Even though it was shown a week ago, I'm still wrapping my head around the fact that Brandeis was able to screen Roy Scheider's last film-the one he died while making-Iron Cross. The man was a legend, plain and simple. He is famous for starring in The French Connection, All That Jazz, and of course, Jaws (as Amity police chief Martin Brody). Prof. Alice Kelikian (HIST), who organized the screening, made this all the more important when she reminded the audience that Scheider had actually attended the SunDeis Film Festival only a few years ago. Now, things came full circle with the screening of Iron Cross at the Wasserman Cinematheque.By no means is this all about Scheider, despite the gushing in the previous paragraph. Even without Scheider, Iron Cross has a compelling back story. In a question-and-answer session after the film, director Joshua Newton said it started when his father, Bruno, told him of how he escaped from the Nazis at age 13, losing the rest of his family in the Holocaust. Bruno had not told anybody about this for most of his life, and Joshua was floored when he learned about what his father had gone through. With this knowledge, the younger Newton asked himself what would happen if his father could confront the people responsible for this. What would his father do, and what would he do himself? Iron Cross was made to answer that question. Unfortunately, Bruno Newton never got to see the end result. Like Scheider, he died during production, oddly enough of multiple myeloma, the same disease that would take Scheider's life only nine months later. So here we have a deeply personal movie-the last one Roy Scheider would be in and one that also won Newton the Visionary Filmmaker award at the Boston Film Festival. With that in mind, I should have liked this movie. The audience did; the judges at the Boston Film Festival did; even my editor did-but I didn't.

My first hangup isn't so much on the story but on how it's told. The plot is simple enough to follow: ex-cop Joseph (Scheider) is visiting his estranged son Ronnie (Scott Cohen), who's living in Nuremburg with his non-Jewish wife and kids, two points that Joseph has a hard time forgiving him for. Once there, he realizes that Ronnie's neighbor (Helmut Berger) bears a striking resemblance to the Nazi officer who killed his family and becomes obsessed with the idea of vengeance. This is intercut with flashbacks of a teenaged Joseph (Alexander Newton, the director's son, whose skill keeps the casting from being written off as nepotism) as he escapes the Wehrmacht and joins with Soviet partisans. It's not too complicated on paper, but it doesn't really pan out on the screen.

The most glaring problem is the pacing. The scenario constantly jumps between modern Joseph and young Joseph, giving the audience no time to get a feel of what either character is like. If anything, there's too little time with the older Joseph. The flashbacks happen with such frequency that they begin to lose their importance to the plot. If the present had been given more attention, I think the characters would also make a bit more sense. Ronnie spends his time throughout the movie either yelling at Joseph or helping him plan his revenge, sometimes doing both simultaneously. He helps his father steal a truck and plot the cross-border kidnapping of an old man but argues with him the whole way, never stopping to think what might happen if, say, the police find them. Remember, this is a man with a wife and children to support, willing to risk it all after spending two days with his father. Despite Newton calling it a psychological thriller, there really wasn't enough attention paid to the characters' minds. Outside of Joseph's too-frequent flashbacks, we have no clue what is happening in their heads.

Honestly, this is my big problem with the movie. Newton says they're still re-editing it, and who knows? Maybe that'll tie everything together. The performers are all at least competent, with Scheider and Newton standing out. The director definitely has a connection to the material, and the plot itself isn't bad. I'm hoping it just needs that one final tweak to make the whole thing work.