After Dark, My Sweet

Intense actors like Bruce Dern, Jason Patrick and Rachel Ward combine to make this modern-day film noir a winner. Of the three, I don't know who was most interesting as all offer good performances and intriguing characters.

Patric does the narration in this noir, playing an ex-boxer and mental patient. Wow, that alone makes for an interesting guy! He looks dumb, but he isn't. Ward is the slinky, attractive, cynical, intelligent and compassionate co- conspirator of a kidnapping plan that goes bad. Bruce Dern also is in the mix and Dern never fails to fascinate in about any film.

The movie could be considered kind of downer to the average viewer, but I found it fascinating....and I don't like depressing movies normally. What I found was a kind of quirky crime film. Take a look and see if you agree. This is pretty unknown film that shouldn't have that status because it's simply a good story and well-done.

I see After Dark, My Sweet every couple of years and it is only slightly less stunning now compared to 10 years ago. 3 key points... Jason Patric's performance, or rather character. I haven't seen his performance in anything else that has been close, I thought at the time it was perfection. The mood. If you're familiar with the area it was shot in, the desolation and decay is conveyed with alarming accuracy. And an ending that has impact. Again, if you're in the mood.

The first of two Jim Thompson adaptations released in 1990 (the other being the more well-known GRIFTERS), AFTER DARK has all of Thompson's hallmarks: dangerous women, the confidence game, and characters that are either not as dim as others suspect them of being, or not as harmless.

Jason Patric is superb as a former boxer disqualified from the sport for life due to an incident in the ring (director James Foley uses RAGING BULL-esquire sequences to flesh out the back story) and the too-little-seen Rachel Ward also delivers a great performance. But Bruce Dern is the film's secret weapon: his sweet-talking grifter Uncle Bud subtly commands each of his scenes.

there's almost no comic relief in this film, so watch it prepared to be sucked into the void.

If you're as huge of a fan of an author as I am of Jim Thompson, it can be pretty dodgy when their works are converted to film. This is not the case with Scott Foley's rendition of AFTER DARK MY SWEET. A suspenseful, sexually charged noir classic that closely follows and does great justice to the original text. Jason Patrick and Rachel Ward give possibly the best performances of their careers. And the always phenomenal Bruce Dern might have even toped him self with this one. Like Thompson's book this movie creates a dark and surreal world where passion overcomes logic and the double cross is never far at hand. A must see for all fans of great noir film. ****!!!

It was easy not to notice this in theaters a decade ago, but time has been exceedingly kind to AFTER DARK & likely will continue to be. Already it stands as one of the 90s best films. Though its Southwestern locations (Indio, California was used) are both a bit too sparse and modern to suit the source material, in every other way this captures the ineffable aura of Jim Thompson's prose (and anyone who's actually READ "The Getaway" knows how utterly impossible a task translating his best effects to film really is). Director Foley has done a splendid job in setting a tone of dreamlike, sunburned melancholy and maintaining it throughout, aided immeasurably by fine performances by Rachel Ward & Bruce Dern and an absolutely riveting one by Jason Patric. I had faint hopes for this film before seeing it, due mostly to Patric in the lead; I was floored watching it, and all DUE to Patric's performance. Though a little young for the part, he captures perfectly the likable ambivalence and roiling inner pathology of the Jim Thompson Hero: you never stop feeling for the guy even as you know he will inevitably be compelled by his inner torments to do monstrous things before the story ends. Patric's complete immersion into "Kid Collins" steals a little thunder from one of Bruce Dern's most chillingly indelible portrayals of slime personified, "Uncle Bud". (Fans of Dennis Hopper's "Frank Booth" from BLUE VELVET would take to Uncle Bud immediately, I think.) More than any other film adaptation of Thompson, AFTER DARK -even more than THE GRIFTERS - embodies that peculiar cowtown existentialism of his that tells us we're each of us alone in a world where things start bad and only get worse, pretending we're sane the way kids pretend there's a Santa Claus. A film without an audience in 1990, but little by little, year by year, a growing and appreciative audience is building. See this movie.