"Auto Focus"

Greg Kinnear's brilliant performance honors the pervert star of "Hogan's Heroes" in this sordid tale of a creepy charmer's fatal descent into the fleshpots.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Oct 18, 2002 | There's an important lesson to be learned from both the sad and sordid life of Bob Crane and Paul Schrader's movie about it, "Auto Focus": A cautionary tale is only as good as the actor who carries it on his back.

"Auto Focus" is so well-intentioned, and so sympathetic toward its subject, that I found myself reaching out toward it instinctively -- to close down to it would only seem inhumane. But as both a movie and a fable, it nearly buckles under the weight of its own intentions, at least partly because Crane, a major celebrity in the pantheon of '60s TV sitcoms but a minor one in every other respect, can barely carry the weight of his own story. Crane's saga is sad, all right. But he's still damn lucky, as Schrader is, to have Greg Kinnear around to give it the shape and heft it just doesn't have on its own.

In "Auto Focus" Kinnear pulls off the feat of making us feel something for Crane, the smirky but popular actor who starred in "Hogan's Heroes" from the series' beginning, in 1965, until its end, in 1971. Crane lives on in infamy, as well as in reruns: From the late '60s until his murder, in 1978, he amassed hours and hours' worth of pornographic videotape documenting his sexual encounters with a seemingly endless number of women -- women who were, we suppose, easily seduced by the power of his celebrity. The videos had been made on equipment supplied to him by a guy named John Carpenter, who became a longtime friend or a hanger-on, depending on how you look at it. Carpenter was a suspect in Crane's murder, although he was tried and found innocent. (He died in 1998 at age 70.)

Schrader, working from a script by Michael Gerbosi (which was adapted from Robert Graysmith's book "The Murder of Bob Crane"), traces Crane's life from the mid-'60s, when he was working as an amiable disc jockey in Southern California while looking for work as an actor, to his death. The picture's first half is the most effective: Crane has an ostensibly well-balanced, nicely manicured life with his high-school sweetheart and wife Anne (Rita Wilson, in a sharply observed performance) and their several children.

When his agent, Lenny (Ron Leibman), tells him about the "Hogan's Heroes" role, he's understandably dubious about a show set in a World War II prison camp. But he and Anne talk about it; she reads the sample script and decides it's funny. She urges Crane to give it a closer look. The scenes are significant, as Schrader films them and as the actors play them, because they establish the easy intellectual rapport at work in the marriage, a connection that seems to be forged less out of marital habit than from the daily pleasure that comes from living with another human being to whom you're well suited.

It's clear that Anne has more common sense than her husband does, but the downside of that is that, like many women of her era, she's fueled by the drive to be normal, conventional and proper; the couple's attempt to be good Roman Catholics makes the going even tougher. She's upset by the stacks of girlie magazines she finds in her husband's garage darkroom (he's what they used to call, in the old days, a "photography enthusiast," as well as an amateur jazz drummer), and worries that their mere presence means she isn't enough for him.

The unfortunate truth is that she isn't -- although of course, the magazines don't have anything to do with that. "Auto Focus" never presumes to suggest that if you hide porn in your garage, you'll turn into a sex addict like Bob Crane. Yet there is something searchingly innocent about the way Schrader attempts to trace Crane's ultimately unhealthy obsession with sex back to the harmless sexual preoccupations of normal, red-blooded males everywhere.

As Schrader sees it, the mid-'60s Bob Crane -- the Crane who still worked hard at being faithful to his wife -- lived in a world papered with nudie cuties, women who were only as real (and as "damaging") as the magazine stock they were printed on but who gave infinite pleasure just by baring a nipple or two or winking flirtatiously. (Later in the movie, long after Crane's obsessions have begun to mess up his life and his career, he keeps asserting that he's just a guy who likes sex, and how normal and healthy that is -- the desperate words of a man who protests too much.)

Crane's role on "Hogan's Heroes" led to the kind of notoriety that made it easy to score babes, as well as to attract the wrong sort of friends. Carpenter is played by Willem Dafoe with both lizardlike ooziness and a sometimes touching vulnerability -- it's a weird mix, but it works. Carpenter is without a doubt the wrong sort of friend. Crane first meets him on the "Hogan's Heroes" lot -- he's an audio whiz who's installing some fancy equipment in the trailer of fellow "Hogan's" star Richard Dawson (Michael Rodgers). (One of the movie's more entertaining sub-threads is the way it keeps circling back to Dawson and Crane's dislike for one another; the irony is that Dawson comes off as the bigger creep.) Carpenter introduces Crane to the then-fledgling video technology; before long, he's got Crane hooked on the sleaziest of its 1,001 uses.

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