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"One dumb move and the animals move in," the Eighties yuppie's education. It opens with an aerial scan of Los Angeles that zeroes in on the mansion and its marital cracks, the wife (Ann-Margret) is running for councilwoman and the husband (Roy Scheider) is a steel industrialist with a young mistress (Kelly Preston) on the side. He sneaks into a motel to find a gun in his face, three hooded extortionists have footage of the affair and demand an opulent sum to bury it. The racket branches off into snuff films ("kind of a low-budget production"), the businessman takes matters into his own hands. "When a man pulls shit on me, he's either very brave or very stoned. Which are you?" Elmore Leonard's novel is largely shorn of its humor in favor of a vicious distillate, John Frankenheimer posits blackmail as matrimonial therapy (cp. Chabrol's Innocents with Dirty Hands) for extravagant displays of Southern California sleaze. John Glover is the porn-theater owner with auteur delusions (he dons eye-patch and camera at a sex party and finds Ron Jeremy in a jacuzzi), Clarence Williams III is the dreadlocked brute who can improvise an asphyxiating weapon out of a teddy bear, Robert Trebor has the squirming Peter Lorre role. (Frankenheimer can't resist using these exceptional clowns as compositional elements, one wide shot has them lined up inside a car with Glover's outstretched middle finger capping the deep-focus diagonal.) A simple matter of bookkeeping, enjoyably degenerate variations of Seconds and French Connection II. "Clean living. It pays off every time." Terminal Island at sundown receives the punchline of the booby-trapped Jaguar. With Vanity, Lonny Chapman, and Doug McClure.
--- Fernando F. Croce |