dennisbedard

Being a fan of the genre, I enjoyed this movie but it is not for everyone. My first thought was that Harvey Keitel should have played Vito Genovese. And I stand by that. This type of film has been done before. The Irishman, Goodfellas, Lansky, and probably many others I cannot think of. A lot of mob history and voice over reminiscing. The scene in upstate New York is funny. They must have commandeered a retirement home in Brooklyn and paid the extras $25 for the field trip. The ending confirms Vito Corleone's gut feeling: "they wouldn't be my friends for very long if they know my business was drugs instead of gambling, which they regard as a harmless vice."

This film had the potential to be a lot better than it was. Still worth the 90 minutes though. Here are the shortfalls.

1. The story line has gaps. The organized crime connection is poorly written. It is never developed. The viewer is left at the end wondering. Would have been better to have woven the mob angle into the picture from the beginning and had parellel stories that merged at the end.

2. Derian McCall's prior life as a cop makes no sense. Her ripping off the body wire to have sex with a criminal is preposterous. And her regrets that her fellow officers shot the bad guy who had a gun pointed at her is equally off the wall. She could have been killed. Huge credibility gap.

3. And speaking of a credibility gap, a private detecitve agency that has all the accoutrements and window dressing of a top flight law firm or movie studio does not pass the smell test. A cop with a blemished past and only 4 years on the job living a high end lifestyle as a PI is tough to accept.

4. The actors are misplaced for the roles they took on. Kiefer Sutherland is too Boy Scoutish. Rebecca De Mornay is too prim and proper and Dana Delany is just not femme fatale material.

5. And finally, and most absurd of all, our friend Derien is arrested for 1st degree murder and getting visitors in her (quite posh) jail cell. Flip to the next scene and she is out of jail and carrying a gun. How she bailed out on a murder charge is left unexplained. Very odd indeed.

In sum, not a bad movie but it could have been a lot better. I got the impression that the production team was under time pressure and put a lot of this together at the last minute to meet a deadline.

I enjoyed this film. An attraction between two very different people. Gabin, as a peripatetic and hard drinking longshoreman with Ida Lupino as a young and innocent looking lost soul. Their overnight romance lacks the noir essentials: it is real and each loves the other. No one is looking to get rich quick through devious means or to use the other for personal greed. The age difference would normally lend itself to sinister motives on both sides but it is not to be. Fritz Lang was the original director on this movie and one has to assume had he continued on with it, the ending would have had Lupino traversing into the dark side and doing Gabin in. Alas, Gabin has nothing going for him and thus a very unlikely target for a thrill hungry vixen. So what we get is a very un-noirish ending: the happy couple goes off into the sunset to live happily ever after.