A High-Stakes Blindman's Buff

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER Directed by John McTiernan

Screenplay by Larry Ferguson and Donald Stewart

Back in 1983, before Gorbachev, before glasnost, before perestroika, there was, it seems, Captain Marko Alexandrovich Ramius, commander of the Soviet Typhoon-class submarine Red October. Since he is played by the estimable Sean Connery in this movie version of Tom Clancy's hurricane-class best seller, you know he can't be a hard-liner -- a stern-liner, maybe, but never a hard-liner.

Even so, it may come as a surprise to find a career submariner in any navy, let alone the Soviet fleet, as determined as Ramius is to preserve the peaceful status quo. His vessel -- larger than a World War II aircraft carrier -- has been modified so that it can run faster and more quietly than any other submersible, which means it has something no solo submarine has ever had: first-strike capability. It can glide in close to the U.S. Eastern seaboard, undetected, and start lobbing nuclear missiles at major population centers. Or threaten to. Being the sort of man who thinks he ought to help prevent World War III, not start it, Ramius enlists his key officers in a conspiracy to hoodwink the rest of the crew (and the Kremlin, of course) and deliver Red October to the Yankee imperialists.

Connery, the actor to whom everyone most eagerly surrenders disbelief, quickly renders the movie's central implausibility plausible. And a man named Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) makes Ramius' mission impossible possible. In a way, Ryan is the Soviet officer's double. A CIA intelligence analyst, he too is an apparatchik who has retained the capacity to think for himself. And he too is a man who embarks on a lonely and perilous course.

Ryan must convince the President's security adviser and the Joint Chiefs of Staff that Ramius is neither a rogue lunatic nor an officer grimly carrying out a scheme to upset the cold war balance of terror. Then he must somehow manage to get himself aboard the U.S.S. Dallas, the American sub that has located Red October in the vastness of the Atlantic, and persuade its tough, dubious skipper (Scott Glenn) to help Ramius elude his Soviet pursuers.

The nicely poised, sometimes ironic balance of twin protagonists at play in a high-stakes game of blindman's buff gives The Hunt for Red October solid dramatic tension. Still, this obviously could have been a movie in which a lot of people stood around talking in tight spaces; in other words, a movie that refused to move. But screenwriters Larry Ferguson and Donald Stewart do not overexplain (or underexplain) either its technology or the intricacies of its far-darting plot. We know all we need to know to keep our bearings and not a monosyllable more. And director John McTiernan does not fall too much in love with any scene, character or gadget. He has judged his material (and our attention spans) very well. His alternation of menace and human interest, technological wizardry and action sequences is subtly calibrated, ultimately hypnotic in its effect.

Beguiled as one generally is by the professionalism of The Hunt for Red October, pleased as one is by its celebration of reasonable men attempting to overcome cold war paranoia when such efforts were even more uncommon, one cannot help wondering: Will the movie seem an anachronism in this moment of revolutionary change? Or do the events of recent months make the movie even more treasurable as possibly the last, and by no means the least, of its kind?