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Sidney Lumet is famous for his double collaboration with Al Pacino in Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon; both are tense thrillers with an actor at the height of his talents and a director totally in touch with how suspenseful the medium of film can be. His partnership with Sean Connery is certainly not a failure, it just cries out for improvement. Murder on the Orient Express, an all-star effort the legendary director made with the Scot a few years after The Anderson Tapes showcases what the duo are capable of, but the 1971 star-vehicle which muddies the James Bond stereotype synonymous with Connery's fame doesn't quite hit the mark.
Firstly, Quincy Jones' wacky score is completely out of place and ruins the entire mood of the picture - it's reminiscent of a Kraftwerk synthesizer-heavy experimental session gone wrong. In addition, with the blurry relationship between all the surveillance teams (IRS, BNDD, and FBI) investigating different characters it's quite obvious Lumet wanted to add to the mystique of the film but the overall light tone fails to correlate with this serious critique of our surveillance society - it's more of a bubblegum caper flick (similar to the Ocean's films) than the profound analysis it has hidden inside the script (The Conversation). In a sense Lumet is seemingly muddled in his intentions fluctuating between the severe and the comedic in almost every scene.
Plus points luckily outnumber the downfalls. Christopher Walken makes his silver screen debut in a cute understated manner as part of Connery's (Duke Anderson) crew; the balding protagonist himself demonstrates how he can quarterback a film without Ian Fleming's ammunition; the sporadic flashback interview sequences of the apartment building's residents (the target of the elaborate heist) never state whether the jaunt was successful or not until the climax; the Big Apple setting is captured beautifully; Dyan Cannon's girlfriend to Connery's ex-con is as gorgeous and passive as one would expect; and, though falling short of what Lumet is capable of, the tension is relatively well jacked at times. The whole escapade just needs more depth in terms of both characterization and plot, and the screenwriter (Frank Pierson of Cool Hand Luke fame) needs shooting for incorrectly stating Wichita Falls is in Kansas and not Texas.
The extras
Zilch.
The summary
Though far from terrible, The Anderson Tapes is very much a "could do better" film. Connery and Lumet must have been sleepwalking back in '71.
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