Hustle

Between Dassin's The Naked City and Schrader's Hardcore, the drowned lamb in the stag movie. "Everybody hustles," the case at hand is a blip on a rotting radar, the violated teenager remembered by daddy (Ben Johnson) as a toddler on a merry-go-round and viewed by everybody else as a topless cadaver on a morgue slab. The official verdict is suicide, the police lieutenant "stoned on fatigue" (Burt Reynolds) investigates as a way into the lair of the nefarious bigwig (Eddie Albert) and a way out of his spiritual constipation. "Sometimes you can't tell the Christians from the lions." The oasis in the sordidness is the gorgeous call-girl he lives with (Catherine Deneuve). Rome is a dream escape, the moony cocoon is padded with Aznavour tunes and Lelouch screenings but ugliness keeps seeping in: "I'm starting to draw dirty pictures about what you do," cf. Wyler's Detective Story. Robert Aldrich back in Los Angeles two decades after Kiss Me Deadly, with the awareness that you can't explode the world, you can only live in it while painfully accumulating compromises. The protagonist takes down a maniac, waits with his partner (Paul Winfield) at the airport for a potential terrorist, goes home to Huston's Moby Dick. The dead girl's mother (Eileen Brennan) makes a dolorous confession, the chief (Ernest Borgnine) is more interested in fishing. (The camera wanders at the police station and finds a tangy vaudeville routine with Fred Willard and George Memmoli as interrogator and fetishist.) A mighty Aldrich jeremiad, concurrent with Penn's Night Moves and a good deal sadder and angrier. "Can't you smell the bananas? You know what country you live in? You live in Guatemala with color television." Tampering with evidence stands for "a little charity in the system," the reward is senseless death at the convenience store. The coda caps the continental motif with a nod to Sautet's Les Choses de la vie. With Catherine Bach, Jack Carter, Colleen Brennan, James Hampton, David Spielberg, and Robert Englund.