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Kandinsky sun, black Studebaker in the desert, not The Postman Always Rings Twice but Professione: Reporter. The spot is a Podunk Texas town, the drifter (Don Johnson) breezes into the auto dealership and helps himself to a customer. "You got a grudge against the world?" "Nope. I'm a car salesman." The boss (Jerry Hardin) is married to a blonde (Virginia Madsen) who drives by with hitched skirt aboard a pink Cadillac, rapacious Yang to the demure Yin of the teen coworker (Jennifer Connelly). One poses in her crimson robe on top of an ursine taxidermy mount, the other is blackmailed by a shutterbug (William Sadler) with mangy manners and dubious proverbs ("Chicken don't always lay its eggs in the same nest"). In addition to female trouble, the protagonist has his eye on the bank staffed by volunteer firemen and managed by a strip-club habitué (Jack Nance). "It takes a lot of money to be free." Dennis Hopper on film noir, a photographer's lambent arrangements of color and a satyr's wry view of desire, easily outclassing the arid simulacra of Body Heat and Blood Simple. Burning building and buried loot, Madsen with shaving cream on her legs and a Coke billboard glimpsed through slatted blinds. The robbery abuts on slapstick, the blind witness recalls the culprit by sound: "He got a kind of a bleep... like a tea kettle." Incendiary matters handled with humid calm, a nice long fuse, light and shadow and neon perpetually on the verge of abstraction. "Killer deal" in Day-Glo letters on a rain-drenched windshield, the feeble-hearted husband tied to a bed, "fucked to death." "That was more fun than eating cotton-candy barefoot." The punchline rephrases Double Indemnity, and Verhoeven is just over the rise with Basic Instinct. With Charles Martin Smith, Barry Corbin, Debra Cole, Leon Rippy, and Virgil Frye.
--- Fernando F. Croce |