|
Deep in the Eighties mainstream, the independent's last laugh. "Looking, hoping, praying, searching. Nothing." The insurance salesman (Alan Arkin) has a trio of Mozartean prodigies accepted into Yale but not enough money, his boss (Robert Stack) turns down his request while giving a tour of the golden vault. A nervous man who watches I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang on the telly, his client (Beverly D'Angelo) is assuredly a Double Indemnity fan, her husband (Peter Falk) is seen on a painted portrait in safari gear. ("A beautiful soul," he enters trying to cheat a truckload of Chinese laborers out of pay.) Murder is the plan, cardiac arrest is the official story ("Around the heart, the arteries have a hard-on," says the doctor), the ol' switcheroo turns accomplice into patsy. "Did she kill anybody? Did I kill anybody? Did anybody kill anybody?" A John Cassavetes pirouette on the shredded blueprint of Andrew Bergman's screenplay, the studio's cutting can't diminish its rhythms and inventions. The noir protagonist can't utter the word "corpse," the daffy femme fatale has a new ensemble for each scene, the screwball mastermind is fueled by mischief more than greed. A Robert Burns verse recited by Falk in Wellesian disguise, Arkin's spit-take master class in the jungle of a tacky Los Angeles mansion. "Every time I laugh, I get upset for the rest of the day." Charles Durning's tangy clowning as a company bloodhound, Haydn and Puccini on synthesizers, a hint of Ordet for the ticklish resurrection, why not. It closes with a derivation from Big Deal on Madonna Street, and a farewell to the Cassavetes mise en scène behind the closing credits. "I'm not saying it wasn't brilliant. I'm just saying it didn't work," cf. Allen's Small Time Crooks. With Valerie Curtin, Richard Libertini, and Paul Dooley.
--- Fernando F. Croce |