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The Passenger

Original title: Professione: reporter
  • 1975
  • PG
  • 2h 6m
IMDb RATING
7.4/10
28K
YOUR RATING
Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider in The Passenger (1975)
Home Video Trailer from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Play trailer2:08
2 Videos
99+ Photos
SpyDramaThriller

Unable to find the war he has been asked to cover, a frustrated war correspondent takes the risky path of co-opting the identity of a dead arms-deal acquaintance.Unable to find the war he has been asked to cover, a frustrated war correspondent takes the risky path of co-opting the identity of a dead arms-deal acquaintance.Unable to find the war he has been asked to cover, a frustrated war correspondent takes the risky path of co-opting the identity of a dead arms-deal acquaintance.

  • Director
    • Michelangelo Antonioni
  • Writers
    • Mark Peploe
    • Enrico Sannia
    • Michelangelo Antonioni
  • Stars
    • Jack Nicholson
    • Maria Schneider
    • Jenny Runacre
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    7.4/10
    28K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Michelangelo Antonioni
    • Writers
      • Mark Peploe
      • Enrico Sannia
      • Michelangelo Antonioni
    • Stars
      • Jack Nicholson
      • Maria Schneider
      • Jenny Runacre
    • 145User reviews
    • 139Critic reviews
    • 90Metascore
  • See production info at IMDbPro
    • Awards
      • 5 wins & 2 nominations total

    Videos2

    The Passenger
    Trailer 2:08
    The Passenger
    The Passenger
    Trailer 2:07
    The Passenger
    The Passenger
    Trailer 2:07
    The Passenger

    Photos162

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    Top cast18

    Edit
    Jack Nicholson
    Jack Nicholson
    • Locke
    Maria Schneider
    Maria Schneider
    • Girl
    Jenny Runacre
    Jenny Runacre
    • Rachel
    Ian Hendry
    Ian Hendry
    • Knight
    Steven Berkoff
    Steven Berkoff
    • Stephen
    Ambroise Bia
    • Achebe
    José María Caffarel
    José María Caffarel
    • Hotel Keeper
    James Campbell
    James Campbell
    • Witch doctor
    Manfred Spies
    • German stranger
    Jean-Baptiste Tiémélé
    • Murderer
    Ángel del Pozo
    Ángel del Pozo
    • Police inspector
    Charles Mulvehill
    • Robertson
    • (as Chuck Mulvehill)
    Miquel Bordoy
      Jaime Doria
        Joan Gaspart
        • Hotel Clerk
        • (uncredited)
        Narciso Pula
        • Murderer's accomplice
        • (uncredited)
        Gustavo Re
        Gustavo Re
          Enrico Sannia
          • Cameraman
          • (uncredited)
          • Director
            • Michelangelo Antonioni
          • Writers
            • Mark Peploe
            • Enrico Sannia
            • Michelangelo Antonioni
          • All cast & crew
          • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

          User reviews145

          7.428K
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          Featured reviews

          9Chris Knipp

          Re-release of a classic

          Michelangelo Antonioni: The Passenger (Italy/France 1975). 128 minutes. Release by Sony Classics Pictures release. Release date: October 28, 2005. Shown at the New York Film Festival: October 8, 2005.

          Thirty years later, Michelangelo Antonioni's re-released "The Passenger" is looking very good, and so are Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, as the journalist who takes a dead man's identity in the Sahara and the girl he meets in Barcelona who decides to tag along. David Locke (Nicholson) takes the passport of a man named Robertson who he's had a few drinks with in a hotel. Before that we see Locke experience frustration, giving away cigarettes to men in turbans who say nothing, abandoned by a boy guide, dumping a Land Rover stuck in the sand. Later we see films that show as a journalist he was subservient to bad men. Locke has Robertson's appointment book which leads him to Munich, then various points in Spain. He learns Robertson was a committed man taking risks: he sold arms to revolutionaries whose causes he thought were just. He gets a huge down-payment.

          Then Locke's wife gets a tape of him talking to Robertson and his passport with Robertson's photo pasted into it -- and she gets the picture.

          Changing your identity and using someone else's isn't just an existential act, it's also a criminal one. Locke's gambit is hopeless: he winds up fleeing from himself. The film skillfully gives its action story an existential underpinning. The chase keeps up a rapid pace, like the Bourne franchise, but it has time to contemplate Locke's old and new lives in a metaphorical story he tells Schneider about a blind man that explains how he ends up.

          Antonioni is great at little incidentals -- a girl chewing bubblegum, a man reciting in a Gaudi building. And at the end, people coming and going in a desolate plaza outside a bullfighting amphitheater. The locations provide exotic glamor. The camera-work of course is wonderful. In retrospect now one can see this was definitely a culmination for Antonioni. He thought it technically his best film. This is the director's preferred European version, originally released as "Professione: Reporter."
          9noralee

          Noir of Contrasting Cultures Told Brilliantly Visually in Blinding Light

          "The Passenger (Professione: reporter)" is a tour de force of visual story telling. While there is more dialog and the plot makes more sense than many other Michelangelo Antonioni films, it first and foremost uses film-making as a medium to tell its story.

          The camera is always our eye, taking in sweeping panoramas of the North African desert to an architectural tour of European churches and an appreciation of the variegated urban and rural landscapes of Moorish Spain, still showing relics of older invasions, where it all comes together as we literally go from dust to dust. We are the passengers on this existential trip to try and change identities through someone else's travels logging almost as many locations as an outlandish Bond film .

          Because so much of the film is dispassionately observational about natural landscape and cityscape, and windswept plazas that provide imitations of nature within a city, it stands up through time, even as the 1975 clothes, hair, TV journalist technology, and, somewhat, male/female relationships, look a bit dated and we can no longer assume that African guerrilla fighters and gun dealers helping them are more noble than the corrupt inheritors of colonialism.

          The camera is constantly picking out culture contrasts - camels vs. jeeps, horse-drawn carriages blocking Munich traffic, Gaudi's serpentine architecture vs. Barcelona's modern skyline, a cable car gliding over a shimmering body of water.

          And, of course, the very American Jack Nicholson in a very European film, with the many layers of meaning as he plays an adventurous broadcast reporter who ironically tries to escape the truth about himself. His young, sexy, challenging self is surprisingly effective here as we believe both his ethical lapses and his obsession.

          Avoiding the narration that a film today would utilize, Antonioni well takes advantage of what now looks fairly primitive tapings of the reporter's past and current interviews to convey background and flashbacks on characters through minimal explication with overlapping sound and gliding visuals. The intertwined story lines constantly re-emphasize the point of not really knowing a person or a culture from the outside, with a repeated refrain of "What do you see?".

          Maria Schneider's character skirts just this side of a male fantasy cliché, though Antonioni helped to create the type, and a few subtle plot points save her from total disingenuous sex kitten femme fatale (even as her character shrugs that one plot point is "unlikely"). Nicholson's repeated refrain to her of "What the f* are you doing with me?" takes on different meanings as we know more.

          I'm not sure if this 2005 re-release of the director's cut, with supposedly nine minutes that were not in the original U.S. release, is notably pristine, as it wasn't particularly sharp, but the director's trademark crystalline blue sky is still breathtaking and is a must-see in a full screen rather than on DVD. The views practically feel like the old Cinemascope.

          A climactic landscape shot brings all the violent, sensual, philosophical and narrative plot and thematic points together in a marvelous way that has been much imitated but is still powerful, as the camera looks out a window at a cool distance in the heat, key events culminate back and forth frantically in front of the camera, in and out of frame, and the camera moves through the bars and is free to roam in ever more close-ups.
          9mercuryadonis

          Famous concluding shot worth the wait.

          Slow but well worth the time it takes to arrive at the shattering conclusion. Watch it more than once as there are many small visual cues and tips that add both to the plot and theme. Jack Nicholson is superb - and surprisingly low-key - as the jaded and detached reporter who switches identity with a dead man out of boredom more than anything else. Maria Schneider is fine in a somewhat underwritten role. The real stars however are Antonioni's restlessly roving camera and the sublime locations which include the Sahara desert, a cable-car, and that bewitching Gaudi rooftop in Barcelona.
          8Asa_Nisi_Masa2

          Trading oneself in

          For such an enigmatic movie, Professione: Reporter features a thematically well-treaded path. A young, slim Jack Nicholson in an understated performance, sans the familiar shark's grin, plays David Locke, a celebrated, respected, British-born, American-educated international reporter whose life has lost all sense of purpose (this is Antonioni after all!). On finding a British arms dealer he knew now freshly dead in his hotel room in an unnamed, remote African location, Locke decides to take on the other man's identity, and make the world believe that David Locke, the journalist, is dead. Why he does this is never explained, though one can easily intuit it. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter, though one can guess it may have something to do with self-loathing (the bitter irony is that taking on an arms dealer's identity is hardly more honourable!). In one memorable sequence, Locke's wife Rachel (who now believes herself to be a widow) is watching a piece of footage featuring Locke interviewing an unnamed African leader. It stands out as one of the most acerbic polemics on journalism ever filmed. In it, the camera is turned back onto Locke by his African interviewee after the latter loses his patience with the reporter's narrow-minded, Eurocentric vision, betrayed by his lazy, formulaic questions. The artifice of Locke's profession (which on the contrary ought to be a search for truth) is fully exposed in this scene, as well as Locke's increasing disillusionment with his purpose in life.

          Despite its power and polemic against journalism, Professione: Reporter is also an understated movie from start to finish, made for a grown-up audience. Nothing is spelt out for you. However, the movie is strewn throughout with powerful and evocative visual clues, so it's nonetheless up to you as an attentive viewer to pick up (the early scene of Locke's Jeep getting stuck in the African desert sand, anyone?), or even soak them up unconsciously. As with all Antonioni, every shot in this movie is worthy of analysis and admiration. Bergman once said about the Italian that he could create some arresting individual images, but was incapable of stringing them all together in the sequence of a palatable movie: sorry Ingmar, old man - as much as I feel in awe of your craft, you're talking nonsense, here. However, I can't believe Antonioni once had the cheek to say he improvises each scene as he goes along (see his IMDb quotes page). There isn't a chance in hell these meticulously crafted, immaculately framed and composed movies are not also carefully premeditated. Clearly, Antonioni was trying to start a myth about himself along the lines of the one about Mozart composing his music straight onto the page, as dictated by God. In Professione: Reporter, I was especially in awe of the sequence involving the single long take from the window of Locke's last hotel room in an unnamed, dusty Spanish village. Regarding Maria Schneider, it truly is a shame she wasn't the star in a greater number of successful movies. Her ambiguity makes it very difficult to keep one's eyes off her when she's on screen. She looks like a cross between a boy, a girl and something cutely ape-like (I mean it in a good way!).

          I would like to warn viewers of the inclusion of footage of a real execution - again, this was a film within the film. Personally, I found it very disturbing, which is why I'm mentioning it here.
          10michelerealini

          One of the best Antonioni films

          Michelangelo Antonioni's films are very static, with a few dialogues. They describe boredom of bourgeois class, they're cold. Sometimes they're unbearable: either you like them or you don't.

          "Professione: reporter", to me, belongs to the most interesting period of Antonioni's career (between the second half of the Sixties and the first of the Seventies). Because in these years the Italian director made his most accessible works: "Blow Up" (1966), "Zabryskie point" (1969) and "Professione: reporter" ("The Passenger", 1974). These films contain more action and more situations. They are neither more commercial nor more mainstream, but they talk about an adventure or a dream.

          A journalist in North Africa switches the identity with a dead man who looks like him. He does this to escape from his life and for living a more interesting one. But he'll pay for his choice...

          It's difficult to say, but this Antonioni movie (with his recurrent themes and -in a smaller way- times) has a lot of suspense, if I can say so. Once you begin to watch it, you can't give up. The funny thing is that nothing really big or special happens: sometimes it seems a road movie, sometimes it is a typical Antonioni analysis of the society. Jack Nicholson -how young he was at that time!- fills the film, his performance and his expressions are brilliant. It's also interesting the chemistry with Maria Schneider, the lady of "The last tango in Paris" -an actress who never got the fame and the recognition she deserved.

          Cinematography is fantastic. But, above all, the big surprise of the film is the final shot: a 7-8 minutes take without cuts, absolute amazing. It's not describable, it's a must!

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          Related interests

          Daniel Craig in Skyfall (2012)
          Spy
          Mahershala Ali and Alex R. Hibbert in Moonlight (2016)
          Drama
          Cho Yeo-jeong in Parasite (2019)
          Thriller

          Storyline

          Edit

          Did you know

          Edit
          • Trivia
            When Michelangelo Antonioni received his honorary Oscar in 1995, the Academy asked Jack Nicholson to present it to him.
          • Goofs
            There are a couple of inaccuracies in the displayed details of Locke's Air Afrique air ticket that was evidently issued in Douala, Cameroon in August 1974. The name of Fort-Lamy (Chad's neighboring capital city) became N'djamena in early 1973, and Paris is written in Italian ("Parigi") which would not have occurred in French-speaking Douala.
          • Quotes

            The Girl: Isn't it funny how things happen? All the shapes we make. Wouldn't it be terrible to be blind?

            David Locke: I know a man who was blind. When he was nearly 40 years old, he had an operation and regained his sight.

            The Girl: How was it like?

            David Locke: At first he was elated... really high. Faces... colors... landscapes. But then everything began to change. The world was much poorer than he imagined. No one had ever told him how much dirt there was. How much ugliness. He noticed ugliness everywhere. When he was blind... he used to cross the street alone with a stick. After he regained his sight... he became afraid. He began to live in darkness. He never left his room. After three years he killed himself.

          • Crazy credits
            Leo, the MGM lion, which normally precedes the opening credits of MGM movies, has been supplanted by "BEGINNING OUR NEXT 50 YEARS". Leo then returns in the center with "GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY" on either side of it.
          • Alternate versions
            Seven minutes were added to the 2005-2006 re-release version, including a brief shot of a nude Maria Schneider in bed with Jack Nicholson in the Spanish hotel.
          • Connections
            Featured in Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004)

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          Details

          Edit
          • Release date
            • April 9, 1975 (United States)
          • Countries of origin
            • Italy
            • France
            • Spain
          • Official site
            • Sony Classics (United States)
          • Languages
            • English
            • Spanish
            • German
            • French
          • Also known as
            • Zanimanje: reporter
          • Filming locations
            • Fort Polignac, Algeria(desert scenes, setting: Chad)
          • Production companies
            • Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)
            • Compagnia Cinematografica Champion
            • Les Films Concordia
          • See more company credits at IMDbPro

          Box office

          Edit
          • Gross US & Canada
            • $620,155
          • Opening weekend US & Canada
            • $24,157
            • Oct 30, 2005
          • Gross worldwide
            • $818,936
          See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

          Tech specs

          Edit
          • Runtime
            • 2h 6m(126 min)
          • Color
            • Color
          • Sound mix
            • Mono
          • Aspect ratio
            • 1.85 : 1

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