Missing (Polygram Filmed Entertainment, Universal Pictures, Estudios Churubusco Azteca S.A., 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, June 22) Turner Classic Movies ran an intriguing double bill of movies featuring Sissy Spacek, who was born on Christmas Day, 1949 in Quitman, Texas and is still, thank goodness, very much alive. (Her most recent credit is for a 2025 film called Die, My Love whose stars are Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, and Nick Nolte. The imdb.com synopsis describes it thusly: “In a remote forgotten rural area, a mother struggles to maintain her sanity as she battles with psychosis.”) The first Spacek film they ran last night was Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), British director Michael Apted’s biopic of country music legend Loretta Lynn, with Spacek as Lynn and Tommy Lee Jones as her often straying husband Doolittle, a.k.a. Mooney (whose extra-relational activities inspired some of her greatest songs, including “You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man”). The second film they showed last night on their Spacek double bill was also fact-based, but a quite different kettle of facts: Missing, a 1982 production by Universal made by European director Costa-Gavras (born Konstantinos Gavras on February 13, 1933 in Loutra-Iraias, Greece). His first feature was The Sleeping Car Murder (1965), a thriller starring Yves Montand and his wife, Simone Signoret, but he “made his bones” with his third feature, Z (1969). Z, a true story about the assassination of a prominent Left-leaning Greek politician (also played by Montand) and the social ferment that it inspired, which led to a military coup that overthrew Greece’s democracy for eight years from 1967 to 1975, set the pattern for most of Costa-Gavras’s later films.

Missing was his first English-language film and his first for a Hollywood studio, Universal, and it told the true story of Charles Horman, a young American journalist living in Santiago, Chile in 1973, when the democratically elected government of Leftist Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup led by Col. Augusto Pinochet and others in the Chilean military with substantial assistance from the U.S. military and the CIA. Costa-Gavras and his co-writer, Donald E. Stewart, based their film on a book called The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice by Thomas Hauser, published in 1978 and reprinted under the film’s title in 1982. I remember getting an invitation to go to a preliminary screening of this film in 1982 before its release because I was then part of an anti-nuclear power group called Community Energy Action Network (CEAN), and as part of their strategy for marketing the film Universal’s publicists did outreach to various Leftist organizations and invited them to see the film early. But for some reason I missed that screening and never saw Missing until last night. The central characters in Missing are Charles Horman’s father Ed (Jack Lemmon in one of his greatest “serious” performances, rivaling Save the Tiger, Glengarry Glen Ross and his TV-movie The Execution of Leo Frank, in which he played a white lynching victim in another tale based on fact) and his daughter-in-law Beth (Sissy Spacek).

When Charlie Horman (John Shea) goes missing on September 16, 1973, five days after Pinochet overthrew and murdered Allende and took power in a coup d’état, Ed gets tired of the pablum he gets fed by officials of the U.S. State Department and the diplomatic corps about what happened to his son. He decides to go to Chile himself and he and Beth launch their own investigation to determine what happened to him. They run into a series of intimidating officials, both American and Chilean, and get the proverbial run-around from all concerned. One U.S. diplomatic official asks that Ed and Beth provide them a list of all Charles’s friends and acquaintances, ostensibly to aid in the search for him. Ed is flabbergasted when Beth categorically refuses to write such a list, explaining to him that if she listed Charles’s friends and gave it to the American officials, it would find its way to the Chileans and everyone on that list would be at best arrested and at worst summarily killed. The story includes a thread about the long-term radicalization of Ed Horman; at first he is a political moderate who tends to believe the officials who say that Charles’s radical political activities (including doing Spanish translations of English-language articles about Chilean politics for a Chilean Communist newspaper called Fin) got him into this in the first place and he was responsible for what happened to him. I thought the film’s one weakness was its frequent use of flashbacks – a lot of times Costa-Gavras and Stewart keep it all too unclear not only where we are but when we are, and characters we’ve been told are dead or have left Chile suddenly turn up alive, well, and on the streets or in the living rooms of Santiago.

Among those are Charlie’s friends Terry Simon (Melanie Mayron), Frank Teruggi (Joe Regalbuto), and David Holloway (Keith Szarabajka), who are shown with Charles in a long sequence representing a home movie they took of themselves just before the coup. The fact that these itinerant Americans barely surviving on remittances from their parents were able to afford a 16 mm projector and a camera that could record and shoot synchronized sound is something of a mystery (in the pre-video age, sound was always the hardest problem facing amateur movie-makers), but the interlude gives us a welcome respite from the terror of the immediate post-coup environment, in which people are being shot down in the street almost at random, the cops are literally patrolling the skies in helicopters looking into people’s windows, and women wearing trousers or even pantsuits are being harassed and given D.I.Y. makeovers because the regime hath decreed that all women must wear dresses. (One of the more peculiar obsessions modern-day authoritarians have is with women’s clothing; among the more serious challenges to Iran’s theocratic dictatorship was one led by women demanding freedom from the chador, the veil Islamic fundamentalists insist women wear every moment they’re out of the house.) Ultimately, after weeks of uncertainty and being strung along with half-truths by both American and Chilean officials, Ed and Beth Horman learn the truth [spoiler alert!]: Charles was killed on September 19, 1973, just three days after he was arrested, during one of the mass executions that took place in Santiago’s football stadium. (More recently, the Taliban in Afghanistan also became notorious for staging mass executions in a stadium and literally rounding up the people and forcing them to watch. One twist is that the Taliban had banned all forms of popular entertainment so the only shows they were allowing to be put on were these mass executions.)

We also learn that the reason Charles Horman was marked for death was that both the Chilean and American government wanted to cover up the U.S. involvement in the coup, which Charles had learned about from interviewing U.S. military officials who gave him the details and obviously weren’t aware that their role was supposed to be a deep, dark secret. Ultimately Ed and Beth Horman leave Chile with a parting shot from Ed threatening a lawsuit against both the Chilean and American officials responsible for his son’s death: “I just thank God we live in a country where we can still put people like you in jail!” That wasn’t true then any more than it is today – though at least in 1982 we could watch this movie in relative comfort that at least abuses like this couldn’t take place in our country. Now we’re living under the thumb of a dictatorial President who’s sending immigration goon squads to pick people up off the streets and ship them to concentration camps in other countries and beat up and arrest members of Congress and other elected officials who try to investigate the conditions under which Trump’s detainees are being held. Missing ends with a grim postlude stating that Ed Horman didn’t receive his son Charles’s body until seven months later – after he was hit up with a bill for nearly $1,000, payable immediately, on his way out of Chile for “freight charges” on his son’s remains. The delay meant that when Ed finally received Charles’s body it was too decomposed for an autopsy to be possible. He also sued the U.S. State Department for damages for the loss of his son, but the government successfully got the courts to dismiss the case. Aside from its all too timely reminder of how easily a democratic government can evaporate and become a brutal dictatorship, Missing is a finely honed movie, beautifully directed by Costa-Gavras and featuring Jack Lemmon in one of his most brilliant, effective performances as he gradually realizes that his son Charles’s radical ideals were actually valid and true, and enough of a threat to the status quo that they literally had him murdered.