (1958) -- but, unlike lesser copy-cats, Demme has a unique viewpoint under the homage. His characters are complex people with realistic moral ambiguities, and Roy Scheider, in a subtle, often non-verbal characterization, gives one of his best performances as the ...more