Frantic

I now come to Frantic which has an opening which then had me engaged for the rest. A woman takes the wrong luggage at the airport in Paris which she is visiting with her husband Harrison Ford who is to deliver an academic paper. It will be remembered that at the end of my recent trip to London I took the wrong case on leaving the train at Newcastle Station. Fortunately the train ended in the city rather than continue north to the City of Aberdeen. I was also fortunate as the owner of the case  lived in Newcastle and waited at the station with his friends until I returned. When the mistake was realised in the film on reaching the hotel the airline was contacted and arrangements made to return the case as well as file a lost form in relation to that of the wife. The couple are tired from their overnight journey and Harrison has a shower after ordering breakfast and then finds that his wife is not in the room after receiving a phone call.  He goes downstairs to see if she is in the lobby, restaurant, and hotel shop and then out to the neighbouring street after a search of the hotel with the help of the management fails to find her. He goes into a nearby flower shop and a local bar when he meets a local drunk who claims to have seen his wife bundled into a car by two men. Ford goes to the police who treat it as a missing person and he gets no help from the USA Embassy after waiting his turn in a long line.

Back at the hotel he breaks into the case and finds nothing except a book of matches with the a telephone number and Christian name. He visits the club where he learns that the name has not been seen for a couple of days  and that the man is a drug dealer according to another drug dealer who thinks Ford is talking about wanting to find white power rather than a white lady! He bribes the individual to find the address of the other man and when he visits he find the man dead. He takes the answering machine tape where there are several messages by a woman in French. He is able to have these translate and learns that the female caller plans to visit so he arrives beforehand and takes her to the airport to reclaim the case.

The young woman had agreed to got to California to bring back the case without knowing its contents except it was not drugs  and without know who she was working for as the trip had been arranged by her now dead boyfriend. The action takes place at the airport and then at the flat of the young woman where for some reason he takes case with him using the roof to get into a sky light at the flat. This results in the cause of the action, a small replica of the Statue of Liberty ending in a precarious position as the case opens. They eventually find it contains a device crucial to the detonation of nuclear devices and worth several million dollars.

Ford negotiates a trade with the kidnapper for his wife where the exchange takes place on the banks of the River Seine. During the films the police, the US Embassy and the security forces show great interest and their intervention prevents Ford being killed although not the girl. He and his wife are reunited on the day he is due to deliver his paper although it is not disclosed if he goes ahead with this as planned. Frantic was aptly named and the acting of a high order so that one experienced the reality of his emotions had such a situation happened. For once the basic premises was easily appreciated. Easily done.