Image credit: Pablo Garcia Saldana, Wikimedia Commons, CC0.
Missing is a political thriller based on a true story, and Jack Lemmon’s performance as Ed Horman is one of the quietest and most powerful of his career. Directed by Costa-Gavras from Thomas Hauser’s book The Execution of Charles Horman, the film follows the disappearance of American journalist Charles Horman, played by John Shea, during the Chilean coup of September 1973, which deposed the democratically elected President Salvador Allende. His wife Beth, played by Sissy Spacek, and his father Ed, played by Lemmon, travel through a militarised Santiago searching for him, confronting American embassy officials, Chilean soldiers, and a wall of evasions. Lemmon plays Ed as a conservative, devout, and self-assured businessman who begins the film trusting his government completely and ends it understanding how badly that trust has been betrayed. Ed Horman arrives in Chile as an outsider in every sense. He has not approved of his son’s left-wing politics, he has not been close to his daughter-in-law, and he believes that American officials, if approached politely and through the proper channels, will help him. Lemmon plays that belief without caricature. Ed is not a fool. He is a man of his generation and his background, a Christian Scientist, a New Yorker who has built a life on the assumption that institutions work. When embassy officials offer him reassurances that do not match what Beth has seen, Lemmon lets Ed’s confusion show in small ways: a pause before he answers, a glance at Beth, a repeated question asked slightly more sharply. The audience watches a worldview crack, slowly, and Lemmon makes each crack visible. The relationship between Ed and Beth is the film’s emotional core, and Lemmon and Spacek play it with remarkable restraint. At first, they are polite strangers, united only by their worry for Charles. Beth has lived in Chile, she knows the danger, and she is frustrated by Ed’s deference to officials. Ed, in turn, is unsettled by Beth’s anger and by her willingness to challenge authority. As they visit morgues, hospitals, and government offices together, and as they are lied to again and again, their alliance deepens. Lemmon does not play Ed’s change of heart as a sudden conversion. He plays it as a series of small surrenders: he listens longer, he stops defending the embassy, he starts to see Beth not as a difficult daughter-in-law but as a brave and clear-eyed witness. By the film’s end, Ed and Beth are no longer opponents. They are partners in grief and in determination. Costa-Gavras, known for political films such as Z, directs Missing with a controlled fury. He does not use flashy camera work or a pounding score to tell the audience what to feel. Instead, he lets the accumulation of detail, the empty offices, the soldiers on street corners, the bodies in a morgue, the officials who smile while saying nothing, create a sense of dread. Vangelis’s score is spare and mournful, and the film’s structure, which withholds the full truth about Charles until late, mirrors Ed and Beth’s own search. Lemmon’s performance fits that style perfectly. He does not overact. He underplays, and the underplaying makes Ed’s eventual anger, when it finally comes, feel earned rather than theatrical. The film was controversial on release, particularly in the United States, where its suggestion of American complicity in the Chilean coup provoked legal challenges and political debate. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, shared with Yilmaz Güney’s Yol, and Lemmon won Best Actor at Cannes. He was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, and the film won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Those honours matter because they recognised a performance that refused easy heroics. Ed Horman does not save his son. He does not defeat a conspiracy. He learns the truth, and he carries that truth home, and Lemmon plays that carrying as both a defeat and a form of dignity. What makes Ed Horman a signature role is how completely Lemmon disappears into a man so different from his comic persona. There are no jokes to hide behind, no clever dialogue to charm an audience, no familiar Lemmon mannerisms to signal that everything will be all right. Ed is stiff, formal, and sometimes wrong, and Lemmon loves him anyway. He shows Ed’s decency in his persistence: he keeps asking questions when it would be easier to go home, he keeps standing beside Beth when it would be easier to blame her, and he keeps believing that the truth matters even when it cannot change the outcome. That persistence is a different kind of courage from the one Lemmon played in comedies, and it is no less compelling. For viewers today, Missing remains a powerful introduction to a chapter of history that many audiences know only vaguely, and a reminder of how political films can work through personal stories rather than through lectures. Lemmon’s Ed Horman is the audience’s way into that history: a man who starts by trusting the official story and who ends by questioning it, not because he has become a radical, but because the facts have left him no choice. That journey, played with such honesty and restraint, is why Missing stands among Jack Lemmon’s finest achievements, and why it deserves to be remembered alongside his comedies as an equal part of his legacy. Missing also deserves recognition for how it handles its ending. It does not offer catharsis or revenge, and it does not pretend that learning the truth can undo what has happened. Ed returns home carrying knowledge that will change how he sees his country, and Lemmon plays that homecoming as a sombre responsibility rather than a triumph. The final scenes linger on Ed and Beth’s faces, not on political slogans, and that restraint is what makes the film endure. It trusts its audience to sit with uncomfortable facts, just as Ed has learned to do, and Lemmon’s quiet, unshowy performance is the reason that trust feels justified.