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Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9786305972921
Format: Color, Letterboxed, Special Edition, Widescreen, NTSC
ISBN: 6305972923
Label: Starz / Anchor Bay
Manufacturer: Starz / Anchor Bay
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Starz / Anchor Bay
Release Date: April 24, 2001
Running Time: 102 minutes
Sales Rank: 40437
Studio: Starz / Anchor Bay
Theatrical Release Date: 1983
Editorial Review:
Amazon.com:
Only two years separate The Fourth Man, the final Dutch language movie by director Paul Verhoeven, and the explosive commencement of his Hollywood career. Controversy raged about violence in Flesh & Blood, RoboCop and everything else he made thereafter. Yet controversy has always been a part of the filmmaker's work. This savage comedy shocker could well be seen as a trial run for Basic Instinct, since it features an ice-cold seductress (Renée Soutendijk) with mysterious motivations and sexual preferences. The hallucinatory tale follows a novelist (Jeroen Krabbé) first falling for her, and then feverishly investigating whether she's a serial husband killer. The film is full of what would soon be recognized as Verhoeven trademarks: a little blasphemy, a lot of nudity, dispassionate characters, and hidden agendas. One of the aspects that caught the eye of international audiences was the film's colorful lighting and camerawork. This was from Jan de Bont, who, thanks in large part to Verhoeven, would go on to direct Speed and others. Full of symbolic flourishes and allegorical plot points The Fourth Man is a dizzying display of the type of black comedy that not even Verhoeven can get away with in today's politically aware industry. --Paul Tonks
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - An Early Masterpiece
"The Fourth Man"
An Early Masterpiece
Amos Lassen and Cinema Pride
Paul Verhoeven is probably best known in America for having made "Basic Instinct" but "The Fourth Man" is his masterpiece. Its amazing script and ending that will leave you intrigued make this a movie that should not be missed. Here is the story of a man and how he allows himself to become trapped. He is an alcoholic bisexual who finds himself in a spider web where he and other characters must ... Read More
Rating:  - much better than 'basic instinct'
paul verhoeven made his masterpiece before he took off to america to make basic instinct - the fourth man tells the tale of a man caught in a spider web - it is not a mysognyst film as one reviewer stated but more of an allegory about a man and how he himself becomes trapped.. He is an alcoholic who is as easily seduced by the young male lover as he is by the woman who is in between the two men.. this spider (god perhaps) has caught these men in a metaphoric gesture - and they are doomed to meet their ... Read More
Rating:  - Verhoeven's Original Blond With a Taste for Blood
For me this film held the most interest in the respect that it was early Paul Verhoeven, something I had never seen before. This was a quality experience that gave insight into his later work and created more curiosity for me about his earlier work. It does have a little trouble taking flight at the beginning, but once it does it provides the viewers with a worthwhile script and an intriguing ending. The story follows Gerard as he travels by train to give a literary speech. Once in the new town he hits ... Read More
Rating: - Gripping movie
Verhoeven's last Dutch movie was made out of spite. Increasingly lambasted for his films in his native Holland for being too perverted and desperate to make the move to Hollywood, this was the movie he made to show off potential executives in the USA. There were movie offers that he was interested in, in America, but due to one reason or another, he ended up frustrated with the whole process of waiting.
Often cited as a prototype of Basic Instinct, this can easily work on its own levels. Sure ... Read More
Rating: - Movie for a Post-Christian World
The director, Paul Verhoeven, creates a profoundly Christian movie and presents it to a bored post-Christian world disguised as a cheap sex comedy with special effects. He must be laughing bitterly now, to see us avert our eyes from this tale of sin and redemption. Hard to imagine, isn't it? Show me a man more more sunk in degradation than our eminent Dutch writer and drunk and lecher and thief, masterfully played by the actor Jeroen Krabbe. Who would die to redeem this failure of a human being? Yet someone ... Read More
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