Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Trenchcoat

At the dawn of 1983, Disney President and newly installed CEO Ron Miller’s mission to rebrand the studio’s image had mostly resulted in a series of failures. Some of these flops had at least been interesting creatively, like Tron and Tex. But more often than not, it simply felt like they were throwing stuff at a wall to see if anything stuck. That’s certainly true of Trenchcoat, a complete misfire on every level. And in the case of Trenchcoat, they should have thrown it a whole lot harder.

The project came from Jerry Leider, a former TV executive who had recently branched into feature production with the Neil Diamond remake of The Jazz Singer. Leider had a deal with the British studio EMI, who had co-produced The Jazz Singer. The movie ended up making a small profit and produced a bestselling soundtrack album but critics (and most audiences) absolutely despised it. As a result, EMI decided it wasn’t keen to foot the bill for Leider’s next production, a comedy-thriller with the working title Malta Wants Me Dead.

Leider had heard that Disney was now producing outside material that did not fit comfortably into their usual slate of family-friendly entertainment. He contacted Head of Production Tom Wilhite, the man who’d given the OK to Tim Hunter’s adaptation of Tex. I find it hard to believe that Disney would have been Leider’s or any producer’s first choice for a project like this at that time. But maybe he figured the studio was so desperate for non-G-rated content that they’d take a chance on just about anything.

Whatever the reasoning, Leider turned out to be correct. Wilhite responded to something in the script by Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman and gave Leider the green light. Trenchcoat would be the first produced screenplay for Price and Seaman and I’m slightly curious how different their script was from what ended up on screen. Their later track record is spotty at best. Price and Seaman went on to write the screenplays for Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Doc Hollywood, both of which are good to great. But they’re also responsible, at least in part, for Ron Howard’s loathsome How The Grinch Stole Christmas and Will Smith’s borderline incoherent Wild Wild West. Granted, both of those movies suffered from rewrites-by-committee, so it’s a little hard to get a handle on Price and Seaman as a writing team.

Director Michael Tuchner had been active in British film and television since the mid-60s, directing everything from the Alistair MacLean thriller Fear Is The Key to The Likely Lads, a feature spinoff from a popular BBC sitcom. He’d recently branched out to American TV with the Emmy-winning drama Summer Of My German Soldier. Television would become his primary focus following the release of Trenchcoat. His only other feature credit would be the 1989 comedy Wilt, which was barely released in the US.

Leider needed to find a couple of American stars to topline his international production. Margot Kidder may have been Canadian but she’d recently shot to super-stardom playing one of the most all-American roles imaginable, Lois Lane in Richard Donner’s Superman. Kidder only became an overnight success after honing her craft for a solid decade in such films as Brian De Palma’s great Sisters. After hitting it big, Kidder struggled to find success as a leading lady outside of Metropolis and movies like Trenchcoat did her no favors. Later on, she would have some very public bouts with mental illness and substance abuse, ultimately leading to her tragic death in 2018. But she gave every performance her all, even in projects far beneath her talents, and remained a champion of environmental issues and LGBQ+ rights to the end.

Kidder’s costar, Robert Hays, also knew a thing or two about being trapped by a single iconic role. After spending most of the 1970s hopping around the TV dial, Hays was cast as the lead in the comedy classic Airplane! Since then, he’d done a little more TV and appeared in the films Take This Job And Shove It (which was actually a bit of a hit, believe it or not) and Airplane II: The Sequel (which was not). He’d continue to bounce between TV and film and will eventually be back in this column.

Now, I’m not going to assume that too many of you have seen Trenchcoat. If you have, it was probably many, many years ago when it would pop up on HBO with some regularity and you were home sick from school with a stomach bug. Ordinarily with more obscure titles like this, I go into some detail about the plot and individual scenes. But in the case of Trenchcoat, it’s just not worth it. So here’s a rough outline of what you need to know.

Kidder stars as Mickey Raymond, a San Francisco court stenographer and aspiring writer of hardboiled detective fiction (no points for figuring out who her name is an homage to). Seeking inspiration for her novel, she books a vacation to Malta, as one does. Arriving in Malta, she finds herself in possession of a postcard that reveals the whereabouts of some stolen plutonium and becomes the prime suspect in a series of murders revolving around said plutonium, prompting her to turn detective to clear her name.

Hays plays Terry Leonard, a fellow American who variously presents himself as a doctor, a wholesale jewelry salesman and a lawyer before ultimately revealing himself to be an agent for some sort of nuclear regulatory agency. Mickey and Terry are, of course, destined to fall in love according to Section 6, Paragraph 12 of the laws governing bad comedic thrillers, despite spending most of the movie actively disliking each other.

Over the course of her Maltese adventure, Mickey also crosses paths with a razor-wielding psycho named Esteban Ortega (Leopoldo Trieste) who she inadvertently kills. Then there’s the German travel writer, Eva Werner (Gila von Weitershausen), who randomly starts hitting on Terry at a casino. Mickey herself has to fend off the advances of Italian lothario Nino Tenucci (Daniel Farado). Oh, and we mustn’t forget about the kindly Irish couple, Sean and Lizzy O’Reilly (P.G. Stephens and Pauline Delaney), that befriends Mickey. All of these people turn out to be spies or double agents or somehow after the stolen plutonium. I suppose these would be considered spoilers if you intended to watch Trenchcoat. My point is that there is no earthly reason for you to watch Trenchcoat, on account of it being so very, very bad.

Early on, Mickey does attempt to involve the local police led by Inspector Stagnos (David Suchet, best known for his long-running role as Hercule Poirot on British television). But Stagnos refuses to believe a word out of her mouth, especially after he discovers her manuscript, featuring thinly veiled and uncomplimentary characters based on himself and his men. If you fancy yourself a writer or any sort of creative individual, don’t bother going to the cops in Malta if you’re robbed. They’ll just write it off as a product of your overactive imagination.

After being kidnapped by Arabs and shot up with sodium pentothal, Mickey takes matters into her own hands. Her investigation leads her to a drag queen named Princess Aida, played by Ronald Lacey. I believe this is the first openly gay character we’ve seen in a Disney film (even if it isn’t, it’s absolutely the first one played by Toht from Raiders Of The Lost Ark). Princess Aida’s scene mostly ends up being just another tangent but it’s interesting that the character’s sexual orientation is presented very matter-of-factly, even sympathetically. I’m not arguing that Trenchcoat is some kind of progressive milestone in gay cinema. But it’s a relief and frankly a bit surprising that we don’t have to add homophobia to the movie’s list of cinema sins.

The story here makes precious little sense and the audience is given absolutely no reason to care about any of it. Superman and other films proved Kidder is a charming and delightful presence but even her energy can’t liven things up. The same could be said of Hays. The reveal of his true agenda as a government agent feels as though the director just thought of it that morning. Hays might just as well be playing three different characters all named Terry Leonard for all the continuity in his performance. The whole sorry affair climaxes with a lackluster car chase that would have been a disappointment in something like Superdad, much less a supposedly sophisticated thriller for grown-ups.

Between the relatively high body count (there are at least half a dozen on-screen murders), gay characters and, of course, the quality of the film itself, Disney had plenty of reasons to be nervous about Trenchcoat. As a result, they kept Walt’s name off the final picture, just as they had done earlier with Midnight Madness. The movie opened on March 11, 1983. It failed to do as well at the box office as Charles Bronson’s 10 To Midnight and a couple of holdovers from 1982, Tootsie and Gandhi. Critics were less than kind. Siskel and Ebert included it on their year-end special, “The Stinkers of 1983”, alongside such non-masterworks as The Sting II, Smokey And The Bandit Part 3 and Staying Alive.

Trenchcoat may have been another non-starter for Disney but it did hammer home one cold, hard truth. If the studio was to continue making films with an intended target audience over the age of 10, they were going to have to figure out a way to market them. Tom Wilhite knew this and had intended to release Trenchcoat under this new name. In retrospect, it’s probably just as well that they hadn’t quite figured out their new, mature division yet. This has allowed Trenchcoat to remain an easily forgotten blip on Disney’s radar, rather than potentially sinking their new enterprise before it even got started.

VERDICT: It’s about as Minusey as a Disney Minus can get.

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