Film Review: Our Man In Tehran

Our Man In Tehran is a fascinating documentary about the hostage situation in Iran in 1979, and specifically about the plan to get the six people who had escaped the embassy out of that country. It features interviews with many of the key players, including hostages, those who were in hiding, and the folks who created and executed the plan to get them out.

The film opens with a quote from Kenneth Taylor, former Canadian Ambassador to Iran: “In November 1979, we watched helplessly as the US Embassy in Tehran was seized, and American diplomats held hostage. The world was in shock. It shouldn’t have been. This was the culmination of events that had been building for years.” Kenneth Taylor, of course, is the man President Jimmy Carter referred to when he said, “He was our man in Tehran,” and the film, in part, focuses on his tale. But for those of us who perhaps don’t remember the events as well as we should, this documentary gives us plenty of the backstory to help put the hostage situation into perspective.

The film takes us back to the early 1970s, when the oil crisis made what was once a poor country a rather rich country, and deals with the growing rift between those committed to the faith and the more westernized Iranians. There is quite a bit of old footage, including an interview with Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi from October 1975, in which he talks about the possibility of the CIA being active in Iran. The Nixon administration wanted to create Iran as the policeman for the Middle East, and Henry Kissinger wrote a memo to the Defense Department, urging them to sell the Shah anything he wanted short of a nuclear weapon. Iran was the one country that the U.S. sold F-14s to. But the poor in that country felt that education and food might be a bit more important. There is lots of footage of the revolution, leading to the Shah exiting his country, and to the return of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Interestingly, some of the journalists on the plane with Khomeini are interviewed in this film. Canadian journalist Carole Jerome says, regarding the Shah’s being allowed into the U.S. for cancer treatment, “That was what triggered the hostage seizure.” We see footage of the demonstration that led to the hostage seizures. More than fifty US diplomats were taken hostage. However, a small group was able to escape from one of the other buildings. And the film really focuses on that small group, and those who sheltered them and then helped them finally leave the country. The main focus is on the plan to get those six people out, not on the revolution or those taken hostage or on Khomeini. The various ideas for getting them out are so interesting, and the plan they eventually put into effect is fascinating (and is the subject of Ben Affleck’s 2012 film Argo). There are interviews with Joe Schlesinger, Roger Lucy, William Daugherty, Tony Mendez, Zena Sheardown, Patricia Taylor, Bob Anders, Kathleen Stafford, Gary Sick, and even Joe Clark, the Prime Minister of Canada at the time.

This film had me in its grip from the very opening. If it has any failing at all, and I’m not sure it has, it’s that it left me wanting even more information. I wanted to know more about the original coup, how the Shah took power. And I wanted to know how long the Shah was in the United States, about his cancer treatments. But of course those things are a bit outside the scope of the film’s main thrust.

Our Man In Tehran was directed by Drew Taylor and Larry Weinstein, and inspired by the book Our Man In Tehran by Robert Wright. It opens in New York on May 15, 2015, and is distributed through First Run Features.