Frank Miller / The Customer is Always Right

Frank Miller

SIN CITY

The Customer is Always Right

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M17kHj-TNOc

 The Customer is Always Righ

The Customer is Always Right is a short story, part of a publication of stories entitled "The Babe Wore Red and Other Stories". The Customer is Always Right is the shortest as it is three pages. It was later re-published in the collection Booze, Babes, and Bullets.

It served as the opening sequence for the movie Sin City, which featured Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton. The sequence served as the original proof of concept footage that director Robert Rodriguez filmed to convince Frank Miller to allow him to adapt Sin City to the silver screen.

The story involves an enigmatic tryst between two nameless characters; "The Customer" and "The Salesman". They meet on the terrace of a high rise building, hinting that although they seem to be acting like strangers, they do indeed have some sort of past. It is unclear what their past involves even as they embrace in a passionate kiss.

A silenced gunshot stabs the night air to reveal that The Salesman has shot The Customer. The reader is led to believe that The Customer had fallen into a serious and difficult situation and, with no other feasible alternative, hired The Salesman to kill her. Later information given by Frank Miller on the commentary of the Recut & Extended DVD Edition states that The Customer had an affair with a member of the mafia and, when she found out, tried to break it off with him. The mafia member then swore to her that she would die in the most terrible way possible, and when it is least expected. The Customer, having connections, hires The Salesman (who is referred to as "The Lady-Killer") to kill her. In the comic The Salesman is The Colonel, as Miller has verified in the BLAM! section page 29 of the one-shot issue Sex & Violence.

FANDOM

James Ellroy / The Black Dahlia

The Black Dahlia

Peter Bradshaw
Friday 15 September 2006

T

he return of Brian De Palma to centre-stage is something that many will greet with mixed feelings. His pop genius status is something that posterity has still not had sufficient time to ratify, and I am uncertain about this over-long and muddled adaptation of James Ellroy's postwar LA thriller about the murder and dismemberment of a failed actress, instantly nicknamed The Black Dahlia by the yellow press. There is some gobsmackingly melodramatic thesping and the final revelations, when they eventually arrive, are at the wrong end of the bang-whimper continuum.

Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart play two cops; Eckhart becomes dangerously obsessed by the Black Dahlia case, and Hartnett becomes dangerously obsessed by his girlfriend, the outrageously buxom and full-lipped Scarlett Johansson, whose job is to run in and out of rooms, frowning or sobbing with concern, sporting a fluffy, clingy sweater and a cigarette-holder. That disappears after a while, though, as if tension has diminished the desire to smoke - which isn't the effect tension usually has on smokers.

The Los Angeles of this booming decade emerges as booming and decadent, all at once: with the cops, the politicos, the movie-moguls and the papers all frantically feeding off each other. De Palma uncorks some big production numbers - street brawls, gay nightclubs, gunfights - and for fans of his Hitchcock homage Dressed to Kill, there's even a bit of cross-dressing in the shadows. Hilary Swank is the rich-little-rich-girl who toys with a little recreational lesbianism and turns Hartnett on in bed by wearing nothing but a string of pearls the size of ping-pong balls.

The most extraordinary thing is Fiona Shaw, playing Swank's alcoholic and pill-popping mother. Her final moments in this film are so hammy that any vegetarians present will come out in a rash. The prefix "over-" in "over-acting" doesn't quite cover it. Her shriekingly tragic fate was something that I certainly won't forget in a hurry. Many people in the audience had to be helped out of the auditorium, given a cup of hot, sweet tea and covered with those Bacofoil blankets. I myself will need years of therapy to get over it.

This is a handsomely mounted movie, and it's directed with gusto, but unlike Curtis Hanson's LA Confidential, all the cynicism and corruption and twisty plot chicanery leads nowhere very satisfying. LA comes across as a dirty town, right enough - but also just a little bit dull.

THE GUARDIAN

New Again: Josh Hartnett

By Staff and Elizabeth Weitzman

Photographed by Ellen von Unwerth

January 14, 2014

This spring, Josh Hartnett will star alongside Timothy Dalton and Eva Greene in Showtime’s new horror series, Penny Dreadful. Set in Victorian London, creator John Logan has promised the show will be “highly erotic” and “very bloody.” The first pictures leaked earlier this week, and our interest was piqued.