Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11551 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-02-24
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Anamorphic, PAL
• Original language: Dutch
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 98 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Only two years separate The Fourth Man, the final Dutch language movie by director Paul Verhoeven, and the explosive commencement of his Hollywood career. Controversy raged about violence in Flesh + Blood, RoboCop and everything else he made thereafter. Yet controversy has always been a part of the filmmaker's work. This savage comedy shocker could well be seen as a trial run for Basic Instinct, since it features an ice-cold seductress (Renee Soutendijk) with mysterious motivations and sexual preferences. The hallucinatory tale follows a novelist (Jeroen Krabbé) first falling for her, and then feverishly investigating whether she's a serial husband killer. The film is full of what would soon be recognised as Verhoeven trademarks: a little blasphemy, a lot of nudity, dispassionate characters and hidden agendas. One of the aspects that caught the eye of international audiences was the film's colourful lighting and camerawork. This was from Jan de Bont, who, thanks in large part to Verhoeven, would go on to direct Speed and others. Many prints of the movie were edited around the world, but it's presented here uncut. Full of symbolic flourishes and allegorical plot points, this is a dizzying display of the type of black comedy that not even Verhoeven can get away with in today's politically aware industry. --Paul Tonks

Special Features
Anamorphic Wide Screen
DVD 5
Dutch
Region 0
Dolby Digital Dutch
Dolby Digital
Star And Director Filmographies
Scene Selection
David Parkinson Film Notes
Original Theatrical Trailer
World Cinema Trailer Reel
English

Synopsis
Paul Verhoeven (BASIC INSTINCT, STARSHIP TROOPERS) won international acclaim for this sexy, gory film noir. Christine (Renee Soutendijk) is a three time widow with a mysterious past and a new lover, Herman (Thom Hoffman). Enter Gerard Reve (Jeroen Krabbe), the bisexual writer of several controversial novels. Unable to resist the alluring Christine, he also finds himself attracted to Herman. Unfortunately he always begins to believe that the deaths of Christine's past husbands were not accidental and that he and Herman may also be living on borrowed time. But is Christine a killer, or is Gerard merely coming undone

Customer Reviews

Verhoeven's Groundbreaking Film
Previously dismissed as a soft porn filmmaker in Europe, Verhoeven decided to make a film so overloaded with symbolism and foreshadowing that the gullible critics would call it "high art". And they did.

The plot is simple but fun, including all Verhoeven's specialties - sex, frontal nudity, explicit gore (castration-ouch!), etc. When the main character (a drunken poor writer) is determined to meet a young man he cruised at a magazine shop, he also discovers the woman who helped organize his book readings is dating the youngster. He's off and manages to get both in the sack. One example of symbolic overkill: The writer discovers three black film canisters in her house revealing the "accidental" deaths of her three previous husbands. Later, after he gets the young man to have sex in a mausoleum, he spots three black urn canisters containing the woman's three prior husband's ashes! Now come on! I won't even get into the 'Virgin Mary' sightings!

However, despite the overload on ALL levels, it makes for a great art-house film and one you'll watch over and over. (If your eyeball doesn't get poked out - movie hint - more symbolism).

This film enabled Verhoeven to proceed to make such classics as "Basic Instinct" and "Showgirls". Trivia: Main actor Jeroen Kraabe was the evil doctor who framed Harrison Ford in "The Fugitive". Best extra is the inclusion of Verhoeven's director's commentary. He is one clever personality!

Surreal, atmospheric, coolly erotic thriller with shades of hidden depth
Well known for being something of a run-through for the infamous Basic Instinct (1992), The Fourth Man (1983) remains one of maverick director Paul Verhoeven's greatest works. Like Basic Instinct, The Fourth Man blends sex and death in a delicious cocktail of mystery, suspense and exaggerated imagery; telling a story of seduction and paranoia through the eyes and mind of an unreliable narrator. In this instance, Gerard Reve; an alcoholic writer of lurid pulp fiction, who in the film's subtle and darkly sardonic opening sequence, staggers out of bed, naked and hung-over, and - in a scene of quiet confusion and matter of fact precision - garrottes his homosexual lover to the point of asphyxiation. Right from the start, Verhoeven is skilfully introducing those aforementioned themes of sex and death, as well as establishing the air of incredibly dark humour, symbolism and that sense of blurring the lines between fact and fiction to near incomprehensible levels of uncertainty, all of which will permeate the film's very core.

Verhoeven has often claimed that the somewhat skewed, surreal and heavily atmospheric look and feel of the film was purposely stylised to an almost obvious degree in order to placate the high-brow Dutch film critics who had, at that particular time in his career, dismissed previous films such as Keetje Tippel (1975) and Spetters (1980) as lurid sensationalism. Whether or not this is the case is open to debate, but what most impresses here is Verhoeven's energy and skill in presenting such a taut and labyrinthine thriller that seems to draw as much on the surreal and coolly evocative psychodrama of a filmmaker like Ingmar Bergman as it does on the twisted world of Alfred Hitchcock. From beginning to end, The Fourth Man offers old fashioned suspense and bold strokes of drama, all contrasted and juxtaposed against the director's moody, European style and liberal bursts of violence and eroticism. The design of the film - rich with over-saturated light and colour, shades of autumn and lingering camera movements - suggest a world hinged somewhere between the noir-like stylisation of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970) and the vibrant, lurid surrealism of Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977), to add further depths to the already densely layered mystery, and to create a world that seems real, but at the same time, entirely dreamlike.

The film works on a number of levels; on the one-hand, as a piece of pure entertainment, with Verhoeven's always memorable use of imagery - both grotesque and beautiful - and his scenes of upfront and often confrontational violence and sexuality. The film is as much about sexuality and desire as it is about sex; with Gerard introduced initially as gay, though he later has an affair with the central femme-fatale, but only after he has flattened her small breasts with his hands and confessed that she "looks like a boy". Later in the film he will seduce the fiancé of this character and again raise questions pertaining to the film's central enigma. In the most telling scene, Gerard attends a Q&A session for his new book. When someone in the audience asks him about his secret for writing, Gerard replies "I lie the truth". Perhaps a poor subtitle translation, but the implication that Gerard sees the world through a somewhat false perspective is certainly there; with the further elements of alcoholism, sexual confusion, lust and paranoia creating a fascinating central character, quite possibly creating the story in his mind as it moves along.

There are Hitchcockian allusions as noted, with the cold, blonde femme-fatale person represented by Christine, who has an air of subtle menace and great sexuality. Is Gerard seducing her or is she seducing Gerard, and just why have three of her past husbands turned up dead in recent years? Is Gerard imagining all of this? Is he genuinely interested in Christine, or is he more interested in getting closer to the man in her life? Are his reasons purely sexual or are they a further fuelled by his lurid obsessions with death? Questions like this crop up constantly with The Fourth Man, with Verhoeven denying the audience easy answers and instead plunging headlong into surreal visions of rotting eyeballs, strung-up meat carcasses, puddles of blood and the juxtaposition of homoerotic yearning with Christ-like metaphors. There's also a continual use of black-widow symbolism apparent right from the start, as well as all the elements coming together at the end in a sort of tragic foreshadowing of events. Even then, do we believe Gerard and his wild accusations, or is this just another example of the alcoholic, over-sexed writer "lying the truth" for the purposes of fiction.

The Fourth Man is a film that I haven't seen in a long time, but its images and story have always stayed with me. On my initial viewing in 2001, my familiarity with Verhoeven was based purely on his satirical Hollywood pictures, principally Robocop (1986), Total Recall (1991) and Starship Troopers (1997). I was also fairly unfamiliar with European cinema in general, meaning that the film's bold scenes of both straight and gay sex, nudity and imagined (or are they?) scenes of surreal, sexualised violence were a real revelation. A few years later I returned to the film and found it just as fascinating; with the labyrinthine plot, moody visuals, bold performances and totally entrancing story and character drawing me in; offering a great central mystery that is visually captivating and rife with a myriad of potential interpretations. It's easy to say that The Fourth Man is one of my favourite films; filled with cool irony, controversial images and ideas, and a completely fascinating, dreamlike evocation of the story at hand.

Not so delightful as the Delight, but still a masterpiece
Coming to the Fourth Man, for some Verhoeven's masterpiece, after the experience of the Turkish Delight, one is equipped with a certain set of expectations: high erotic charge with a fetishist's delight in the body, both male and female, loose narrative, etc. All these ingredients are there in the Fourth Man, even if the mixture is not nearly as delicious as in the Delight. The biggest asset of the film is its brilliantly crafted menage a trois: the dark eroticism of the Spider Woman so intriguingly portrayed in the cover of the Tartan DVD is totally upstaged by an undercurrent of homosexual attraction between two of its intended victims, the tormented author and the young vagabond. The author's predatory pursuit of the young lad is so obsessive that the boundaries between the hunter and the hunted are blurred. The supernatural is never far from the surface in this film, although Verhoeven is not very comfortable dealing with it. The Marianic epiphanies at times ring alost parodic, but they do succeed in confusing reality and illusion thus ipmrinting upon the viewer the point that the narrative of the film is filtered through a troubled mind