Angel Heart (1987)

It’s funny, I’ve a feeling I’ve met you before. New York City, 1955. Private investigator Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) is contacted by a man named Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) to track down John Liebling, a pre-war crooner known professionally as ‘Johnny Favorite’ who suffered severe neurological trauma, resulting from injuries received in World War 2. Favorite’s incapacity disrupted some kind of contract with Cyphre regarding collateral for his investment in his career and Cyphre believes a private mental hospital in Poughkeepsie where Favorite was receiving radical psychiatric treatment for shell shock has falsified records. At the hospital, Harry discovers the records showing Favorite’s transfer were falsified by a physician named Albert Fowler (Michael Higgins). After Harry breaks into his home, Fowler admits that years ago he was bribed by a man and woman so that the two could abscond with the disfigured Favorite, his face wrapped in bandages, driving him away from the hospital. Believing that Fowler knows more than he’s saying, Harry locks him in his bedroom, forcing him to suffer withdrawal from a morphine addiction. The next morning, he returns to the house to find that the doctor has apparently shot himself. Harry tries to break his contract with Cyphre but agrees to continue the search when Cyphre offers him $5,000. He discovers that Favorite had a wealthy fiancée named Margaret Krusemark but had also begun a secret affair with a woman named Evangeline Proudfoot. Harry travels to New Orleans and meets with Margaret (Charlotte Rampling), who tells him Favorite is dead, or at least dead to her. Evangeline died years before but is survived by her 17-year-old daughter, Epiphany Proudfoot (Lisa Bonet) who was conceived during her mother’s affair with Favorite and is herself the mother of a toddler. When Epiphany is reluctant to speak, Harry tracks down Toots Sweet (Brownie McGhee) a guitarist and former Favorite bandmate. After Harry uses force to try to extract details of Favorite’s last known whereabouts, Toots refers him back to Margaret. The following morning, police detectives inform Harry that Toots has been murdered. Harry returns to Margaret’s home and finds her murdered, her heart removed with a ceremonial knife. He is later attacked by enforcers of Ethan Krusemark – Margaret’s father, a powerful denizen of Louisiana – who order him to leave town. At his hotel, Harry finds Epiphany. He invites her into his room, where they have sex during which Harry has visions of blood dripping from the ceiling and splashing around the room. He later confronts Krusemark (Stocker Fontelieu) who reveals that he and Margaret were the ones who took Favorite from the hospital. Favorite was actually a powerful occultist who sold his soul in exchange for stardom. He got his stardom but then sought to renege on the bargain. To do so, Favorite kidnapped a young soldier who was of the exact same age as Favorite and strongly resembling him from Times Square and performed a Satanic ritual on the boy, murdering him and eating his still-beating heart in order to steal his soul. Favorite planned to assume the identity of the murdered soldier but was drafted and then injured overseas. Suffering severe facial trauma and amnesia, Favorite was sent to the hospital for treatment. After Krusemark and his daughter took him from the hospital, they left him at Times Square on New Year’s Eve 1943 (the date on the falsified hospital records). While hearing Krusemark’s story, Harry runs into the bathroom, vomits and continually asks the identity of the soldier… Secret love should stay secret. Written and directed by Alan Parker, this atmospheric adaptation of William Hjortsberg’s 1978 novel Falling Angel is overripe with symbols and intimations of evil, the power of association and issues of identity. Of course the major twist is pretty obvious and there is a weakness in Parker’s screenplay (which alters the novel somewhat) with the revelations arising not from any kind of believable detective work but just happening following Harry’s attending at different destinations rather than the nuts and bolts of storytelling which gives the plot away much too early. For a film so evidently committed to shock value it doesn’t indulge in anything deeper about the propensity of people toward evil and seems content to float on the surface of effects which is disappointing given the potential of the setting. De Niro’s main contribution to the unravelling is to have well manicured nails and Johnny Favorite’s alleged stardom remains something of a McGuffin. Beautiful as this looks and sounds, with Rourke at his most appealing, this had censorship issues due to the nature of his sexual interaction with Bonet, the young star of TV’s Cosby Show and the final twist could only surprise Harry himself. I know who I am!

8 Million Ways to Die (1986)

I’m an ex-cop. Los Angeles. Matt Scudder (Jeff Bridges) is a part of LAPD’s Sheriff’s Department and he takes part in a drugs bust that goes badly wrong with his colleagues beaten to death. Six months after the internal investigation he’s in Alcoholics Anonymous celebrating his pin for sobriety but his marriage is gone, his daughter lives with his wife and he’s picking up private eye work from his meetings. A request from a call girl Sunny (Alexandra Paul) brings him back into contact with a drug dealer Willie ‘Chance’ Walker (Randy Brooks) he used to know from the streets who’s now running a flash gambling club where he has a business arrangement with Angel Maldonado (Andy Garcia) who himself has an ongoing interest in another one of the prostitutes, Sarah (Rosanna Arquette). When Sunny turns up at his home looking for help because she’s being threatened Matt agrees but she’s abducted and brutally murdered and he’s too late to help. He wakes up in a detox ward and signs himself out. When he finds evidence against one or other of the men at the club in Sunny’s Filofax, he embarks on a quest for vengeance aided by the discovery of a jewel and a mountain of cocaine while Sarah accompanies him and tries to seduce him before agreeing to help … You’re not a mindless lush after all. Adapted (somewhat) from Lawrence Block’s fantastic New York City-set novel, the fifth in the Matt Scudder series, this was a disappointment on several levels. Oliver Stone did the first pass (and more), with R. Lance Hill (writing as David Lee Henry) then went off to direct a film of his own, so Robert Towne was prevailed upon by director Hal Ashby to do a rewrite but took so long the production was already shooting and changes made on the hoof with improvisation by the cast by the time his pages started arriving. Unrelenting and cliched in ways and draggy in the second half, which is surprising given Ashby’s subtle way of controlling narrative, it retains some of the superficial interest that the cast and behind the scenes team accrues but takes too long to get where it’s going and is horribly violent in one scene. The plausibility of an alcoholic former cop being allowed back in the fold to exert a vigilante-type revenge seriously tests the saw suspension of disbelief. And yet this hovers on the edges of greatness which begs the question why it went wrong. The drift commences with the change in setting – which the opening voiceover does not assist in any way. It’s (obviously) set in New York City. Then, Matt Scudder is an NYC detective, cut from a very different cloth than any denizen of LA. All the performances feel a little too loose in a film that swings between character study and crime story. The contrasting styles of Sunny and Sarah seem off and Angel’s swagger is exaggerated. Bad writing, bad direction or both? I live in a world I didn’t make. Bridges had already done better in the era’s popular noir remake Against All Odds and the thriller Jagged Edge – so this was not his best performance although he has his moments as the lower depths of his addiction to the bottle are plumbed. The major problem appears to be the fact that the film was taken from Ashby and edited by someone else. Ashby, as we know, was one of the great film editors prior to directing so this made absolutely no sense albeit he had his own addiction issues and this was sadly his final feature. This is beautifully shot by Stephen H. Burum with a striking score by James Newton Howard but it fundamentally changes the intent of the book and the re-edit altered it completely. The final shootout is simply unbelievable and not in a good way. Novelist Lawrence Block was not happy (to say the least) with this first screen take on Matt Scudder, as he recounted to this author. You can read more about that and Robert Towne in Chinatowne: The Screenplays of Robert Towne, https://www.amazon.co.uk/ChinaTowne-Screenplays-Robert-Towne-1960-2000/dp/1695887409/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1MXGOF3HFVGNA&keywords=elaine+lennon+chinatowne&qid=1705759297&s=books&sprefix=el%2Cstripbooks%2C847&sr=1-1. Waking up is the hardest part. #600straightdaysofmondomovies

Lady in Cement (1968)

This is one blonde who didn’t have more fun. While diving off the Miami coast with charter boat captain Rubin (Pat Henry) seeking one of the 11 fabled Spanish galleons sunk in 1591, private investigator Tony Rome (Frank Sinatra) discovers a dead woman encased in cement on the ocean floor. He reports this to Lieutenant Dave Santini (Richard Conte) and thinks nothing more of the incident, until Waldo Gronski (Dan Blocker) hires him to find a missing woman, Sandra Lomax (Christine Todd). Gronski has little money, so he allows Rome pawn his watch to retain his services. After investigating the local hotspots and picking up on a few names, Rome soon comes across beautiful Kit Forrest (Raquel Welch), whose party Sandra Lomax was supposed to have attended. This encounter raises the ire of racketeer Al Mungar (Martin Gabel), a supposedly reformed gangster who looks after Kit’s interests. Thinking a connection may exist between Lomax, Forrest, and Mungar, Rome starts probing into their backgrounds and begins a romantic relationship with Kit. Then he finds both cops and crooks chasing him while an omnipresent Gronski is breathing down his neck … Dumping people in cement – that went out with violin cases. Adapted from Marvin H. Albert’s 1961 novel by the author and Jack Guss, this sequel to Tony Rome is dogged by elements of what passed for humour in the Sixties – grotesque sexism and gay slurs that simply don’t play well to the gallery these days. It’s unfortunate because a bit more care with the writing might make this neo-noir greater than the sum of its parts. There are good moments here including a scene between Sinatra and a voluptuous young Lainie Kazan as dancer Maria Barretto; conflict with his friend Conte that spins into a car chase; and one potent exchange alluding to police corruption: The law works for the law. Rome works for money. That makes him easy to trust. This accretion of character detail and the ensemble around Sinatra’s protagonist builds to a mostly agreeable hero. Beautiful Miami locations, a smattering of Chandler references (among others, brutish but useful and friendly big guy Gronski is clearly a take on Moose Malloy from Farewell, My Lovely; while the smart repartee has some zingers); and a splashy, playful tone aided by Hugo Montenegro’s upbeat score makes this an undemanding hep thriller with Sinatra fans noting his references to Jilly’s, his real-life NYC hangout, the moniker given to the club here. Offscreen he was playing a series of concerts at the city’s Fontainebleau Hotel throughout production. Joe E. Lewis makes an uncredited appearance as himself. Lanita Kent makes an impression in a small role as Conte’s wife Rose and she’s someone we’d like to have seen more but sadly died aged 44 in 1987 having made just a handful of films. A spirited, lively thriller directed by Gordon Douglas. One of these days you’re going to have to make your mind up whether you’re going to a civil liberties benefit or the policeman’s ball

True Confessions (1981)

Looks like a leprechaun, thinks like an Arab. Los Angeles 1948. Detective Sergeant Tom Spellacy (Robert Duvall) probes into the savage murder of a young woman named Lois Fazenda found dumped in an empty lot. At the same time, he investigates a priest found dead in a whorehouse. Spellacy’s brother Monsignor Des (Robert De Niro), a Catholic priest, is meanwhile attempting to expand his church through businessman Jack Amsterdam (Charles Durning), a shady contractor whose favours he seeks at the behest of Cardinal Danaher (Cyril Cusack). While the two police cases and the real estate deal seem a world apart, Spellacy discovers an insidious connection involving money and power and the path always seems to lead back to the Church … We need more young pastors. Men who’ll do what they’re told. Adapted by John Gregory Dunne from his own novel with a draft by his wife Joan Didion, this utilises the Thirties Hollywood dyad of policeman/priest to prise apart the moral and actual violence that characterised Los Angeles in the years immediately following World War 2. That they’re brothers adds to the frisson of recognition that we’re back in the world of Spencer Tracy and Pat O’Brien and James Cagney. And the brothers are low-key individuals, with both Roberts turning in finely crafted, understated performances, irony writ large in who’s the more corrupt. This is studded with good performances, with Burgess Meredith very effective in the role of the priest who’s sacked for his incorruptibility. If the plot isn’t particularly well managed (with a lot of explanatory strands dropped from the source novel), it’s atmospheric and beautifully shot by the great Owen Roizman – the blood looks like blood, whether fresh, dried or caked on corpses and it ain’t pretty. Taking inspiration from the notorious real-life Black Dahlia murder it’s another gaze at the flipside of fame with the young victim a wannabe actress turned prostitute encountering the brutal sleaze that’s a world away from onscreen cinematic glory (supposedly). Scored by the great Georges Delerue who riffs on Carrickfergus to emphasise the Irish aspect of Catholicism, this is always a work of referentiality: the wedding scene at the Amsterdam estate nods to The Godfather; the mortuary scenes remind us of Chinatown, that other neo-noir; but it’s neither as deep nor as wide, it ploughs its own particular furrow about religion, depravity, loneliness and death. Directed by Ulu Grosbard whose wife Brenda Samuels plays the touching figure of Rose Gregorio. You’re my confessor in here but you wheel and deal out there, is that it?

Motherless Brooklyn (2019)

I got shot with my own gun. Lionel Essrog (Edward Norton) is a lonely private detective who doesn’t let Tourette’s syndrome stand in the way of his job. Gifted with a few clues and an obsessive mind, Lionel sets out to solve the murder of Frank Minna (Bruce Willis) his mentor and only friend while they’re out on a job. Scouring the jazz clubs and slums of Brooklyn and Harlem, Essrog soon uncovers a web of secrets while contending with thugs, corruption and the most dangerous man in the city, Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin) famed for building parks but in reality lining the pockets of his fellow investors in building corporations. Meanwhile Lionel finds that the half-caste daughter Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatah-Raw) who campaigns against housing discrimination may be connected with him. And the man supplying him with information on Randolph (Willem Dafoe) is not quite who he claims to be … Everybody looks like everybody to me.  Star and director Edward Norton loved Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel and determined to adapt it when it was published but this bears virtually no connection with its source material, setting it forty years earlier and fusing a variation on the plot of Chinatown with Robert Caro’s 1974 biography of Robert Moses.  It takes its sweet time to bed in and Norton’s character’s tics are immensely irritating even offputting. Once it settles into being a private eye flick it’s a better fit with the tone and the tropes work well – surveillance, shady operators, mistaken identity, chases, beatings and – just like Jake Gittes – going to a public meeting and then looking up files in City Hall. The issue of race and miscegenation replaces the incest plot but it’s all about power. Baldwin is at his best declaiming and he has some good lines here:  Do you have the first inkling how power works? The plot really kicks in when Norton works out who Dafoe really is. Norton asserts his own peculiar charms as the disabled guy whose problem ironically makes people think he’s dumb and uses that to his advantage. Either that or a sugar shaker. Wonderfully shot by Dick Pope, this is a tad long but ultimately a rather intriguing throwback noir melodrama with straightforward political commentary about slum clearance, ghettoising and corruption. This is not a programme for slum removal. This is a programme for negro removal

Little Nikita (1988)

I was crossing into the west before you could spell bolshevik. Jeffrey Nicolas Grant (River Phoenix) is a cocky hyperactive teen living in a suburb of San Diego with his parents Richard (Richard Jenkins) and Elisabeth (Caroline Kava) who run a garden centre. Ambitious and keen to fly, Jeff has applied for entry to the Air Force Academy. During a routine background check on Jeff, FBI agent Roy Parmenter (Sidney Poitier) finds contradictory information on his parents, who have adopted identities of people dead a hundred years, making him suspect that all is not as it should be especially given the present whereabouts of a Soviet agent Konstantin Karpov (Richard Bradford) on the trail of a rogue agent Scuba (Richard Lynch) apparently killing off all the Soviet sleepers in the US. Further investigations reveal that the Grants may be sleeper agents too. Unable to arrest them as they have not done anything illegal, Roy continues his investigation, moves into the house across the street from the Grant family, and worms his way into Jeff’s confidence, eventually confronting Jeff with his suspicions and seeking his cooperation to learn more about his parents. Jeff is soon forced to accept the facts and discovers that his real name is Nikita. Meanwhile Karpov is moving closer to home and Scuba is heading straight for the Grants … Straight As. Tells his friends he gets Cs. A coming of age tale with a difference. Written by Bo Goldman and John Hill the intriguing premise is let down somewhat by the uneven directing from actor Richard Benjamin and the conclusion. Phoenix impresses as the brash teen who isn’t remotely what he thinks he is while Jenkins and Kava perfectly capture the fear implied by the big reveal. It all ends predictably enough with respect between Poitier and Bradford winning out over the presumed quarry. For Phoenix fans this is of course the perfect companion piece to the comparable but superior Running On Empty, released 6 months later, another story about a teenager on the cusp of adulthood whose parents’ politics are dangerously problematic. Shot by the legendary Laszlo Kovacs with an occasionally discordant score from Marvin Hamlisch, there’s a fabulous sequence of the Sleeping Beauty ballet choreographed by Kenneth MacMillan. You’re not my father. You’re not even my friend

The Running Man (1963)

You’re not in Croydon any more. Stella Black (Lee Remick) returns from the memorial service for Rex, her late husband, a pilot who died in a gliding accident. He (Laurence Harvey) is in fact alive and well and in hiding at a secluded seaside boarding house having defrauded his insurer Excelsior out of a huge sum of money for his premature death after they failed to pay out for an accident involving his airline business. Stella joins him in Malaga, Spain where he has changed his appearance and is living under the assumed name of Jim Jerome. Things start to go wrong when an insurance investigator Stephen Maddox (Alan Bates) appears to be following Stella as she drives her expensive car and enjoys the high life at a lovely hotel … He shouldn’t have married her. Adapted by John Mortimer from Shelley Smith’s novel The Ballad of the Running Man, this starts out as a sunny neo noir suspenser and turns into something quite different with a nice twist that dictates the outcome. Harvey and Remick are superb as the beautiful blonde married couple whose fate alters irrevocably and their relationship with it; while the issue of mistaken identity regarding Bates is wonderfully played out, subtly inverting the entire premise so that it rebounds with catastrophic consequences. Thanks to Robert Krasker’s cinematography (a very different experience to the kind of exploitation of locations in The Third Man) Spain looks stunning and the sinister nature of the story comes entirely from the construction and playing. Never was misunderstanding so well portrayed: everything here is lost in translation. Watch out for Fernando Rey as a policeman and Noel Purcell and Eddie Byrne have small roles in a production partly shot at Ardmore Studios in Ireland.  Directed by Carol Reed. They’ll have to put up the insurance premiums on anyone who wants to make love to you

Hollywoodland (2006)

I can see the pieces. How they should fit. How I want them to fit. When Hollywood superstar, TV’s Superman George Reeves (Ben Affleck) dies in the bedroom of his home by a single gunshot to his head during a party in June 1959, private detective Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) is hired by Reeves’ mother Helen Bessolo (Lois Smith) to investigate his death. He gets caught in a web of lies involving MGM general manager Eddie Mannix’s (Bob Hoskins) and his wife Toni (Diane Lane) with whom Reeves was having an open if adulterous relationship until he took up with younger woman Leonore Lemmon (Robin Tunney) as he is trying to make his own films as a director …. An actor can’t always act – sometimes he has to work. Easily one of the most pleasurable throwback movies made in (relatively) recent times, this is based on one of Tinseltown’s more notorious unsolved crimes. It’s told in classical Hollywood fashion, a romance revealed in parallel with an investigation, the latter of necessity post mortem, the former in flashback, the biography of a rather disappointed self-loathing actor who despises the role responsible for his fame at a time when the film business was in flux. Affleck is superb as the small screen incarnation of the archetypal super hero in what is still his best performance. Lane matches him every step of the way as the ageing starlet cheating on the studio’s most dangerous fixer. Beautifully put together, gorgeously shot by Jonathan Freeman and nicely resolved even if the private eye’s own travails rather detract from the movement of the narrative which posits an alternative ending to that proposed by Kashner and Schoenberger’s book Hollywood Kryptonite. Murderous Mannix is portrayed here by Hoskins whose screen wife Lane was married in real life to Josh Brolin, who played him for the Coen Brothers in Hail, Caesar! and was up for the role of Batman that went to … Affleck! Written by Paul Bernbaum and directed by Allen Coulter. I hope you’ve discovered the meaning of justice

Bugsy (1991)

I don’t go by what other men have done. Gangster Ben ‘Bugsy’ Siegel (Warren Beatty), who works for Meyer Lansky (Ben Kingsley) and Charlie ‘Lucky’ Luciano (Bill Graham), goes west to Los Angeles and falls in love with Virginia Hill (Annette Bening) a tough-talking Hollywood starlet who has slept around with several men, as he is regularly reminded by his pals, who he meets on a film set where his friend George Raft (Joe Mantegna) is the lead.  He buys a house in Beverly Hills and shops at all the best tailors and furnishes his house beautifully while his wife Esta (Wendy Phillips) and young daughters remain in Scarsdale, New York. His job is to wrest control back of betting parlours currently run by Jack Dragna (Richard Sarafian) but life is complicated when Mickey Cohen (Harvey Keitel) robs one of his places – Bugsy decides to go into business with him instead of punishing him and puts him in charge of casinos, while Dragna is forced to admit to a raging Bugsy that he stole $14,000, and is told he now answers to Cohen. On a trip to a deadbeat casino in the desert Bugsy dreams up an idea for a casino to end all casinos, named after Virginia (Flamingo), bringing the stars to Nevada but the costs overrun dramatically and his childhood friend Lansky is not happy particularly when it seems Bugsy might be aware that Virginia has cooked the books … Looks matter if it matters how you look. Warren Beatty’s long-cherished project was written by James Toback and Beatty micro-managed the writing and production and the result is one of the most powerful and beautiful films of the Nineties:  a picture of America talking to itself, with a gangster for a visionary at its fulcrum, building a kingdom in the desert as though through damascene conversion while being seduced by Hollywood and its luminaries, watching his own screen test the most entertaining way to spend an evening other than having sex. It sows the seeds of his destruction because his inspiration is his thrilling and volatile lover and making her happy and making a name for himself but it’s also a profoundly political film for all that, as with most of Beatty’s work. It’s undoubtedly personal on many levels too not least because the legendarily promiscuous man known as The Pro in movie circles impregnated his co-star Bening who was already showing before production ended. They married after she had his baby and have remained together since. His avocation of the institution is an important part of the narrative and gangsterism is a version of family here too but he chases tail, right into an elevator and straight to his penthouse too. Perhaps he wants to show us how it’s done by the nattiest dresser in town. It’s a statement about how a nation came to be but unlike The Godfather films it’s one that demonstrates how the idea literally reflects the image of the man who dreams it up in all his vainglory:  he enjoys nothing more than checking his hair in the glass when he’s kicking someone half to death (perhaps a metaphor too far). He is a narcissist to the very end, charming and totally ruthless while Ennio Morricone gives him a tragic signature tune. Impeccably made and kind of great with outstanding performances by Beatty, Bening and Kingsley. Directed by Barry Levinson. I have found the answer to the dream of America

Manhunter (1986)

You want the scent? Smell yourself! Former FBI Agent Will Graham (William Petersen) is called out of early retirement by his boss Jack Crawford (Denis Farina) to catch a serial killer.  The media have dubbed him The Tooth Fairy (Tom Noonan) because he kills random families in their homes. Will is a profiler whose speciality is psychic empathy, getting inside the minds of his prey. The horror of the murders takes its toll on him. He asks for the help of his imprisoned arch-nemesis, Dr Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox) who gets to him like nobody else and nearly murdered him years earlier yet has insights into the methodology of the killer that could unlock the case… He butchers whole families to pursue trivial fantasies. As an adult, someone should blow the sick fuck out of his socks. The mindbending antics of Thomas Harris’ narcissistic creation Lecktor were first espied here but it’s really Will Graham’s story and what a surprise casting choice the introspective pigeon-toed Petersen seemed.  He carries this oppressively chilling thriller where he is the masochist to his targets’ sadistic mechanisms. The dispassionate style, the modernist interiors, the internal machinations of the protagonist’s obsessive inner voice while he inhabits the minds of his relentlessly morbid prey, lend this a hypnotic mood. As the action increases in intensity the colours and style of cinematographer Dante Spinotti become cooler and more distancing. The diegetic score by bands including Shriekback and The Reds is an immersive trip into the nightmarish vision. An extraordinary spin on terror that is as far from the camp baroque theatrics of The Silence of the Lambs as it is possible to imagine, this masterpiece has yet to be equalled in the genre and feels like a worm has infected your brain and is burrowing through it, out of your control, colouring your dreams, imprinting you with a thought pattern that may never depart. A dazzling exercise in perspective and perception, this is a stunning work of art. Adapted from Red Dragon by director Michael Mann. Does this kind of understanding make you uncomfortable?