Pursuit (ABC Circle Films, ABC, 1972)

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

Last night (Tuesday, July 8) my husband Charles and I watched yet another movie I’d ordered online from Amazon.com because I was assigned to do a Fanfare review of its soundtrack CD. The film was called Pursuit, and it was a 1972 made-for-TV movie notable mainly as the directorial debut of author Michael Crichton. It was based on a novel called Binary which Crichton had just published under the pseudonym “John Lange.” Crichton had started writing under the “John Lange” name because he was still in medical school and hoped to make some side money for his education, but he didn’t want to use his real name because he was worried that writing what amounted to pulp fiction would affect his credibility as a doctor. But it seems odd that he was still using the “Lange” name in 1972, three years after the blockbuster success of The Andromeda Strain (the first book he published under his real name) had definitively propelled him out of medicine and into writing as a full-fledged career. It also seems odd that Intrada Records would release a soundtrack album of three films featuring Jerry Goldsmith as composer – this one, The People Next Door (about a suburban couple whose daughter becomes a drug addict), and Crawlspace (described on imdb.com as “A childless middle-age couple adopt a troubled youth they find living in their crawlspace and attempt to get him to rejoin society with tragic results”) – when all Goldsmith did for Pursuit was write a few generic “suspense” cues.

Indeed, the first 10 minutes of Pursuit – showing a group of terrorists ambushing a U.S. military truck and stealing two big canisters of gas – are totally unscored, and certainly could have benefited from music. What’s more, Goldsmith took this decidedly low-end assignment just two years after his iconic score for the big-budget biopic Patton established his reputation as a “name” composer for Hollywood’s “A”-list. Pursuit is a decidedly dull tale of a group of government agents, led by Steven Graves (Ben Gazzara), on the trail of a terrorist band led by a crazy Right-wing politician named James Wright (E. G. Marshall). Wright leads a group called the “American Renewal Party,” or something like that, and we first see him giving a televised speech before the logo of his group (which he’s standing so closely in front of we can’t make out all of it) denouncing both the Democratic and Republican parties as corrupt pawns of a heinous political establishment whose members are interested only in feathering its own nests at the expense of the rest of us. I suspect Crichton in 1972 (the script was actually written by Robert Dozier based on Crichton’s novel) loosely based this character on George Wallace, but today he seems like a prototype of Donald Trump. Graves has an uneasy relationship with his immediate supervisor, Robert Phillips (William Windom), who puts limits on his efforts to go after the bad guys because of the pesky due-process requirements of the U.S. Constitution. Graves and his colleagues are stalking the baddies, including Wright and his field commander Timothy Drew (Martin Sheen when he was still young and relatively sexy), through the streets of San Diego in 1972.

All this is happening during a major-party political convention represented by stock shots of a real one – Crichton and Dozier try to avoid specifying which one, but the floor signs for Ronald Reagan give it away – and Wright’s plan seems to involve some sort of attack on the convention. But it takes the good guys a while to figure out just what the weapon is and when and how the attack will take place. One aspect that marks this film as being ahead of its time is how the bad guys acquired the information on which they based their plot: though the Internet was still in its infancy in 1972, the baddies had enough experienced computer hackers to sneak their way into the government’s databases and extract top-secret files. The title of Crichton’s original novel, Binary, refers not to computer code but to the terrorists’ ultimate weapon: “Binary-75” and “Binary-76,” two gases that are each harmless on their own but, when combined, they form a toxic substance that kills within minutes. The good guys watch a captured video from Czechoslovakia showing a prisoner being executed with the substance, and this gives both them and us the necessary information on how dangerous it is. Graves tries to call the White House to get the current President to cancel his plan to travel to San Diego to speak to the convention, but whoever he’s talking to refuses to disrupt the President’s plans. Amazingly, there are no women in this movie except for two bikini-clad babes we briefly get to see as some of the good males train their binoculars on the pool of the resort where Wright and Drew are staying.

In the closest the film gets to generating any real excitement, Graves has himself lowered on a rope to break into the room where the gases are being held. To protect himself against the gases’ combined effects, he’s been outfitted with a pre-inserted needle he’s instructed to inject himself with at the key moment just before he’s exposed. Crichton and Dozier make the rookie mistake of putting their big climax into effect – the successful dismantling of the bomb that was supposed to release the two gases together – with 15 minutes of the film’s 75-minute running time still to go, with the remaining open question of finding the gang’s back-up plan. It involved coating the black canister (they’re color-coded, one yellow and one black) with paint made of plastic explosive and setting it to blow up after they’ve turned off the building’s elevators so the good guys can’t evacuate the yellow canister. The idea is the black canister will blow up, taking the yellow canister with it, and release the toxic gas so one million people will die and Wright will achieve his desired “reset” of American politics and governance. Ultimately Graves realizes what’s going on – with the help of a bomb-sniffing device and the technician who operates it, even though he left it in his car and has to run back for it and arrives with just a minute left to spare – and he tosses it out the hotel-room window after yelling out a barely audible warning to the passers-by below to get out of its way. The black-canister bomb duly explodes in mid-air without blowing up the yellow one, humanity is saved and the good guys can go back to whatever it was they were doing before that.

Pursuit was fun for Charles and I to watch because of the glimpses it gave us of the San Diego skyline – particularly downtown and the waterfront – eight years before I moved here and well before Charles lived here as well. Obviously this was made when the 1972 Republican Convention was still scheduled for San Diego, though because of a political scandal it was later moved to Miami where the 1968 Republican Convention had also taken place. Aside from that, though, it was deadly dull, a cardinal sin in a movie that at least genre-wise was supposed to be a thriller. Crichton’s imdb.com page lists seven other directorial credits for him, six for feature films – including his very next one, Westworld (1973), which eventually spawned an extended cable-TV series and became an iconic success after Crichton’s death in 2008. His other movies as director, mostly based on his novels or screen originals, were Coma (1978), The Great Train Robbery (1978), Looker (1981), Runaway (1984), Physical Evidence (1989) – the only film Crichton directed which he didn’t write as well – and a video-game version of his time-travel novel Timeline (2000).