I used to be somebody else...but I traded him in.


The mutual admiration between actor Jack Nicholson and director Michelangelo Antonioni resulted in the psychological drama The Passenger. Nicholson plays David Locke, a disillusioned American reporter who is sent on a grueling mission to North Africa. When he stumbles across the body of a dead man, Locke, long desirous of starting life over again, assumes the corpse's identity. He soon discovers that the man he's pretending to be is involved in gun running on behalf of a terrorist group. Making the acquaintance of a mysterious woman (Maria Schneider), he finds a kindred spirit -- a woman as "lost" as he.

The Passenger has been widely praised for its camerawork (by Luciano Tovoli) and acting. While the movie has been critically praised by such movie critics as Peter Travers of Rolling Stone and Manohla Dargis of The New York Times, it has also been criticized by Roger Ebert, Danny Peary and others for being slow-moving and pretentious. Ebert has since changed his stance on the film and now considers it a perceptive look at identity, alienation and mankind's desire to escape oneself.


The film's penultimate shot consists of a seven-minute long take tracking shot which begins in Locke's hotel room looking out into a dusty, run-down square, pulls out through the bars in the hotel window into the square, rotates 180 degrees, and finally tracks back into the hotel room.[2]
There is another long take earlier in the film, when Nicholson is exchanging passport photos, with a tape recording playing an earlier conversation between Nicholson's character and the now dead man. The camera then pans, without a cut, to the two of them talking on the balcony i.e. an in-camera flashback.
The location of the hotel is stated to be Osuna in the film. However, the bullring at the edge of the square is recognisably that of the one in the Spanish town of Vera, in the province of Almería.[4][5] In a DVD commentary, decades later, Nicholson said Antonioni built the entire hotel so as to get this shot.
Since the shot was continuous, it was not possible to adjust the lens aperture as the camera left the room and went into the square. Hence the footage had to be taken in the very late afternoon near dusk, in order to minimise the lighting contrast between the brightness outside and that in the room.
The square was windy and the crew needed stillness to ensure smooth camera movement. Antonioni tried putting the camera in a sphere so the wind might catch it less, but this wouldn't fit through the window. In the scene it appears that the bars may have been adjusted to be removed as the camera approached them.
The camera ran on a ceiling track in the hotel room and when it came outside the window, was meant to be picked up by a hook suspended from a giant crane nearly 30 metres high. A system of gyroscopes was fitted on the camera to steady it during the switch from this smooth indoor track to the crane outside. Meanwhile the bars on the window had been given hinges. When the camera reached the window and the bars were no longer in the field of view they were swung away to either side. At this time the camera's forward movement had to stop for a few seconds as the crane's hook grabbed onto it and took over from the track. To hide this, the lens was slowly and smoothly zoomed until the crane could pull the camera forward again.[Note 1] Antonioni directed the scene from a van by means of monitors and microphones, talking to assistants who communicated his instructions to the actors and operators.
Although it is often referred to as the "final shot" of the film, there is one more, which shows a small driving school car pulling away in the twilight some time later, holding on the hotel as the credits begin to roll.

Release Date: April 8, 1975 @ The Coronet


Distrib: MGM