Verdict
Summary
Overlong at 139 minutes, The Spiral Road feels like it’s two or three movies in one, and so it’s an investment. Jerry Goldsmith provides an excellent score to the film, and that’s one of the highlights.
Plot:
A young doctor travels to Indonesia to treat leprosy with a much more seasoned doctor, but his destiny has some surprises in store.
Review:
Fresh from medical school, young doctor Anton Drager (Rock Hudson) travels to an Indonesian outpost in the late 1930’s and requests to be transferred deep into the jungles where he hopes to work on research for leprosy with a much more seasoned doctor named Jansen (Burl Ives), whom the other doctors believe has basically gone native because he’s long stopped submitting his research and has basically gone off the grid. Drager’s request is approved, and when he eventually makes it to the village where Jansen has been living for many years, he impresses Jansen with his keen, intuitive eye for spotting leprosy, as well as being a no-nonsense doctor who really seems to be the right guy to work with Jansen and perhaps one day be his successor. Over the next few years, Drager marries his sweetheart (played by Gena Rowlands), which greatly upsets Jansen because he believes it will distract him from his work, but when Drager takes all of Jansen’s research and plans to use it as his own in “civilization” to advance his own career, Jansen disowns him and they split ways. Drager goes deeper into the jungle and spends the next few years on his own doing his own research with the natives, but when an encounter with a witch doctor turns his whole world upside down, Drager disappears into the jungle altogether and eventually a rescue mission is undertaken to recover him and save him …
A sprawling story that almost feels like two or three movies in one, The Spiral Road really does live up to its title, and it goes on and on for two hours and twenty minutes, which is far too long for this film, as it never ends. The last third of the film are baffling in how it goes off on an almost surreal tangent as it follows Hudson’s character as he loses touch with reality and becomes a shell of a man, wandering around in the jungle by himself for months (years?), just barely surviving and going insane. It doesn’t really fit with the tone of the movie that came before, and so it’s an interesting development to be sure. Jerry Goldsmith’s score provides a lovely and sometimes majestic and beautiful counterpoint to the film, and Robert Mulligan directed it.
Kino Lorber has just issued a Blu-ray edition of The Spiral Road, and it has a very satisfactory image transfer, an audio commentary by a film historian, and the trailer. No slipcover for this one.
