The Passenger (1975) on Netflix
David Locke, a television journalist in northern Chad, cannot find the rebel fighters he came to interview. When a fellow guest dies, Locke takes the dead man's name and passport.
- Netflix3.1/5
- IMDb7.4/1029,232 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes88%
Trailer
Plot summary
David Locke is a television journalist in northern Chad, trying to arrange interviews with rebel fighters in the civil war. The interviews do not happen, and his guides leave him with a Land Rover bogged in a sand dune. He walks back through the Sahara to his hotel and learns that Robertson, an Englishman staying nearby, has died of a heart attack. Locke resembles the dead man. He tells the front desk that the body is his own, then collects Robertson's passport, appointment book and pistol, and puts his own photograph into the passport. In London, Locke's wife Rachel hears that her husband has died and asks his friend Knight, a BBC producer, to find out about Robertson.
Cast
- Ambroise Mbiaas Achebe
- Manfred Spiesas German Stranger
- Charles Mulvehillas David Robertson (as Chuck Mulvehill)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Passenger (1975)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The execution of a prisoner seen in The Passenger is not staged: it is actual footage of a real execution that Michelangelo Antonioni's crew filmed while on location.
- After MGM abandoned a film project Jack Nicholson had planned to star in, he demanded compensation and MGM handed him the rights to The Passenger; he kept it out of circulation for nearly three decades, until Sony Pictures Classics offered to restore it in 2003.
- The film places the hotel in Osuna, but the bullring in the square is the one in Vera, in Almería; Jack Nicholson said in a DVD commentary that Michelangelo Antonioni had the entire hotel built in order to get the shot.
- For The Passenger's long unbroken shot, the camera ran on a ceiling track inside the hotel room, was then picked up by a hook on a crane nearly 30 metres high, was steadied by gyroscopes during the changeover, and the window's hinged bars were swung away as it passed.
