Black Widow (1987)

Black Widow is a 1987 neo-noir and it probably really is a neo-noir if you define neo-noir fairly loosely.

Debra Winger is Alexandra and she’s a Fed. She’s become intrigued by two cases of older very rich men with much younger wives. The two men both died suddenly apparently from a very very rare medical condition. It’s a real medical condition but its rarity makes the coincidence seem just a little odd. The autopsies offer no indications of foul play.

It strikes Alexandra that the two wives looked rather similar. In fact, very similar.

Then another older very rich man with a much younger wife dies suddenly. There are various other odd similarities between all three cases.

Alexandra is convinced that the three wives are all the same woman and that she has now murdered three husbands. Her superior officer thinks she’s go a bee in her bonnet about nothing. The three men appeared to have died of natural causes. Alexandra has zero evidence to back up her hunch.

The audience knows that Alexandra is right. It’s the same woman, played by Theresa Russell. Her real identity is elusive. Her name might be Catherine. For the sake of convenience I’ll refer to her as Catherine.

Alexandra pursues the case obsessively.

At first it’s a hunt. Finding the mystery woman isn’t particularly difficult. She’s now in Hawaii. Alexandra does after all have all the resources of the Justice department behind her. But finding the woman doesn’t help. There is still no actual evidence. It now becomes a cat-and-mouse game. Alexandra is the cat, Catherine is the mouse. It is of course possible that the mouse has teeth, and in such cases it can become unclear as to who is hunting whom.

One criticism levelled at this movie is that the audience knows too much too early but that’s standard suspense movie technique. This is a case where the detective also knows a great deal early on. But knowing the identity of the killer is irrelevant. Alexandra has to find proof. The interest in this movie is provided by the battle of wits between Alexandra and Catherine. Catherine is a very very clever murderess. But Alexandra is a very good very determined cop.

The other major point of interest is motivation. The first murder made Catherine a very rich woman. She has more money than she could spend in a dozen lifetimes. But she keeps killing. Alexandra would like to know why.

In Hawaii some major plot twists kick in and naturally I’m not going to give any hints about them.

There are some interesting supporting players. Nicol Williamson and Dennis Hopper are very good but the only characters who matter are the two women. Debra Winger is excellent but this movie belongs to Theresa Russell. She has the more showy more ambiguous more mysterious and more interesting role and she makes the most of it.

She is very sexy in a very classy way. And she’s fascinating and charming. It’s not difficult to see how Catherine has no trouble acquiring husbands.

In my view in a story such as this it’s a mistake to over-explain things. That’s the mistake Hitchcock made in Psycho. It ended up making Norman Bates less interesting and less scary. When we’re offered detailed diagnoses they always come across as unconvincing and contrived. We already had enough clues to form our own conclusions about Norman.

Black Widow does not make that mistake. Catherine might be motivated by greed but there might be something else. On several occasions she reacts in very odd ways, offering tantalising suggestions that she’s more complicated than she appears to be. There are a number of possible motivations. It could be over-compensation for something. It could be sexual. It could be feminine competition. We get vague hints, which allows us to amuse ourselves by speculating on the basis of those shadowy hints.

What really allows Theresa Russell to display her acting chops to the full is that she is playing the role of a woman who is herself playing various roles. To snare each husband she must adopt a different persona. We cannot be sure that we ever see the real Catherine. Maybe there no longer is a real Catherine.

To make things even more interesting, Alexandra has gone undercover. So she is playing a part as well. There are so many layers of ambiguity and role-playing in this movie and it’s possible that both women have become captives of the roles they’re playing. And the dynamic between these two women is fiendishly complex and Ron Bass’s screenplay avoids the more obvious pitfalls.

What’s even better is that Catherine displays occasional signs of vulnerability and she doesn’t seem as emotionally blank as you might expect from a ruthless murderess. When Catherine cries we almost believe that her emotion is real. And it’s possible that she almost believes it herself. Maybe it is real. Maybe there is real pain there. The fact that we don’t get a detailed diagnosis makes this the most interesting aspect to the film. She’s femme fatale but a complicated one.

The part is a gift for a great actress and Theresa Russell is a great actress and she’s at the top of her game here.

Another strength of the movie is that Alexandra is not one of those female characters who could just as easily have been male. She is obsessed by this case because she knows that this is a killer that only a woman can catch, because only a woman knows what another woman is capable of.

Black Widow is a superb thriller. Very highly recommended.

Rumble Fish (1983)

Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish was released in 1983. Audiences stayed away in droves. In the 80s Coppola was reinventing himself as the crazed visionary wild man of American cinema. This resulted in a series of spectacular box office failures.

It seems like it’s going to be a juvenile gang movie. Rusty James (Matt Dillon) leads a gang in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He’s about to face a showdown with a rival gang leader, Biff. During the fight his big brother (referred to throughout the film merely as The Motorcycle Boy and played by Mickey Rourke).

The Motorcycle Boy had left town suddenly and mysteriously a couple of years before. Rusty James idolised his big brother. Now he’s back and this sets up certain expectation in Rusty James, expectations which will be disappointed. The Motorcycle Boy had been a big shot. Rusty James assumes that he will now reassume his big shot status and lead the gang to glory in its battles with rival gangs.

Rather than doing this, The Motorcycle Boy broods mysteriously. He continues to brood mysteriously for the rest of the picture.

Their dad, played by Dennis Hopper, is an alcoholic loser. His wife, the mother of the two boys, walked out on him years ago and went to California (in this movie California is like a fabled land across the seas).

Rusty James has a girlfriend, Patty (Diane Lane). She’s a typical high school girl girl. Rusty James treats her with contempt.

The Motorcycle Boy keeps on brooding. Rusty James indulges himself in childish tantrums and self-pity. Nothing really happens until the ending which I guess we’re supposed to see as tragically inevitable.

Coppola also saw this as a movie about time. He does come up with some interesting ways to evoke the passage of time. But in this movie the passage of time is largely meaningless. At the beginning of the story Rusty James is violent, self-pitying and as dumb as a rock. By the end of the story he is violent, self-pitying and as dumb as a rock. At the beginning of the story The Motorcycle Boy is brooding mysteriously. By the end of the story we still have no idea what he was brooding about.

A story about a kid hero-worshipping a big brother had a personal resonance for Coppola since he had hero-worshipped his own big brother.

The movie is based on a novel by S.E. Hinton who also co-wrote the screenplay. It really does feel like a story written by a woman, a woman with zero understanding of men and zero interest in trying to understand them.

This was the golden age of Hollywood flops. Movies like Heaven’s Gate, Ishtar and Waterworld. Some of these - The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, Cut-Throat Island, Hudson Hawk and Coppola’s own One from the Heart - were actually great movies and it’s difficult to see why they flopped. But it’s very easy to see why Rumble Fish flopped.

Coppola went to extraordinary lengths to ensure the film’s commercial failure. He shot it in black-and-white, which in 1983 made it impossible to market.

Stewart Copeland of The Police wrote the score. It’s jarring, discordant and bizarre. That’s apparently what Coppola wanted but it’s jarring, discordant and bizarre in a way that doesn’t fit the tone of the movie.

All of the characters are unlikeable losers. A movie about unlikeable losers can be fascinating if they’re unlikeable losers in interesting ways. But these people are irritating and uninteresting.

The Motorcycle Boy is clearly meant to be a mythic outsider figure. Coppola wanted Mickey Rourke to look like Camus so he clearly had a bit of an existentialist theme in mind - the Motorcycle Boy as a complete outsider totally detached from the world around him. That can work but it requires an actor with the right kind of charisma. It’s the sort of thing that Alain Delon could do effortlessly. Mickey Rourke just doesn’t have that charisma so he comes over as a dime-store would-be Camus.

It sounds like I’m doing a hatchet job on this movie but it does have its strengths. It looks extraordinary. At this point in his career Coppola had a knack for making movies that did not look like anyone else’s movies and did not feel like anyone else’s movies.

Everything about the way it’s shot, and especially the continual use of smoke that seems to come from nowhere, gives it an odd feeling of unreality. In a way that anticipates some of David Lynch’s later movies we’re given the impression that we’re not exactly in the world of everyday reality. At times it feels like a descent into Hell.

Rumble Fish is a failure but it’s an interesting failure.

Urban Cowboy (1980)

Urban Cowboy, released in 1980, is a movie in which a large part of the action takes place in a honky tonk. Not just a honky tonk, but the world’s biggest honky tonk. It’s Gilley’s in Pasadena Texas and it really existed and it really was the world’s biggest honky tonk.

In fact it’s a movie about the honky tonk. The original idea came from a magazine article about Gilley’s. Somehow or other paramount were persuaded to back such a movie. And it was shot on location at Gilley’s in Pasadena Texas.

It’s also a movie about a mechanical bull.

It’s the story about a cowboy who moves to the Big Smoke. Bud Davis (John Travolta) gets a job in a huge chemical plant. It’s dirty grimy factory work. Pasadena is a grimy industrial city. It’s a long way from home for a young cowpoke. The work is hard but at night there’s Gilley’s. Bud feels at home in Gilley’s. They play great country music. And it’s packed with cowboys (and cowgals) for whom it’s a taste of the world they really love, the world they really understand, the world of wide open spaces and horses and steers.

And there’s the mechanical bull. Which really was the thing that made the real life Gilley’s famous. Bud knows he has to ride that bull.

He meets Sissy (Debra Winger). She’s the kind of girl a cowboy dreams of marrying, a unspoilt down-home country girl, sweet but feisty. They fall in love and get married.

There’s a touching scene which could have been played for cruel mockery but it isn’t. Bud blindfolds Sissy and takes her to see the surprise he’s got for her. It’s a trailer. He’s made a downpayment on it. This will be their dream home. Sissy is over the moon. OK, it’s a trailer home, but it’s their home.

There’s a fly in the ointment, in the person of Wes Hightower (Scott Glenn). This movie is a kind of urban-set western and Wes is the equivalent of the sinister gunslinger who’s going to try to take Bud’s girl from him.

There are traumatic relationship dramas, with not just Sissy cheating on Bud with Wes but Bud cheating on her with Pam (Madolyn Smith Osborne). She’s a spoilt rich girl. Her daddy is a rich oil man but in a western she’d have been the daughter of a rich rancher.

And there’s the bull. Bud is obsessed by the bull. Sissy is obsessed by it as well. And there’s a mechanical bull riding contest with a prize of $5,000, a huge fortune for guys like Bud and Wes. In a western we’d be waiting for the climactic shootout but in this case it will be a climactic showdown in the form of this bull-riding contest.

The sexual connotations are very very obvious, with both Bud and Wes having to prove their manhood. And very obvious sexual connotations to Sissy’s obsession with riding the bull - she doesn’t do it to prove she’s as good as a man she does it because it turns her on.

John Travolta’s performance is the film’s biggest asset. Bud does some bad things but they’re comprehensible and Travolta ensures that Bud never loses our sympathy.

This was made not long after his star-making turn in Saturday Night Fever and the two movies have a lot in common - they’re sleazy and grungy and there’s plenty of despair and bleakness. Urban Cowboy is visually depressing but it’s deliberate. Pasadena Texas is not exactly picturesque. It’s a harsh mean urban landscape.

Debra Winger is very good also. The romantic dramas are believable. Bud and Sissy love each other but they’re too proud and stubborn to ask for forgiveness and we really do believe that that’s the kind of people they are.

The script resists the temptation to make Pam a straightforward Bad Girl. She has her character flaws as well but she’s a decent person and she does love Bud. But is her love as strong as Sissy’s?

If you love country music you’ll be in a state of bliss. There’s lots and lots of country music with performances by genuine country music greats like Bonnie Raitt and the Charlie Daniels Band.

Urban Cowboy was a moderate box office hit. It has some bleakness but some quirkiness as well and it has an engaging love story. Highly recommended.

Physical Evidence (1989)

Physical Evidence is a 1989 mystery crime thriller, it’s a courtroom drama and it also has serious neo-noir vibes.

It was directed (but not written) by Michael Crichton. It might seem like an outlier in Crichton’s filmography but in his early career as a novelist he wrote relatively straightforward thrillers so it’s reasonable to assume that he had some affinity for the thriller genre.

It starts with a very impressive visual set-piece on a bridge. Which leads to the discovery of the body of Jake Farley, a sleazy nightclub owner with a spectacularly shady past.

Cop Joe Paris (Burt Reynolds) is arrested for Farley’s murder. Joe is already on suspension. He’s a good cop with a very short temper which has landed him in trouble many times.

Hotshot lady lawyer Jenny Hudson (Theresa Russell) works for the Public Defender’s Office and she begs for the case. It will be a very high-profile case, the kind of case that can make or break an ambitious lawyer’s career.

The audience has no idea whether or not Joe is guilty. The evidence against him is very strong but if he is being framed by someone powerful you would expect that, and Joe has plenty of powerful enemies.

Jenny Hudson also has no idea whether or not Joe is guilty. She’s a lawyer. Her job is to defend him either way.

And the uncertainty about Joe’s guilt is maintained quite skilfully, for a while at least. The evidence against him steadily accumulates but the possibility that someone might be framing him also increases. We still do not know. Nor does Jenny. It’s a good basis for a neo-noir suspense thriller and it works.

The main problem is that this is the most potentially interesting aspect of the plot and it gradually gets lost and the story thereafter becomes rather routine.

There’s also the problem that courtroom dramas are always dull because courtroom scenes are always dull. They’re stagey, rather than cinematic. They’re all about dialogue and dialogue scenes are inherently uncinematic. They’re at best a necessary evil. And it’s very difficult to get away from that staginess in courtroom scenes.

I have seen very few Burt Reynolds movies but he’s pretty good here, not making Joe too sympathetic but just sympathetic enough.

Theresa Russell’s specialty was playing offbeat roles in offbeat roles in offbeat movies for directors like Ken Russell and her husband Nicolas Roeg. This is a much more straightforward role but she handles it well. I like the way she does the full-on power-dressing girl boss thing on the job but throws off that persona as soon as she’s off-duty. She’s a pro. The girl boss routine is part of the job.

The sexual tension between Joe and Jenny works quite well because they’re so radically mismatched. Yes, that’s an established formula, but Reynolds and Russell carry it off well enough.

It bombed at the box office but there’s nothing really wrong with this movie. It’s a bit like an old-fashioned B-movie or a well-crafted TV-movie. It’s decent entertainment but it isn’t going to knock your socks off. And if, like me, you’re a bit of a Theresa Russell completist you’ll enjoy her performance.

This movie is paired with The Anderson Tapes on a double-header Blu-Ray from Mill Creek. There are no extras but it looks terrific. Physical Evidence isn’t particularly special but if you buy the set for The Anderson Tapes (and you should) it’s worth giving Physical Evidence a spin as well.

Tarzan the Ape Man (1981)

Tarzan the Ape Man was released in 1981. This is the notorious Bo Derek Tarzan movie. The one directed by her husband John Derek. Everybody knows this is a really bad movie because everyone says so. And film critics said so, so it must be true.

Personally I don’t care what everybody knows and I certainly don’t care what film critics think so I’m going to approach this one with an open mind.

Bo Derek burst onto the film scene with her role in Blake Edwards’ 10. It was bit part but she got all the attention. Right from the start critics were out to get her.

This was an attempt to do a slightly different sort of Tarzan movie. Tarzan enters the picture quite late.

In 1910 Jane Parker (Bo Derek) arrives in Africa to be reunited with her father. She has never met him. She knows him only by reputation. He is the legendary explorer James Parker (Richard Harris).

Jane insists on joining him on his latest expedition. He is hoping to discover the fabled Inland Sea, and perhaps there are other things he hopes to find.

Also accompanying him will be big game hunter and photographer Harry Holt (John Phillip Law).

While they’re camped deep in the jungle blood-curdling cries are heard in the night. It is the legendary Tarzan. No-one knows who or what Tarzan is. Some say he is a gigantic white ape. Some say he is a gigantic white man. Everyone fears him.

Jane is rather surprised when she meets Tarzan. He rescues her from a lion. She realises that he is only a man. She also notices that he is quite a man.

Having caught sight of Tarzan at last James Parker is convinced that this jungle man is appallingly dangerous.

Tarzan carries her off. This is what James Parker feared would happen. He has no doubt that Tarzan intends to make Jane his mate. James is determined not to let that happen.

There’s a weird kind of courtship taking place between Jane an Tarzan but other sinister things are afoot. A hostile tribe is tracking the expedition. It’s at this point that the movie becomes interestingly weird and slightly surreal and perhaps just a bit kinky.

As I watched this film I was trying to see what it was about Bo Derek’s performance that earned her so much critical derision. But I couldn’t see it. I think her performance is fine. There’s one moment, where Jane is watching Tarzan and it’s clear that she is, for the first time in her life, feeling the stirrings of sexual lust. Miss Derek really nails it. She gets the point across subtly and without being crass, and in a rather sweet good-natured way.

I was also trying to spot exactly what it was about about the job John Derek does as director here that made him the target of critical venom. Again I couldn’t see it. He does a perfectly fine job.

Richard Harris goes way over the top but you don’t hire Richard Harris if you want a low-key performance. This movie is very much a story of obsession. James Parker is an obsessed inspired madman. Which really was true of most of the real-life explorers of that age. Harris plays him as a larger-than-life character, which is as it should be.

There’s also a lot of emphasis on the father-daughter relationship. Initially she hates him. Gradually she falls under his spell. She starts to like the idea of having a remarkable man as a father.

And of course there’s the love story, which is handled nicely. Jane and Tarzan are like two nervous teenagers, strongly physically attracted to each other but too innocent to know what to do about it.

Some of the action scenes are edited in very odd ways. It is quite a weird movie at times but that aspect, along with the slight hints of perversity, make it in some ways quite close to the spirit of pre-WW2 pulp adventure fiction.

And course Miss Derek takes her clothes off.

This is a slightly oddball movie but I rather liked it, and I liked Bo Derek. I’m going to highly recommend it because that’s the crazy sort of guy I am.

And yes I agree that Tarzan and His Mate (1934) is still the best Tarzan movie.

High Road to China (1983)

The problem with High Road to China is that it inevitably gets pigeon-holed as a Raiders of the Lost Ark rip-off and slammed for not being as good as Spielberg’s movie.

It also seems to have had a rather troubled production history with both John Huston and Sidney J. Furie being lined up to direct. In the end Brian G. Hutton directed. It was a co-production with one of the partners being legendary Hong Kong studio Golden Harvest.

Tom Selleck famously had to turn down the lead role in Raiders of the Lost Ark after having signed the contract to do Magnum, P.I. for television. That of course is another reason for the endless comparisons between the two films.

What Raiders of the Lost Ark actually did was to establish that there was still a huge market for old-fashioned adventure movies and thereby made movies such as Romancing the Stone (1984) and King Solomon’s Mines (1985) possible. Which in my book was a good thing. I love those movies.

High Road to China is set in the 1920s. O’Malley (Tom Selleck) is a broken-down former fighter ace. When the war ended he crawled inside a bottle. He’s been there ever since. He also consoles himself with women. This tends to get him into trouble with the husbands of those women.

And now Eve Tozer (Bess Armstrong) enters his life. She needs to find her father. He’s been missing for several years. His slimy business partner Bentik (Robert Morley)

is trying to have him declared legally dead. Bentik will then own the business and Eve will be left with nothing. Eve has to find dear old dad pronto. She will need a plane. O’Malley has two planes. She offers him a lot of money to help her find her father. O’Malley is indignant. He tells her he can’t be bought. She doubles the offer and he decides he can be bought after all.

O’Malley doesn’t know that Bentik has hired people to kill Eve. It’s one of several important things she forgot to tell him.

They get captured by a crazed Wazieri chieftain (Brian Blessed in glorious full-blown Brian Blessed Mode). The trail later leads to Nepal, and to China. With lots of action along the way.

Now maybe this movie is a bit formulaic but that’s the point. It’s trying to be an old-fashioned rollicking adventure tale and it has to include the elements people expect in such a story.

There are lots of narrow escape from certain disaster. There are aerial dogfights. There are larger-than-life villains. There’s the beautiful slave girl who might be able to help them. O’Malley has the standard likeable loyal sidekick, Struts (Jack Weston).

There’s the broken-down embittered hero who might still be a hero if he can stay sober long enough. Tom Selleck is perfect - alternating between being charming, pathetic, amusing, suspicious, brave and really really annoyed.

And there’s the Feisty Heroine, in this case belonging to the Spoilt Rich Girl sub-group. When we first see Eve she is wearing the full-blown flapper gear, a look that I happen to love. Not every woman can get away with wearing the dress she’s wearing but Bess Armstrong pulls it off perfectly. Bess Armstrong is as cute as a button and she’s lively and fun.

Of course the embittered hero and the feisty heroine hate each other until they finally figure out that they’re madly in love.

So there’s nothing dazzlingly original but the movie is fast-moving, there’s great location shooting, there are flying sequences, shoot-outs and explosions. The action sequences are nicely done. The two leads have fine chemistry.

Most critics seem to have approached this movie with the assumption that it was going to be a second-rate Raiders of the Lost Ark knock-off and so they’d already decided they didn’t like it before they actually watched it. If you just approach it as a lightweight romantic adventure movie you might enjoy it quite a bit, as I did. Highly recommended.

The Hen’s Teeth Video Blu-Ray is basically barebones but it’s a good transfer.

If this is the sort of thing you enjoy I can’t recommend the 1985 King Solomon’s Mines too highly. It’s a blast.

No Mercy (1986)

No Mercy is a 1986 thriller which pairs Richard Gere and Kim Basinger. It could perhaps at a stretch be considered to have a slight neo-noir tinge and also perhaps an erotic thriller vibe although to be honest that’s a lot of a stretch.

As an indirect result of a bungled drugs stakeout Chicago cop Eddie Jillette and his partner Joe Collins stumble upon something much bigger - a planned hit. Eddie and Joe, perhaps unwisely, arrange a meet with a mysterious New Orleans businessman (we will find out that his name is Paul Deveneux) who wants a rival rubbed out. Eddie poses as a hitman. Perhaps Eddie and Joe should have realised the meet might not go smoothly. The guy who wants to hire a hitman doesn’t seem the type. He’s more of an old southern aristocracy type.

This guy has a girl with him. Her name is Michelle (Kim Basinger). She’s the reason for the hit. So it’s not business but a personal grudge, which could get messy.

It does get messy. Eddie’s partner gets disembowelled. He’s not the only one who gets killed. Eddie is off to New Orleans, ostensibly to bring his partner’s killer to justice but in fact his objective is revenge pure and simple.

The problem is that Eddie doesn’t know the identity of the target of the aborted hit. All he knows is that the target was a powerful ruthless man, and that he is Michelle’s owner.

Eddie is going to have to track down Michelle. He finds her, and he finds the man who owns her, Losado (Jeroen Krabbé). He also finds out that everything that he assumed he knew about the case is wrong, and everything that he assumed he knew about Michelle is wrong as well.

Another unpleasant discovery is that the New Orleans cops do not want him in their city. Or rather Deveneux’s brother doesn’t want him in New Orleans. Deveneux is extremely rich. If he’s upset, the New Orleans PD is upset.

Eddie ends up in the middle of a bayou, handcuffed to Michelle. They’re lucky to be alive. Losado doesn’t just employ a couple of goons to enforce his will, he has a veritable private army.

Eddie is just one cop on his own in a strange city but by now he’s seriously annoyed. You don’t want to get Eddie Jillette seriously annoyed. And as far as Eddie is concerned if his mission is to be a kamikaze mission, so be it.

He still has to figure out what to do with this strange girl. And Michelle is a very strange girl. Eddie is not just in a strange city. He’s stumbled into a totally foreign world. This is the world of the old French Louisiana. It’s the 1980s in Chicago but here time has stood still for a couple of centuries. And Michelle is like a girl from another planet.

Looking at online reviews I’m surprised that so many people dislike this movie. There’s no shortage of adrenalin-rush action and mayhem with some terrific action set-pieces. There’s good suspense. There’s a weird twisted love story. There’s an exotic setting. As far as thrillers go this one ticks most of my boxes.

I’m also surprised so many people dislike Richard Gere. His performance is very much in that intense edgy wired mode that was so popular at the time but for my money Gere does this sort of thing with more class than most actors of this type. He doesn’t have to shout and wave his arms about and jump up and down to get the message across that he’s a man on the edge. I like him a lot in this movie.

As for Kim Basinger, she has a tricky role. She’s playing a woman who just doesn’t see the world the way women of the 80s see it. She’s like a woman living in two different eras at the same time. I think Basinger is very good indeed in this part.

There’s nothing subtle about Jeroen Krabbé’s performance as Losado but he radiates pure evil and that’s what the part calls for.

The one weakness is that although the acting chemistry between Gere and Basinger is excellent this is a movie that needed a lot more erotic heat.

Richard Pearce is not a particularly big name as a director but he handles matters here with assurance.

No Mercy hits the ground running and maintains the momentum. Whether it’s a neo-noir or an erotic thriller or a plain old action thriller doesn’t matter - whatever it is it delivers the goods. Highly recommended.

The Kino Lorber Blu-Ray presentation looks great.

Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988)

Tucker: The Man and His Dream was another of the offbeat, ambitious films made by Francis Ford Coppola in the 80s and 90s. It was a box-office failure, although not on the same scale as One From the Heart.

It’s based on the real life story of Preston Tucker, who attempted to challenge the automotive giants of Detroit with a highly advanced futuristic new car design. The attempt was a fiasco, only 50 cars were ever built, and Tucker was lucky to avoid a long prison sentence for fraud. Tucker’s supporters have always insisted that he was the victim of a concerted plan by the established car-makers to destroy a possible competitor.

Coppola’s movie certainly presents a very romanticised and idealised depiction of Tucker as a visionary genius and as the heroic little guy fighting against impossible odds.

The Second World War has just ended and Preston Tucker (Jess Bridges) has decided that the time is right to make his dream a reality. He will build the car of the future for Americans. The Tucker Torpedo is a daring innovative design with a host of advanced features that would not in reality become common for decades. It’s a car for a society about to enter the Jet Age.

Unfortunately all Tucker actually has are a few drawings and some ideas. None of the ideas have been properly worked out. He has no money at all. And no factory.

With the help of financier Abe Karatz (Martin Landau) he sets out to raise money, by methods that are imaginative and risky.

He gets a factory, in fact the biggest factory in the world. And now he has a major problem. The Tucker Torpedo does not exist. There is no prototype. It hasn’t even reached the model stage. Building a prototype will take at least nine months and Tucker has just 60 days. The prototype is built, but corners have to be cut.

Tucker doesn’t realise that immensely powerful corporate and political forces are massing against him.

The movie portrays Tucker as a hero, but also as something of an innocent. And wildly over-confident and over-optimistic. He just cannot or will not understand that he hasn’t got a chance. But the odds against him don’t worry him. His enthusiasm and his belief in his dream are unshakeable.

This is a movie that could not possibly be made today. It doesn’t have the right kind of overt political messaging. In this movie the mega-corporations are the bad guys, but the government and the bureaucracy and politicians are the bad guys as well.

Tucker is a celebration of traditional American values - hard work, determination, the old-fashioned can-do spirit. It’s a reflection of the optimism of the postwar period with the belief in unstoppable scientific and technological progress. And it’s a joyous celebration of the traditional American family. Tucker’s marriage is happy and successful. His wife stands by him without question. He is a good father. His kids like and admire him.

Like One From the Heart and Dracula, 1992 this is a movie that glories in its artificiality. It uses some of the innovative and unconventional techniques used in One From the Heart.

Interestingly Coppola uses innovative techniques but also makes extensive use of classic 1940s filmmaking techniques.

Coppola was aiming for a very 1940s feel, but not a gritty 1940s film noir feel. He was aiming for the feel of promotional advertising films of that era. In fact large parts of the movie are ostensibly Tucker promotional films.

Everything is pastels. Everything is lust and pretty, and deliberately so. And it works.

Coppola makes no concessions to realism. And this is a movie entirely and refreshingly free from irony.

Coppola’s original idea was to do this movie as a musical and it does have a great deal of the breezy romantic whimsical fantasy feel of so many 1940s musicals. Although we know that his car was never going to be a success Tucker’s unquenchable spirit makes it an odd kind of feelgood movie. This is a movie about failure, but it's about heroic failure.

All the performances are good. Jeff Bridges adds some real complexity to Tucker - he’s a good guy, but visionaries can be difficult and they can be self-destructive.

It’s obvious that Coppola felt a very strong kinship with Tucker. Coppola is also a man who follows his dreams and like Tucker he refuses to allow commercial failures to dishearten him.

Tucker: The Man and His Dream is in its way inspirational. It’s a movie with real heart. Very highly recommended.

The Blu-Ray looks terrific (this is the kind of visual feast movie that needs Blu-Ray presentation). I have to say that Francis Ford Coppola does delightful audio commentaries for his movies.

Someone to Watch Over Me (1987)

Someone to Watch Over Me is a 1987 Ridley Scott thriller which flopped badly at the box office.

This is very much a movie intended to be about class.

Detective Mike Keegan (Tom Berenger) is newly assigned to the Homicide Squad, in fact he’s newly assigned to the Detective Bureau. He lives in a cruddy house in a bad part of Queens, with his wife and kid. They’re far from rich but it’s a happy marriage.

Claire Gregory (Mimi Rogers) is a super-rich Manhattan high society type. She lives in a luxury apartment in Manhattan. Luxury is a pitifully inadequate word to describe it - she lives like royalty. She lives like a princess.

One of her super-rich friends was murdered by big-time gangster Joey Venza (Andreas Katsulas). Claire witnessed the murder. She’s not just the State’s key witness; she’s their only witness. And she’s the one whose evidence could send Venza to the big house for a long stretch.

The cops have to keep Claire safe but at the same time they cannot let her know how much danger she’s in. She might get cold feet about testifying. So they lie to her and tell her there’s no real danger.

Mike Keegan is assigned as one of her babysitters. He’s uncomfortable because he knows that Claire has been lied to. He doesn’t believe that the cops can keep her safe.

Claire and Mike are from different universes. Claire can spend the equivalent of a years’ salary for Mike on one dress. They’re like aliens to each other.

Mike is inexperienced and to be honest he’s not a very good cop. He makes a rookie mistake early on making an arrest. This is his first case as a detective and he’s already being hopelessly unprofessional, getting personally involved with a material witness in a murder case. He’s in way over his head.

Of course Claire and Mike sleep together, of course his wife finds out and of course his career at risk.

The plot is strictly by the numbers. There’s not a single original twist.

This is TV-movie stuff, both in terms of plot and visuals. Competently shot but there’s nothing here to dazzle. It looks like a well-made TV-movie.

So what about the class angle? It’s there but it’s handled in an uninteresting trite way. OK, it’s tough for a working-class stuff and a wealthy socialite if they fall in love. Now that’s an earth-shattering revelation.

The big problem is the two leads. Tom Berenger is boring. He has zero charisma. He has the emotional range of a coffee table.

Most importantly, he’s a passive pathetic whiney loser.

There is no way a rich society dame is going to fall for a guy like this unless he exudes huge amounts of masculine sexual electricity. This guy is about as exciting as a librarian. She already has a rich passive whiney boyfriend. Why would she dump him for a poor passive whiney boyfriend?

Mimi Rogers is also a problem. A married man is not going to be tempted to go after a woman way outside his league unless she’s sexy and glamorous and exciting. Claire is none of these things. It might have helped had she been put in glamorous slinky dresses, but she dresses like a teacher at an up-market community college.

There is zero sexual chemistry between the two leads. And zero passion and zero romantic chemistry. When they kiss for the first time we’re surprised, since they’ve given no indication of being the slightest bit attracted to each other. We just don’t buy the idea that they have become sexually and romantically obsessed with each other.

This is not an erotic thriller. It could be described as an un-erotic thriller or an anti-erotic thriller. It could also be described as an unromantic thriller.

It’s also not a neo-noir since Claire is way too bland to qualify as a femme fatale. She fails to give off any femme fatale vibes.

It’s the casting that sinks this movie. With someone like Richard Gere or, even better, Kurt Russell, it might have worked. We could imagine a rich society dame going weak at the knees for Kurt Russell as a tough masculine working-class cop. And as the female lead, maybe Kim Basinger or Sharon Stone (not yet a major star but she’d had a couple of leading roles by this time). A man might sacrifice everything for a woman like Basinger or Stone.

I really can’t recommend Someone to Watch Over Me to anyone but a Ridley Scott completist.

Breathless (1983)

Breathless is a 1983 neo-noir based on Jean-Luc Godards’ 1960 À bout de souffle. It was directed by Jim McBride.

Jesse Lujack (Richard Gere) is caught up in a spectacular self-destructive spiral but he doesn’t know it yet. He has to get from Vegas to LA to collect some money so he steals a Porsche.

By the time he reaches LA there’s a dead cop lying by the side of the highway.

He collects his money but to his horror it’s a cheque, not cash. If you’re a regular law-abiding citizen and it’s clean money a cheque is no problem. If you’re a gambler who has not always been on the right side of the law and it’s dirty money a cheque can be a huge drama.

Within a few hours he’s carried out a minor robbery and stolen another car. He should be keeping a law profile but Jesse is just not capable of doing that. He’s extravagant and wild and crazy and he attracts attention everywhere he goes.

He’s intending to head for Mexico with Monica (Valérie Kaprisky) but Monica doesn’t know that yet. He and Monica had a brief but exciting fling in Vegas. Jesse just knows that Monica is the girl for him. Monica is not at all sure that Jesse is the man for her. She’s about to take her degree and begin a successful career. The last thing she needs is to get involved with a crazy irresponsible loser like Jesse.

On the other hand Jesse is a very good-looking sexy bad boy and what girl can resist a guy like that?

Jesse qualifies as an authentic film noir protagonist. He’s a bit of a bad boy but he’s not really evil. He thinks his problems are due to bad luck but in fact they’re the result of his character flaws. The key to Jesse’s character is that he’s a loser who thinks he’s a winner. He’s ludicrously over-confident. He thinks his charm and his confidence will keep him out of serious trouble. He makes one bad decision after another and he has no idea just how deep a hole he is digging for himself.

Richard Gere’s hyperactive charisma-overload performance is perfect. He captures Jesse’s obliviousness to reality very neatly.

Jesse is not conventionally likeable. Having Jesse in your life would be a nightmare. We care what happens to him not because we like him but because he is a hunted animal and all the odds are stacked against him and we know he’ll just keep doing dumb things. He can’t help it. He’s not so much breathless as hopeless and clueless. He’s so dumb and hopeless that we feel that it’s cruel to hunt him down like a feral dog. And somehow Gere manages to persuade us to be on his side.

Monica is not a femme fatale in a conventional sense (she is not scheming or manipulative) but she is a disastrous choice for Jesse. She is way out of his league. He should just head to Mexico without her. Rich respectable girls will always get guys like Jesse in trouble. And Monica is at heart respectable.

Valérie Kaprisky has had a lengthy successful career in France but Breathless seems to have been her only significant Hollywood role.

This movie is as hyperactive as Jesse. This is the only Jim McBride-directed movie I’ve seen but based on this the man knows how to make a wild rollercoaster of a crime thriller. There are definitely touches of dark humour. It’s like Jesse himself. It dares us not to enjoy ourselves.

I love that at one point our couple on the run end up in a movie theatre and the movie that is playing is Gun Crazy, the greatest couple-on-the-run movie ever made.

Jesse lives in a fantasy world in which he’s the hero. He loves comic books and the world of the Silver Surfer is more real to him than the real world. And the movie to an extent takes us into Jesse’s fantasy world. We’re seeing the world the way Jesse sees it. We’re seeing Jesse trying to be a comic-book hero. The movie takes place in a kind of heightened reality.

Apart from that interesting detached from reality vibe this is also a hugely entertaining movie.

Breathless is great stuff. Very highly recommended.

The Blu-Ray includes an appreciation by Mark Kermode which is very worthwhile. I love his enthusiasm for this movie and I share it.