Red Rock West

John Dahl's Red Rock West (1992) is a small-scale neo-noir treat featuring two now deceased character actors (J.T. Walsh and Dennis Hopper), plus Nicolas Cage and Lara Flynn Boyle, with small but notable roles by Dwight Yoakam and Timothy Carhart. Stylish and peppered with subtle humor, the film has an almost ancient primal-mythic arc but is set in the centemporary American West. Cage's character Michael, a Marine veteran and survivor of the 1983 Beirut embassy bombing, has a bum leg and a lot of choices to make; Hopper's character, Lyle from Dallas, is also a Marine veteran, but of the Vietnam War era; he has been hired to do something nasty in the town of Red Rock West. Boyle's Suzanne (pictured above) is married to Walsh's Wayne. Besides some mordant quips about marriage, Red Rock West rolls out stylish scenes, twists and turns, the kinds of things Oliver Stone later built upon in making U Turn (1997).  

Dahl's subsequent movie, The Last Seduction (1994), features Linda Fiorentino as one of the most entertainingly conniving femmes fatales I've yet seen on a screen.  More recently, Dahl directed several episodes of True Blood and Dexter.

Today's Rune: Fertility.   

Mae West's Babe Gordon, Part Two

Mae West's Babe Gordon is a rare character in that she does basically what she wants. No Pandora's Box. No Thelma and Louise, no Madame Bovary, no Anna Karenina, more like The Last Seduction, the entertaining 1994 neo-noir movie starring Linda Fiorentino. In other words, instead of "independent woman gets punished for her social transgressions," "independent woman lives free and gets away with it." Why aren't there more of these kinds of characters? It's refreshing.

One other thing to note about Babe Gordon / The Constant Sinner (1930/1931).  A lot of the 1920s dialogue and setup will seem like right out of a movie from the 1930s and 1940s -- somewhat hard-boiled and cornball. But the thing is, talkie films didn't even begin until The Jazz Singer (1927), so we might have to turn back to stage productions and vaudeville to locate the more stagey influences on written style and manner. This would make sense, given that Mae West (1893-1980) performed in plays and vaudeville-type romps prior to becoming a playwright, and then a novelist -- well before taking to the big screen herself in 1932.

Photo credit: Archives of the L.A. Times via Wikimedia Commons, dating to around the time of Babe Gordon / The Constant Sinner's publication. 

Today's Rune: Signals.  

Stephen Frears: The Grifters

Stephen Frears The Grifters (1990) stays true to the spirit and many of the specifics of Jim Thompson's 1963 noir novel of the same title. It is a lesson in human psychology and the freakonomics of grifting (swindling). Essentially, grifting only works with economy of scale: corporate size grifting. Smalltime grifting will get you nowhere and is a dangerous, self-destructive pursuit. It is too small to succeed over the long run. Corporate-size grifting, on the other hand, is more often "too big to fail," making millionaires of its psychopathic avatars; its destruction is aimed at everyone else but the perpetrators.

In The Grifters, Anjelica Huston, Annette Bening and John Cusack are superb as unlikeable protaganists, smalltime mental cases who overestimate their grifting skills. Their characters are relatively small bit players going nowhere.  Secondary players -- all good -- include Pat Hingle (the judge in Hang 'Em High, 1968); Henry Jones (Leroy the halfwit in The Bad Seed, 1956); J.T. Walsh (The lawyer in The Last Seduction with Linda Fiorentino, 1993) Stephen Tobolowsky (Deadwood, Californication); plus Jeremy Piven before hair implants as a sailor (Ari on Entourage). Director Stephen Frears has presided over the creation of many excellent, thoughtful films ranging from My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) to The Queen (2006).   

Finally, the "period" details in The Grifters show just how much has changed in the past two decades. There are several payphones, primitive computers, large cars, no SUVs, no cellphones. It is most apparently a different world, though human nature remains the same.

Today's Rune: Harvest.

The Last Seduction

As far as femmes fatales in 1990s film noir, it's hard to beat Linda Fiorentino as Bridget Gregory/Wendy Kroy in John Dahl's The Last Seduction (1994). Like any guilty pleasure, it's fun to watch Ms. Fiorentino run circles around various men. Bill Pullman is good as her bilked husband, the one guy who can almost match her wits. Peter Berg plays a rube named Mike. The Last Seduction is particularly effective in making the viewer complicit in various criminal enterprises. It's no accident, I'm guessing, that this movie was shown on HBO before being released theatrically. Complicity, moral complexity and dark humor are trademarks of many an HBO series or film.

I keep meaning to track down more films featuring Fiorentino (b. March 9, ca. 1958-1960, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). She sizzles in this one, certainly.

Odd HBO connection: Peter Berg's roommate in college was Ari Emanuel, the inspiration for Ari Gold on Entourage. To follow the daisy chain down the line, the name Ari Gold is probably a play on chief Goldfinger villian, Auric Goldfinger, a name that is itself a mockery of Ian Fleming's Hungarian neighbor, an architect named, in real life, Ernő Goldfinger. But it's fiction!

Today's Rune: Movement.

Birthdays: Edward R. Murrow, Ella Fitzgerald, Meadowlark Lemon, Jerry Leiber, Alfredo James "Al" Pacino, Jaroslava Schallerová, Dominique Blanc.