Death Watch

Although remarkably prescient, this film, directed by French master film-maker Bertrand Tavernier based on a novel by English writer David Compton about reality TV and the manipulative nature of the media, set in the near future (and shot in English, in and around Glasgow) is a laboured and earnestly didactic affair in a way that only films of the Left persuasion can be.

Harvey Keitel plays Roddy, an ambitious TV host who has camera implanted in his head so that a tough-talking TV producer (a gruesomely mis-cast Harry Dean Stanton) who will stop at nothing to pander to the ratings.can
have him following a terminally-sick woman (Romy Schnieder) around as she dies for a television series that gives the film its name. 

FYI:  Schnieder died two years later never having recovered from the accidental death of her 14 year old son in 1981.

 

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