Raspberry Picking: Shining Through (1992)

Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. This month takes us to Shining Through, a perfectly reputable little picture directed by David Seltzer, starring Michael Douglas and Melanie Griffith (and John Gielgud!), and winner of three Razzie Awards including Worst Picture despite most of the filmgoing public not noticing that it existed.

The most shocking thing about the origin story of Shining Through is how boring and pedestrian it is.

There are no teenage homewreckers, no protracted director-versus-producer legal battles, no secret cult-leader financiers. It wasn’t supposed to launch anyone’s career, or save anyone’s dying reputation. All that happened is a bunch of famous movie people got together and made a movie, and no one liked it very much.

But let’s throw in a few details for context. Our subject for today does share one element of its origin story with several other Worst Picture winners: it’s based on a well-regarded novel for which the film rights were sold pretty much instantly after its publication. In 1988, American author Susan Isaacs published a World War II thriller called Shining Through, which achieved immediate popularity for its combination of suspenseful plotting, wry humor, lurid romantic subplots, and a charismatic female lead. Columbia Pictures snapped up the rights, hired David Seltzer to write and direct, and suggested Debra Winger to play the foul-mouthed, wisecracking Linda Voss. They also planned to shoot it mostly in Eastern Europe, for authenticity or something. Then history got in the way and the Berlin Wall fell, causing the project to go on hold for two years. Then, in 1990, Twentieth Century Fox announced that they were making the movie now, and that Melanie Griffith had been cast in the lead.

Griffith was riding a glittering wave in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Problems with drug and alcohol addiction had stymied her earlier career and she spent most of the decade playing prostitutes and femme fatales, but she struck gold in the critically and commercially successful rom-com-of-sorts Working Girl in 1988. She bagged a Golden Globe and an Oscar nod for her turn as a plucky go-getter secretary from Staten Island, and the lead roles started to pour in, though none of them earned her the same level of acclaim. 

When Shining Through hit theaters, nothing happened. It neither hit the ground running nor curled up and died. While a box office disappointment – $21 million domestic against its $30 million budget – it wasn’t the abjectly humiliating sort of flop that usually attracts the attention of the Razzies. Critics didn’t really care for it; audiences shrugged at it.

What did curl up and die was Melanie Griffith’s burgeoning career. Between Shining Through and a series of other disappointments, Griffith entered a slow descent into has-beendom that finished with her starring turn in 2000’s Cecil B. Demented.

So what’s the story here? Did we do Shining Through dirty, or did it get its just desserts the first time around?

THE STORY

If anyone did this movie dirty, it’s the people who made it.

Shining Through opens on its hyperdramatic primary musical motif playing over what appears to be a 1990s screensaver of its title. Hyperdramatic musical motifs are omnipresent around these parts, which is good, because they ensure I stay awake.

We open on what seems to be the filming of a BBC documentary about female spies during World War II, and the documentarians are interviewing elderly Linda Voss (Melanie Griffith in unconvincing old-age makeup). This framing narrative will quickly become a supersize albatross around the film’s neck, but we’ll get back to that in due time.

Linda is here to tell the story of how she got involved in the war effort. It all started because she loved war movies, and those war movies made her a lay expert in military and espionage tactics. No, I didn’t say she thinks she’s an expert. I said she is an honest-to-God Expert, because she has seen a lot of movies on the subject. Get ready to suspend your disbelief a lot for the next couple hours.

Anyway, Linda’s dream, besides seeing and talking about (and frequently getting wrong) every war and spy movie ever made, is to visit Berlin, where her Jewish cousins on her father’s side still live. She gets a job as a legal secretary even though she didn’t graduate from Vassar College because she can speak German. A senior partner at the firm (Francis Guinan) declares that she speaks it with “the accent of a Berlin butcher’s wife.” This is, let us say, another matter about which you will need to suspend your disbelief, as Griffith’s German accent in reality evokes less “Arbeiterklasse” and more “AP German student in over her head.”

Linda is assigned to prickly hotshot lawyer Ed Leland (Michael Douglas) because he works with a lot of German clients but doesn’t know a word of German. Ed gets correspondence from J. Edgar Hoover and writes letters and makes phone calls in super obvious code. We are told that Linda is clearly some kind of diplomacy savant for figuring out that he’s a spy.

It takes Ed and Linda approximately 47 seconds of screen time to end up in bed together, but then Ed is called away for onsite spy service so that he and Linda can have a corny Casablanca ripoff moment. Linda mopes away the ages until she chances upon Ed in a nightclub (I didn’t say we were done ripping off Casablanca) and the two rekindle their relationship because Ed simply can’t resist the allure of Linda weeping into his shoulder on the dance floor.

Ed rehires Linda, who has no training or security clearance of any kind, to be his spy secretary. Linda, who has no training or security clearance of any kind, gets to sit in on a meeting where they discuss who is going to replace a field agent who was hunting for intel on the V1 flying bomb, and who also was recently found out and brutally murdered. And Linda, who has no training or security clearance of any kind, suggests that she should take his place, because she could convince the Nazi they need to tail to hire her as a domestic, because she speaks German like a Berlin butcher’s wife!

She convinces Ed – who very understandably thinks this is a terrible idea – to put her in the field by demanding that he taste her strudel. And thus is Linda delivered into the hands of master spy Konrad Friedrichs (John Gielgud), also known as Sunflower and aided by his niece Margrete (Joely Richardson) to begin trying to infiltrate the home of Nazi operative Horst Drescher (Ronald Nitschke). (There is no reason for Margrete to be present in the story, so viewers have all figured out that she’s a double agent at least half an hour before Linda, but in Linda’s defense, Ebert’s Law of Economy of Characters didn’t exist yet.)

Then turns out – get ready to really suspend your disbelief here – that Linda is…wait for it…not very good at being a spy. Yes! It turns out that training and security clearance are, in fact, desirable features in a spy! But no matter, because a friendly Nazi named Franze-Otto Dietrich (Liam Neeson) takes a liking to Linda and offers her a job in his house instead. So Linda continues on her dual mission of finding the flying bomb plans and finding her long-lost cousins while Ed tries with increasing desperation to keep her from dying.

At one point, during an air raid of Berlin, a lone zebra runs through the streets. I regret to inform you that I could not find a picture of this zebra.

THE BAD

Despite all the disbelief-suspension, Shining Through didn’t have to be this way. As with so many of these, I haven’t read the original novel, but its reputation holds it to be lively, funny, and fast-paced. The movie is none of these things. I’m not sure it was ever going to be a great film, but it didn’t have to be as mediocre and uninspiring as it turned out. 

A good part of the fault here lies with the lead acting. Oh no, I’m not talking about Melanie Griffith. I’m talking about Michael Douglas, who sits on the movie like a cat on a laptop keyboard. He clearly doesn’t want to be here and refuses to give his scene partners anything whatsoever to work with. When Ed and Linda share their Tender Departing Moment, Douglas wears a facial expression and body language suggesting an awkward teenager trying to excuse himself from an unpleasant party.

It’s deeply unfair that Melanie Griffith took the brunt of the critical abuse directed at the cast. At least she’s trying to do her job, whereas I’m not sure Douglas is trying to do anything at all. 

Besides, hers is not a terrible performance in itself; it’s just the wrong sort of performance for this movie. Griffith is essentially reprising her starring role in Working Girl, a movie in which everything that makes her a liability in Shining Through made her an asset. And why shouldn’t she? We all loved Working Girl! But in Working Girl, Griffith had any chemistry at all with her co-stars, and she wasn’t surrounded by a production that approached its material with a level of gravity suitable for the Appomattox Court House.

If the enormous number of Nazi flags and Griffith’s and Douglas’s constant furrowed brows and unsmiling faces don’t clue you in to how seriously this project takes itself, Michael Kamen’s score is here to make sure you can’t possibly underestimate it. Pianos and strings and occasional lonely French horns weep and wail together over every scene like Kamen thought he was scoring a 133-minute Red Cross commercial. He differentiates very little between moments of suspense and peril, like Ed sneaking a critically wounded Linda over the Swiss border, and moments that are perhaps a bit less perilous, like Linda seeing Ed walk into a party with another woman.

What’s that you say? Oh, yes, Ed absolutely does sneak a wounded Linda over the border into Switzerland, an extraordinary feat of extraction given that the German-Swiss border was closed during World War II and given that Ed doesn’t speak the local language. He accomplishes this mastermind feat by…dressing in an SS uniform and pretending that he can’t speak due to a throat wound. And the Nazi guards all just kind of…accept that and let him waltz across that very closed border. A much bigger handicap to Shining Through than Griffith, Douglas, or anyone else onscreen is that this script is a Hindenberg-level disaster.

Aside from the infamous “taste my strudel, Ed!” scene, Melanie Griffith is also saddled with lines like “what is war for if not to hold onto the things we love?” and “I knew it was Friday that Ed and I said goodbye, because the next day was Saturday” and confidently declaring that The Fighting 69th, a James Cagney picture from 1940, starred Cary Grant. But none of these stinkers hold a candle to the single biggest stain on the film, which was the decision to have Linda narrate about a quarter of its total runtime.

This narration is truly hideous. Whosever idea it was – writer/director David Seltzer, presumably – should never had worked again. Griffith’s delivery is flat and breathy, and every time her voiceover starts, whatever life existed in Shining Through is instantly drained away. I can confidently assert that chopping the narration, and thus at least 20 minutes from the film’s run time, would have added at least a half star and possibly a full star to my rating. Or they could have given that zebra a bigger role.

THE GOOD

Well, it’s not Ghosts Can’t Do It. Except for some of Seltzer’s artistic choices, nothing here reeks of incompetence so much as boring barely-competence. And every so often, we have a flicker of promise shining through Shining Through.

Joely Richardson as Margrete the Totally Not Double Agent and John Gielgud as her uncle do their very best to reinflate the movie every time Michael Douglas or Narrator Melanie Griffith come along to puncture it again. Richardson in particular is alluring and sassy, and she is the only human, animal, or object onscreen who has chemistry with Griffith. More than a few times, I wished the movie would follow its clear desire to just be about their gal-pal Nazi-catching adventures. It’s a shame she’s a Nazi, so that wouldn’t have worked.

Parts of the movie are also very pretty. Berlin feels like something out of a Grimm’s fairy tale, in that it’s both fantastical and nightmarish by turns. The ominous haunted-house lighting on all the nighttime exteriors is a bit silly, but effective at mood-building all the same. And the scene in which Linda finds the decimated shell of the house where her cousins were in hiding feels like it got airdropped in from a better movie that knows how to be emotionally affecting. Griffith floats through the house like a dazed sleepwalker and even Kamen’s score backs off for a few minutes to let Linda piece together what has happened. It’s a refreshing moment in which the people making the movie briefly remember what real human emotion looks like. It also provides an effective contrast with the zebra-infused air raid that follows on its heels.

In a way, all of Shining Through is refreshing. When reviewing Razzie victors, it’s nice to not feel like the people who made a movie want to punish you for watching it. Everyone here except Michael Douglas is trying to make an honest-to-God good movie. Some people, including Razzies co-founder John J.B. Wilson, even consider Shining Through an enjoyably bad movie. I’m not sure I watched the same movie they did. Shining Through feels wan and weary, as if so much humorless self-importance is simply too heavy a burden for one movie to bear. It’s overdone – overlong, over-serious, overwrought, overproduced – like a juicy steak left too long on the grill. A bummer, but a bummer of the sort we’ll all forget about by the next day. 

Quality of Movie: 2 / 5. It’s not incompetent, it’s just…not anything else either.

Quality of Experience: 2 / 5. Shining Through languishes in the obscurity of forgotten mediocrity for a good reason.

Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida.  She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects.  You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog!  You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.