This is the purported behind the scenes “true life” story of actor Bob Crane, known mostly as Colonel Hogan on the 1960’s TV show “Hogan’s Heroes”. There would never be a behind the scenes movie about Bob Crane if he wasn’t an apparent sex addict who was clubbed to death in a hotel room. This guy was no big star – do you even know anything he did besides “Hogan’s Heroes”?
The attraction here is the strange “double life” the guy lived. Here he was the basic suburban Dad, father of three, and when the movie opens in 1964, an LA disc jockey. But inside of him was this sex maniac dying to sleep with as many women as possible, and to videotape it . All it took was to meet the “right guy”.
That guy would be John Carpenter, played by Willem Dafoe. An audio-visual freak, Carpenter and Crane bond first over the latest camera equipment, then later they share the passion of sex orgies. They top it off by filming themselves and enjoying the playbacks. It’s an odd relationship, but what is even stranger is the feeling you get watching this movie. Was Crane such a cipher? He was like this thirteen year- old kid who didn’t start smoking until he hung out with the “wrong crowd”. Is that all it took? I kept thinking that whoever wrote this movie either didn’t know Bob Crane, or Crane was such a simpleton, a follower, that he gave in to all temptation simply because it was put in front of him. Then I realized he was a DJ and an actor, and believe me, there’s no great IQ points to be found in either of those professions.
Crane is played by Greg Kinnear, and I don’t fault him. There’s just so much missing and the lack of insight makes the movie boring at times. I saw Crane’s second wife, one of his co-stars on “Hogan’s Heroes’, on “20-20’ last week and I got more from her than I did watching nearly two hours of this guys life on the screen. Of course, her objection to the movie is that it doesn’t show what a great Dad he was and that she never objected to his sex parties. She knew he really loved her, and that other stuff was just about sex. She divorced him anyway, claiming he showed some of his homemade porn to their young son. By the way, that kid is now over thirty years old and has a website with the dirty pictures of his Dad on it. Interesting family, isn’t it?
Which is, again, why I was frustrated with this movie. It wasn’t all that interesting. I felt they were going through the motions and not getting to the heart of the story. They barely even showed any nudity. What was really going on between this guy Carpenter and Bob Crane. Was Carpenter just a “glom-on”, using Crane’s fame to get chicks, or was he romantically interested in Crane too? There is one funny scene where Crane freaks out as he watches the porn and notices Carpenter’s hand on his rear end. Random orgy stuff or is there more to it? And as for Crane’s murder, you can really forget it. Much like his life, that was never solved.
“Auto Focus” suffers because you can’t see if there’s any “there” there. Yes, this was the 1960’s and 70’s and people just didn’t talk about these things. I know that. But a little insight would have helped. Crane comes off like dope, just following the leads of others. By the way, the crowd I saw this movie with was a mixture of dirty looking old men and some high school class of teenagers. . Was the teacher trying to give them a morality tale or he just wanted to see the movie and the class got in the way? It was strange. Anyway, I give “Auto Focus” a “5.0”.
