It’s the wildest, funniest, fastest moving adventure comedy you’ve never seen! Steve Guttenberg (Police Academy, Short Circuit) stars as Sam Cooper, a minor State Department functionary in Washington D.C., who becomes the object of a frenetic chase when a dying secret agent hands him a vial containing a top-secret formula that can render a person invisible. Sam immediately drinks the formula to keep one step ahead of Soviet spies, American counterspies, the police (who think Sam murdered the agent), thugs and Sam’s estranged fiancée (who was left standing at the altar when this all began)—until he can find the mysterious “Runkelman” and clear this name. H.G. Wells was never like this! Written by Stanford Sherman (Krull, The Ice Pirates); directed by Bruce Malmuth (Nighthawks, Hard to Kill); and co-starring Jeffrey Tambor (Arrested Development), Art Hindle (The Brood), Lisa Langlois (Class of 1984) and William Forsythe (Stone Cold). This special edition of The Man Who Wasn’t There presents the film remastered in 3-D by 3-D Film Archive!
As embodied by Alan Bates, Butley falls back on the surgically precise wit and savage eloquence that helped put him in his current circumstances in the first place. The blitzkrieg of vitriolic commentary with which Butley engages lovers, students, rivals, and allies, all with equal ferocity, becomes a glass bottom boat illuminating the churning depths of his bankrupted soul. Acclaimed playwright Harold Pinter, in what Time Magazine hailed as “a quite superior directorial debut,” turns author Simon Gray’s single-set, dialogue driven stage play into an irresistible dynamic visual experience that tracks Bates’ hilarious and fearless performance with cunning precision.
Bates and an expert supporting cast, including Oscar® winner Jessica Tandy (Driving Miss Daisy), joust with a sly, self-referencing wit and an unselfconscious exuberance that is breathtaking. With every verbal parry and valedictory flourish of wordplay, Butley’s life becomes more of an inescapable bear trap of thwarted ambition, clandestine affection, and squandered brilliance.
