Eureka

Gene Hackman plays Jack McCann, a Yukon gold prospector turned tycoon who, holed up on Eureka, his private Caribbean ranch, has grown bored and drunk on his own power. McCann, whom Hackman imbues with an impressive sense of sweaty paranoia, refuses to concede anything to anybody (modern film fans will note the obvious influence on Daniel Day Lewis's Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood) and thus finds himself lonely and abandoned. His stubbornness and misplaced pride prove his undoing as he refuses to make a deal with a shady business group and outright rejects his daughter Tracey’s (Theresa Russell) smarmy playboy suitor (Rutger Hauer).

From its icy beginning, Nicolas Roeg laces his film with incestuous allusions and hints of the occult. Images, such as that of McCann’s daughter Tracey having sex wearing nothing but her father's gold or of a late grisly murder, linger and resonate, heightened by the director’s trademark associative editing style.

If the film never quite reaches the sublime heights of Roeg's best work, that is not to say it isn't to be recommended – after all, this is the director responsible for such jewels as The Man Who Fell to Earth, Walkabout and Don't Look Now. Eureka maintains and showcases that classic Roegian mix of the languid and the manic, of slow and patient stretches that erupt into chaos and almost supernatural violence that will stick with you for days.

Extras

Eureka’s release of Eureka (if ever a distribution company were destined to release a film…) is packed with extras, but the highlights are undoubtedly three new interviews, with producer Jeremy Thomas, writer Paul Mayersberg and editor Tony Lawson. Mayersberg is especially enlightening in his account of how the film morphed from a biopic of real-life prospector Sir Harry Oakes into something much more mythic.

---

Released on Bly-ray by Eureka Entertainment. To order your copy, go to eurekavideo.co.uk