The Andromeda Strain (1971)

This superior science fiction outing pits four dedicated scientists against a microscopic menace capable of destroying all life on Earth. Its critics have labeled it slow-moving and overlong, but I find it intellectually exciting. Its thrills come not from action sequences (though there’s doozy at the climax), but from the time-sensitive need to determine: What is the Andromeda Strain? How can it be destroyed? Why did a 69-year-old man and a six-month baby survive when Andromeda wiped out a New Mexico town of 68 people?

The scientists converge on Wildfire, a biological threat containment lab in Nevada, when a satellite returns to Earth with an unknown (alien?) organism. The Wildfire team consists of: Jeremy Stone (Arthur Hill), the leader; Ruth Levitt (Kate Reid), the cynic; Mark Hall (James Olson), the passionate physician; and Charlie Dutton (David Wayne), the skeptic who wonders if their goal should be destroying Andromeda. You could say that there’s a fifth member of the team and that’s the Wildfire lab itself. One of my favorite scenes in the movie is a virtual tour of the five-level, underground facility as the team goes through decontamination and immunization procedures.

Director Robert Wise divides the film into two parts. The first half details the recovery of the satellite and the discovery of what it has done to Piedmont, New Mexico. There’s a chilling scene in which Stone and Hall explore the ghost town of dead bodies. As Hall cuts a vein on one of the corpses, powdered blood pours out—an indication of what Andromeda does to its victims. The second half of the film shifts the action to Wildfire, where the scientists turn detective and try to solve the mystery of why the old man and the baby survived.

Part of the appeal for me is that The Andromeda Strain includes one of my favorite plot devices: the forming of a team in which each member is introduced to the audience (I call this the Robin Hood theme since that’s the first film I can remember that used it). I also admire how Wise uses scrolls at the bottom of the screen to convey the time and locale. It’s an obvious device now, but The Andromeda Strain may have been one of the first films to use it.

Surprisingly, Wise was not a science fiction specialist, though he also directed the splendid The Day the Earth Stood. He was equally at home with musicals (The Sound of Music, West Side Story),  horror (The Body Snatcher), and psychological drama (The Haunting). He spent the early 1940s as a editor, working on films such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Citizen Kane, and My Favorite Wife. I think that experience provided him with insight into the pacing of a film narrative. In The Andromeda Strain, he takes a documentary-like, scientific drama and turns it into an exiting, time-driven mystery--that's no easy feat.

The lack of well-known stars also works to the film's advantage. The nominal star, Arthur Hill, forged his career in television, guest starring series such as The Fugitive, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and The Defenders. In the 1970s,  he finally got his show as Owen Marshall, Counselor-at-Law, an above-average legal drama that ran on ABC for three seasons. On the big screen, Hill's most significant role prior to Andromeda was as Paul Newman's friend in Harper.

I first saw The Andromeda Strain as a teenager with my sister and best friend. I remember liking it, especially the ending. However, it wasn’t until I saw it on television many years later that it became one of my favorite movies.

Underrated Performer of the Week: Arthur Hill

On the big and small screens, Arthur Hill specialized in portraying low-key, authoritative characters in films like The Andromeda Strain and TV series like Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law…so it’s ironic that his most famous role was as the sarcastic, volatile George in Edward Albee’s stage play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Arthur Hill was born in 1922 in Melfort, a small Saskatchewan town in Canada. He studied pre-law at the University of British Columbia, where his attendance was interrupted by a stint in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II. After the war, he returned to college with the goal of following in his father’s footsteps as a lawyer. He supported himself in school by working in radio and eventually became interested in acting.

He moved to Great Britain in 1948 and worked in radio, television, and on the stage. He built a strong resume of theatre credits before relocating to New York. His first Broadway role was opposite Ruth Gordon in The Matchmaker in 1955. He followed it with impressive performances in Look Homeward, Angel (1957), The Gang’s All Here (1959), and All the Way Home (1960). His stage career reached its pinnacle when he won the Tony for Best Actor as George opposite Uta Hagen’s Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1962.

Throughout the late 1950s and the 1960s, Hill appeared regularly as a guest star in television series like The Fugitive, Route 66, The Invaders, and Mission: Impossible. He was in multiple episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The F.B.I., and The Name of the Game. His guest stint in the lawyer series The Defenders and Judd for the Defense foreshadowed his most famous TV role.

In 1971, Arthur Hill played the lead in the two-hour TV movie Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law. The resulting TV series ran on ABC from 1971-1974 and starred Hill as a compassionate, intelligent lawyer whose cases ranged from civil rights to murder. Lee Majors, David Soul, and (briefly) Reni Santoni each played Marshall’s assistant at various stages of the show’s run. The series performed modestly in the ratings, despite four “crossover episodes” with the much more successful Marcus Welby, M.D. (produced by the same company). The 1971 episode “Eulogy for a Wide Receiver” was directed by a young Steven Spielberg. Despite good reviews, even from the legal profession, Owen Marshall never captured the public’s fancy.

Hill’s most famous film role also came in 1971, when he starred as the head of a team of scientists trying to combat The Andromeda Strain (click on the title to read a film review). His other major film credits include Harper with Paul Newman, The Ugly American with Marlon Brando, and Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite.

After the cancellation of Owen Marshall, he focused on television, where he continued to be in demand as a guest star and for lead roles in made-for-TV movies. He gave outstanding performances as a judge fighting racial prejudice in the fact-based Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys (1976) and as Robby Benson’s father in Death Be Not Proud (1975), a moving true story of a young man dying of a brain tumor.

Arthur Hill was married twice. His first wife, Peggy Hassard, died in 1996. He was survived by his second wife, Anne-Sophie Taraba. Hill died in 2006 after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease.