brilliant actors, brilliant editing

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Paul Verhoeven like Dario Argento and Brian DePalma, is a film-maker who likes to answer his critics via his work. After having worked in films that were approached in a more realistic and naturalistic milieu (1973's 'Turkish Delight', 1980's 'Spetters'), Verhoeven found in a novel by Gerard Reve a perfect collective of ideas that suited what would become his cinema; dark eroticism, religious imagery, the Catholic tension of woman worship and misogyny, death, and the grip ideas of the fantastique can have on the mind. He completely embraced the 'Giallo' approach and blends sex and death in a delicious cocktail of suspense and imagery in 'The Fourth Man'.A tale of seduction and paranoia is told via a writer of lurid pulp fiction, Gerard Reve (yes the novelist names the lead character after himself!). Appearing as a keynote speaker at a book seminar, he responds to a questioner who asks how he can still be a Catholic with all science has taught us; "Being Catholic means having imagination!" Catholic, homosexual and alcoholic, he is bursting with emotional tension, ripe for hysteria; "I lie the truth, until I no longer know whether something did or didn't happen." Over the opening credits a spider traps flies in its web, religious iconography is introduced as the web is spun over a crucifix. Verhoeven quickly establishes the fact that Reve has a dark psyche and darker fantasies, such as strangling his male lover with whom he shares a mutual loathing; he quickly and constantly slips into 'Walter Mitty' like daydream fantasy. When he takes a train to the seminar illustrates well Reve's mind-set; he reads a billboard 'Jesus Is Everywhere,' as a young mother boards the train. She offers her son an 'apple' and fashions a circle out of the peel, which as she manipulates it for a moment resembles a halo over the baby's head.Linking sex and death and self-destructiveness is achieved when Reve asks a gentleman at the station if he has come to collect him. The man replies "I doubt it" as a coffin is wheeled towards him; the following discussion establishes the corpse had a beautiful death, as he was about Reve's age and died in bed "on top of some senorita in Spain." As a homosexual it is curious as to why Reve becomes interested in Christine Halsslag. She does have short hair, but is also voluptuous; he covers her breasts with his hands when they first have sex; as he ejaculates he exclaims "through Mary to Jesus!" Coincidence comes into play when Reve discovers Christine is seeing Herman, a man that Reve bumped into before catching his train. He wants to meet Herman; "What a body… what a piece!"Reve essentially ends up as the requisite 'Giallo' outsider, who finds himself in the position of trying to solve a mystery; 'did Christine kill her previous husbands?' His sight is certainly brought into question. Verhoeven has fashioned a world that at times borrows the lurid surrealism of Argento's 'Suspiria', and photography that frequently mimics the soft focus over saturated white flaring of a DePalma film of this era. There is a nice bit of eyeball gouging in a car accident that would be at home in an Umberto Lenzi 'Giallo.'Loosely remade by Verhoeven in Hollywood as 'Basic Instinct'; he considers 'The 4th Man' to be a 'spiritual prequel.'

Paul Verhoeven's earlier Dutch thriller follows a superstitious writer (Jeroen Krabbe) who meets an eccentric woman attending one of his public seminars and begins an affair with her; while staying at her home for an extended period, he is plagued with disturbing visions and incidents, and becomes infatuated with one of her other male lovers.Fans of Verhoeven's neo-noir classic "Basic Instinct" should find plenty of interest here, as the films cross paths in terms of some thematics and the cinematic aspect of the lover's triad, though "The Fourth Man" is actually a much better film in some ways. While not as remarkably violent as some of his other work, it is a solid and transfixing thriller that is as perturbing as it is engaging; as off putting as it is erotic. Verhoeven wears influences on his sleeve, clearly drawing on ye good old days of American Hollywood noir with spatterings of Alfred Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman for good taste. The touches of surrealism are prevalent enough to arrest the audience, but are still left in an inconspicuous enough territory to be debated and thought provoking. Never does the film edge into gaudiness, which is another remarkable feat here— the surrealist colorings are wholly immersed in the reality of the story, blending into an endless portrait of premonitions, fears, and paranoia that is still firmly anchored in a cohesive plot.Remarkable performances here from Jeroen Krabbé and Renée Soutendijk, as well as Thom Hoffman's understated performance as the object of Krabbé's intense sexual affections. Among a multitude of other things, the film is truly a pioneer of queer cinema, brazen in its depiction of male homosexuality and laden with surprisingly baffling religious, supernatural, and feminist themes that are difficult to decipher in spite of their obvious existence within.No less, "The Fourth Man" is one of the most transfixing thrillers of its time, brilliantly crafting the surreal alongside the darker aspects of film noir, all taken to understated extremes. While many people probably think of David Lynch as the first filmmaker to do this, you may be surprised to know that Paul Verhoeven was toying with similar elements back in Netherlands in the 1980s; while Lynch infamously took this to subconscious levels, Verhoeven rather leaves us somewhere in the middle— in a dream, or maybe in a nightmare. 9/10.

Gerard is a writer with a somewhat overactive imagination. He is also homosexual and Catholic prone to Catholic guilt and something of a clairvoyant, or so it seems. On a trip to Flushing he is 'seduced' by Christine. When he discovers that Christine's new boyfriend is the bit of rough trade he's been fancying from afar he decides to stick around. After all, enforced heterosexuality has its compensations. Then he realizes that Christine's previous three husbands have all died violent deaths. Did Christine murder them and is he or the boyfriend, Herman, going to be 'the fourth man'? Verhoeven's overheated, over-egged melodrama is a delicious blend of Hitchcock and David Lynch, full of OTT eroticism and religious imagery and an awful lot of the colour red. A lot of the time it looks and feels like a dream and we can never be sure that what we are seeing is real or a figment of Gerard's imagination. The fun is in figuring it out. Also the fact that Christine is an infinitely more likable character that either the priggish Gerard or the bullish Herman means we are hardly like to root for either of the men over her. In fact, it's fair to say Gerard's comeuppance can't come soon enough. Super performances, too, from Jeroen Krabbe and Renee Soutendijk and easily Verhoeven's best film up to his wonderfully subversive piece of sci-fi "Starship Troopers".

This last Dutch speaking film of Verhooven made me laugh good. As a film buff looking for all the small details and cross references etc in any movie I can assure anyone interested in film art that this piece amuses all the senses. I haven't read Gerard Reves book, on which the film is based, but I still believe we get a candid picture of a somewhat self-conceited poet/writer who gets his (in a way - no spoiling here). An anti-hero surrounded by characters that have their ambiguous intentions, as has he. All this in a superbly packaged cinematography, Paul Verhopven manages to turn the otherwise rather cute "gesellich(?)" Dutch locations into a suspenseful film-noir setting, impressive work!