Here above the embedded video, I'll mention the non-spoiler bits. Dare not scroll too far below least you may be spoiled! The IMDB and Wikipedia pages have good descriptions too.
This is a groovy murder mystery with a tech backdrop. Back in 1971, credit card companies used to mail out perfectly functioning credit cards to people. If I recall correctly, my parents started getting them right after their first mortgage. In this case, a 17 year old computing student accidentally received one, in someone else's name, at his college address.
Things go wacky when he includes some of his college friends in on the action. The students have the all too common, and strange, notion that you are "somebody" when you have unsecured credit and the equally strange notion that college students could not get credit cards just because they are college students. Word: Then and now, if you have a good steady income and a history of paying your bills, it does not matter if you are a college student or not to a credit card company.
The braintrust decides to use the credit card, and get cards on that account for each member of the conspiracy, and pay the bill when they "get money from home." In short order, the group is nearly $100 behind on the card and the issuing company wants more information on the cardholder.
Good news! The group works in the midst of a university computer that is networked to other computers (pre-ARPANET) and they bring in a computing graduate student as a fifth conspirator to create a legend for the cardholder. He injects information into other computers, like a Department of Motor Vehicles computer, that will feed the credit issuers the fabricated information.
This is not quite identity theft. It is identity fabrication and credit fraud. The original card was for a transposed name of someone, so it could be thought of as an accidentally fabricated identity. Something like the way George Allen's name was reversed to Allen George in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.
Some reviews of this film claim that identity theft (fabrication) was not a big issue in 1971. Not quite true. Certainly there was not the volume of this activity then, but techniques for doing it were published by Abbie Hoffman and The Diggers in the years leading up to this movie. I am working on a book and movie about one of Hoffman's associates who created numerous identities in 1971 and lived under one of them until his capture in 1986.
I spoke at some length about a 1970s 60 Minutes episode about identity fraud (48:19 minutes in) and a transcript of that show is available on Wikipedia and in the Congressional Record.
Eventually, the Paper Man had a driver's license and a birth certificate. The conspirators using his credit card began getting bumped off one by one. My memory from the last time I saw the movie, over 40 years ago, ended with the demise of Lisa, the Chinese linguist student. The rest of the movie was a surprise to me. Had the computer spontaneously generated a consciousness?
Or was a real person actually controlling the events?
Actually, as with all computers, a human hand was behind the tragic events. When the computing graduate student removed data and programs, they reappeared as if they had never been deleted.
There is another twist at the very end that I will not spoil here. Click above and watch.
Scoop-O-Steve
No comments:
Post a Comment