Issue date: 11/8/02 Section: Entertainment

Strong acting performances carry this look at the less than heroic Bob Crane.

If you watched "Nick at Night" at all while growing up, chances are you found a strange show called "Hogan's Heroes," a comedy set in a World War II Nazi prison camp. Oddly enough, it was very popular in the late 1960s. Stranger than that though was what went on behind the scenes with the star of this show, Bob Crane, and his life story provides the plot for the newly released Auto Focus.

If you lived through the 1960s and 1970s, chances are you knew much about the scandalous life of Bob Crane. However, since most college students were born after 1980 (by which time he had already been murdered), a brief synopsis of his life will help in understanding why it is worthy of being made into a film. A radio DJ in the 1950s, Crane hit the big time in 1965 landing the title role in "Hogan's Heroes." After a successful run of about half a decade, his career hit the skids. An addiction to sex and photography left him with two ex-wives and left him out of work in an image-conscious Hollywood. In 1978, he was found murdered in a Scottsdale, Arizona, motel room where he was performing dinner theater.

Sounds like an intriguing plot for a movie, right? Well, as it turns out…yes and no. Greg Kinnear plays Bob Crane, who lives the typical 1950s suburban life at the start of the film. We see Bob as a dutiful husband and father, a man who does not smoke or drink and who attends church regularly. However, he has a fetish for pornographic magazines which he hides in the basement and which his wife demands he discard. His fetish grows exponentially once he wins his role on "Hogan's Heroes" and is exposed to the seedy side of Hollywood.

Enter John Carpenter, played by Willem Dafoe, a technology guru who works for Sony testing out prototype equipment. He introduces the concepts of hi-fi stereo and hand-held video recording devices to Crane. They end up using each other throughout the rest of the film, recording themselves having sex with hundreds of women. Crane, with his celebrity status, convinces the women to go along with it, and Carpenter (seemingly the only man on the planet with this technology) provides Crane with the medium in which to record his sexual exploits.

The main problem with this film is the disgusting feeling you get watching it. The sex and nude scenes are cold and grainy, much like the black and white film Bob and John use to create their home movies. The film gets progressively darker as it moves along, and honestly becomes less entertaining. It's interesting to watch Crane as he struggles choosing between his starkly different lives, but when he completely succumbs to a life of sex, it's just…depressing. Dafoe nicely plays the desperate and needy Carpenter, but watching two "friends" shamelessly using each other throughout a film is simply sad.

A main point of the film is how detached Crane is from reality. He enjoys the fun of sex with many different women, but does not see any of the terrible repercussions of his free-wheeling lifestyle, like the debilitating effect it has on his marriages. His inherent likeability as a movie star gets the girls in his bed, but he doesn't understand any feelings besides just the sex. His obsession with reviewing videotape of his encounters clearly demonstrates how removed his is from finding any true love.

Auto Focus is an uneven film – interesting at times, but too depressing at others. The acting is strong, but as the film gets darker, you look more and more forward to it ending – never a sign of a great movie. It's certainly not a date movie, and it's also not one you'd go out to see for fun with a group of friends. The film leaves you with the basic impression that you're glad you've seen it once, but happy you won't see it again.

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