We considered making these a "Best of Ever" pairing, but neither felt quite like a candidate for the pantheon, back then or now, although they are close.
BASIC INSTINCT (1992) (A-minus) - Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas make for quite the sizzling pair of stars, and director Paul Verhoeven and writer Joe Eszterhas provide the pulp and suspense in an old-fashioned thriller about a haggard cop's investigation of a brutal slaying in San Francisco. It is still breezy and witty and as over-the-top as you'd expect from the notorious team behind "Showgirls" and the writer of "Jagged Edge" and "Flashdance."
In a throwback to the days of film noir, Stone plays Catherine Trammel, a wily author who likes to write books about gruesome acts that have eerie parallels to real life and whose best friends happen to be murderers (research, she claims). When her rock-star boyfriend gets ice-picked to death during a round of hot sex, she is the logical suspect. She famously doesn't wear panties to her interrogation, and passes the audition, running free and soon luring to bed Douglas' Nick Curran, a reckless cop who once shot two people while high on cocaine. When his department rival ends up dead, Nick is suspended, but he doesn't give up the chase.
Their affair gets kinky and torrid (akin to the passion in "Body Heat"), and Nick starts to lose his shit when he finds out that Catherine's next book will be a thinly veiled portrait of him and his checkered past. It helps that she somehow got access to his psychiatric files; she may or may not have had a past with Nick's therapist and occasional bed partner Beth (an indispensable Jeanne Tripplehorn). Nick has a guardian angel in his colleague Gus (a rock-solid George Dzundza), but it does him little good.
The plot thickens, Stone smolders, Douglas spews charisma in all directions, and the twists and turns are delectable. While the topic is noir, the visuals are bright and eye-catching all around the bay. Some scenes border on ridiculous (again, consider the sources), like when Nick gets hit by a car but just gets up and chases after the perp.
Like "Jagged Edge," this one never lets up and never lets you down. It's a throwback to the old-fashioned thrill of watching movies.
THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971) (A-minus) - In the hangover of the 1960s, this foundational film suffers a little bit from the Sloppy Seventies syndrome, and Gene Hackman has had less hacky performances, but William Friedkin's cops-and-robbers tale of two cities is suspenseful and, at times, riveting.
At the dawn of a dark decade, New York is starting to show its seedy underbelly. Friedkin picks at all of the city's scabs and revels in Hackman's Popeye Doyle, a narcotics detective who doesn't play by the rules and steps on a lot of toes as he follows a hunch about a big heroin shipment due in from Marseilles. Roy Scheider is along for the ride as Doyle's partner (and conscience), Buddy "Cloudy" Russo. They traipse through a Brooklyn world of small-time hoodlums with shady international connections.
There is a lot of international intrigue and subtitles, and Friedkin doesn't bother to lay things out clearly. He employs Altman-like overlapping dialogue, and some conversations get swallowed in incidental noise. This, though, is the movie that perfected the car-chase on the big screen -- a riveting scene in which Doyle carjacks a Pontiac Le Mans and drives it frantically (and recklessly) under a set of el-train tracks in pursuit of a suspect who has hijacked the runaway train above at gunpoint (apparently it's the D through Brooklyn). Another fascinating scene involves cops meticulously dismantling an impounded car suspected of holding the smuggled heroin.
Hackman and Scheider shoulder the story here, but they have critical help from character actors like Fernando Rey as the French mastermind ("Frog One"), Tony Lo Bianco as the American point man Sal Boca, and Eddie Egan as the gruff police captain. Friedkin, who died last month, shuffles everything together in a grim, sloppy caper.
No comments:
Post a Comment