Out of the Past and Into the Fire

3) Contemporary noir is too concerned with dark alleys, not concerned enough with dark psychology.

Obsessed with invoking the style of classic noir, current filmmakers almost never manage to include the substance--which is human darkness. Two examples from the last couple of years show it can be done.

Stephen Frears's The Grifters (based on Jim Thompson's novel) concerns a double-crossing mother and son, and the double-crossing girl who comes between them. Unlike the book, the movie unreels in some timeless time specifically so it can pivot on a classic oedipal tug of war and speak to something rich, strange and universal in the human condition. "It's not only the smartest, most successful of the recent noirs," says screenwriter Bean, "but it also conies the closest to being modern, particularly because of the relationship between John Cusack and Anjelica Huston. It's just like any suburban kid and his mom. He makes fun of her, acts like she's just a big pain in the ass, yet he's completely in her thrall. That's brilliant."

Mike Figgis's Internal Affairs is, right on the surface, of our time. It tells of a cop investigating corruption within the force, a story not unlike Serpico or Prince of the City. And it zings as few current films can, thanks to the villainous cop played by Richard Gere. An utterly amoral, conniving, charismatic scumbag who plays upon the mistrust between husbands and wives like a virtuoso, Gere's character is hired by a businessman to kill his parents; when that's done, the businessman's wife hires Gere to kill her husband.

Best of all, the dark moral ambiguities of the Internal Affairs investigator played by Andy Garcia, our protagonist, are nearly as unsettling as those of Gere's character. It's nothing new to link the kinks of the hero and villain, but it feels right, particularly in a world, our world, where so much seems out of whack. What's more, Internal Affairs, like Chinatown, is resolutely modern noir because, unlike less sophisticated specimens of the genre, it doesn't suggest that the hero in the end makes order out of chaos.

4) Contemporary moviemakers aren't as good with sex as the old guys.

It's one of cinema's many paradoxes that often, the stronger the restraint, the steamier the movie. One of the smartest moves actor-producer Warren Beatty, director Barry Levinson and screenwriter James Toback made in their very smart Bugsy was confining the eroticism to machine gun banter (She: "Do you always talk this much before you do it?" and He: "I only talk this much before I kill someone"), just like in the old days.

In the early '30s, when eroticism and violence in the movies were self-regulated by the Hays Code, MGM snapped up the rights to James M. Cain's steamy The Postman Always Rings Twice, which was about a sexy drifter and a sexy wife who bump off her older immigrant husband and get away with it. Paramount bought Cain's Double Indemnity, which was about a sexy insurance man and a sexy wife who bump off the older husband and don't get away with it. Neither movie could be made until the mid-'40s, and even then censors confined the moviemakers to pungent words, steamy glances and lots of shared cigarettes. But both films are sexually supercharged.

Consider the exchange in Double Indemnity where Barbara Stanwyck, wearing a filmy white dress and a fetishistic ankle bracelet, is supposed to be talking with salesman Fred MacMurray about an insur¬ance policy for Stanwyck's husband. She: "There's a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. 45 miles an hour." He: "How fast was I going, officer?" She: "I'd say around 90." He: "Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket?" She: "Suppose I let you off with a warning, this time." He: "Suppose it doesn't take?" She: "Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles?" He: "Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder?" She: "Suppose you try putting it on my husband's shoulder?"

That spectacular scene, like so many in these movies, packs a dizzying punch of erotic obsession, of being in too far over one's head to give a good goddamn. What allows it to do so, besides the magical chemistry of the movie stars, is terrific dialogue played against suggestive imagery.

Dennis Hopper somehow wouldn't or couldn't act smart when he directed 1990's The Hot Spot, based on the novel Hell Hath No Fury by Charles Williams. The story, nearly made into a Robert Mitchum movie in the early '60s, pivots pretty much on the groin area of a studly drifter (Don Johnson) who sells cars, robs a bank and diddles the two most luscious women in a small Texas town (Virginia Madsen, Jennifer Connelly). Hopper mistakes soft porn for sexual crackle. When Madsen, as a scheming rich old fart's wife, spreads her thighs and invites Johnson into the back seat of a car for "a real good look," or tells him, "We're a lot alike, you and me. We've got these hard, hard outsides, but inside--" and he interrupts, "We're hard, hard, hard," it's not hot, it's camp, camp, camp.

Sex is ironically one of the areas in which contemporary noir could make an advance over classic noir, since sex is at the heart of noir and it can be presented more graphically on screen now than in the vintage noir era. The problem is that, with few exceptions, filmmakers have failed to develop in any genre a visual language of eroticism that effectively takes advantage of the freedom relaxed censorship has granted. In any film, but particularly in noir, it's what's going on in the minds inside those bodies that matters--filmmaking that fixates you on the skin's surface (and often doesn't even do that) fails to accomplish what the great noir directors did with smoke.

The notable exception is, of course, Body Heat. That film succeeds on an erotic level because it has great chemistry between charismatic actors, because it has great dialogue churning the blood before anyone touches anyone else, and because it's uncommonly well directed by Lawrence Kasdan, who figured out how to run with what the censors tossed. But in general, sex on the screen is as tricky a trap for contemporary noir as the worship of style.

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