walter hill

Johnny Handsome (1989)

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I just finished reading the deceptively dense travel guide San Francisco Noir by essayist Nathaniel Rich, which doubles as both a guided tour of San Francisco’s many character-defining landmarks and a critical history of “the city in film noir from 1940 to the present.”  There are so many noirs set in San Francisco that Rich is able to map out all of the city’s disparate moods & neighborhoods by cataloging how they’ve been portrayed onscreen in that one specific genre, frequently stopping the tour for incisive, short-form reviews of the dozens of noirs set in and around The Bay.  As a movie nerd, the book was a great way to familiarize myself with a city I love to visit but never get to stay long enough to feel submerged below its touristy surface.  As a New Orleanian, it made me jealous.  Besides the impracticality of its distance from Los Angeles, why is it that so few classic noirs were set in New Orleans compared to the seemingly infinite noirs of San Francisco?  Reading through Rich’s illustrated history of his port city’s deep well of art, music, crime, sex, and scandal, I couldn’t shake the feeling that all of the hallmarks that made San Francisco such a perfect setting for noir are echoed in my own city’s alluringly sordid history.  And yet I can only name a few classic noir titles I’ve seen set on New Orleans streets: New Orleans Uncensored, Swamp Women, and Panic in the Streets.  That’s a relatively puny list when compared to such formidable San Francisco noir titles as The Maltese Falcon, The Lady from Shanghai, Out of the Past, and Vertigo.

It turns out I’m not the only person convinced of New Orleans’s hospitality to noir moods & tropes, as I found Roger Ebert entertaining the same thought in his 1989 review of the Walter Hill neo-noir Johnny Handsome.  Ebert wrote, “Johnny Handsome comes out of the film noir atmosphere of the 1940s, out of movies with dark streets and bitter laughter, with characters who live in cold-water flats and treat saloons as their living rooms.  It is set in New Orleans, a city with a film noir soul, and it stars Mickey Rourke as a weary loser who has just about given up on himself.”  Struck by Ebert’s assessment of New Orleans’s “film noir soul,” I dug into his other contemporary reviews of New Orleans-set thrillers starring the leads of Johnny Handsome.  The results were mostly silly, including a thumbs-down dismissal of Hard Target (featuring Johnny Handsome villain Lance Henriksen) as being “not very smart and not very original” and a positive review of Angel Heart (also starring Mickey Rourke) that describes the West Bank neighborhood of Algiers as a “town across from New Orleans that makes the fleshpots of Bourbon Street look like Disneyland.”  Sure, Roger.  I’m glad I kept digging, though, because his 1987 review of the neo-noir erotic thriller The Big Easy (which shares a star with Johnny Handsome‘s secondary villain, Ellen Barkin), captures the city’s “film noir soul” perfectly in the paragraph, “The movie takes place in New Orleans, that most mysterious of American cities, a city where you can have the feeling you never will really know what goes down on those shadowy passages into those green and humid courtyards so guarded from the street.”  That’s some good poetry.

As you can likely tell by my stalling to discuss this film directly by recapping the works of more talented & prestigious film critics, Johnny Dangerously is not especially interesting, at least not when compared to the rest of its era’s New Orleans crime pictures.  It’s not as scuzzy as Angel Heart, nor as steamy as The Big Easy, nor as deliriously over-the-top as Hard Target.  Its one claim to novelty among the other 80s New Orleans crime thrillers starring its central trio of volatile performers is that it’s the most faithful to the genre’s classic noir roots.  Johnny Handsome evokes the drunken, downtrodden storytelling logic of vintage crime story paperbacks, ones written decades before its actual 1970s source material.  Walter Hill reportedly dragged his feet on adapting that novel for years despite multiple offers, but his eventual decision to move its setting from New Jersey to New Orleans and to frame it within a traditionalist noir sensibility makes perfect sense for the material.  The results just aren’t particularly exciting.  Johnny Handsome is bookended by two heists: an early one in which Rourke’s titular disfigured anti-hero is abandoned by his gangster cohorts (Barkin & Henriksen) while looting a French Quarter jewelry store, and a climactic one in which he pays them back by trapping them in a doomed robbery of a shipyard construction site.  Both sequences are fantastic, but there’s a lot of dead air between, which Hill mostly fills with achingly sincere melodrama about a supposedly reformed criminal who can’t seem to get out of the game.  It’s the same level of heightened pastiche he brought to his 50s greaser throwback Streets of Fire, but something about it feels weirdly subdued & unenthused this go-round.

There are actually two old-school genre tributes at play in Johnny Handsome, both of which are signaled to the audience in black & white flashback.  While the film’s classic noir tropes are introduced in an early flashback washed in an aged sepia tone, its simultaneous echo of German Expressionist horror is presented in a starker Xerox contrast.  We’re told that Johnny Handsome was born with a monstrous, mutated face, even though he honestly doesn’t look too out of place in the context of The French Quarter – a circus without tents.  His disfigurement is important to the plot, though, so much so that Hill allowed Rourke to mumble his lines under heavy prosthetics to achieve the effect.  After getting busted during the first botched heist and before plotting to launch the second, Rourke finds himself imprisoned in Angola, where a kind mad scientist (Forest Whitaker) offers to lessen his sentence if he agrees to experimental facial reconstruction surgery.  The surgery goes so well that Rourke is able to insert himself into his old, leather-clad cohorts’ lives incognito, luring them into participating in their own demise with the second heist.  That sci-fi aspect of the plot has a distinct Hands of Orlac feel to it, which was also echoed in contemporary thrillers like Scalpel & Body Parts to much greater effect.  At least Johnny Handsome switches up the formula by combining its German Expressionist patina with classic noir tropes.  It’s a unique genre hybrid, even if subtly played, and it all comes together beautifully by the time the semi-reformed Rourke’s new girlfriend is practically screeching at his old frenemies, “No! No, don’t cut up Johnny’s beautiful face!”

All of the classic New Orleans noirs I’ve seen are fairly mediocre pictures.  Most of the San Francisco noirs covered in Nathaniel Rich’s book are mediocre too, which is true of most movie genres and of all art everywhere.  By the erotic thriller boom of the 1980s (which was essentially just neo-noir with an emphasis on video store sleaze), the movie industry had caught up with New Orleans’s noir potential and set some pretty great crime thrillers here: The Big Easy, Angel Heart, Tightrope, Cat People, Down By Law, etc.  Johnny Dangerously is far from the best example of that wave of locally set 80s thrillers, but it’s the one that best evokes the city’s classic-period noir past that never was.  I enjoyed the movie less as a sincere, in-the-moment thriller than I appreciated it as a what-could’ve-been simulation of what New Orleans’s “film noir soul” might’ve looked like if given the same amount of screentime as San Francisco noir in the genre’s heyday. 

-Brandon Ledet

Streets of Fire (1984)

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I’m sure there are plenty of real-life biker gangs that have been a terrifying menace in whatever communities they rumble through, but I feel like most of my exposure to that culture has been sanitized & defanged to the point where I don’t see them as a threat.  From Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones to Vanilla Ice in Cool as Ice, there’s a long history of retro biker gangs that look tough on the screen but never actually follow through on their threats.  Likewise, most bikers I see in the streets these days appear to be bored men in midlife crisis, trying to muster up some Leather Daddy fashionability instead of just plain Dad Vibes.  Apparently, that de-emphasized biker menace bothered notorious genre filmmaker Walter Hill as well, presumably after growing up in the Marlon Brando era of biker-with-a-heart-of-gold dramas as a teenager.  Hill seemingly made an entire feature film just to make bikers feel genuinely dangerous again, terrorizing a 1980s audience with revamped black-leather bullies from his 1950s youth.

Streets of Fire is a 50s teen-delinquent throwback sleazed up with 80s music video neons.  Self-described as “a rock & roll fable” set in “another time and another place,” it exists in a make-believe limbo that covers both decades at once – the same neon-noir aesthetic as Alan Rudolph’s Trouble in Mind.  It’s basically The Wild Ones sped up for MTV sensibilities, with music-video crosscutting and a constant, aggressive drumbeat keeping the audience’s blood pumping like mad while its rabid biker gangs raise Hell up & down the streets of the fictional city of “Richmond” (read: Chicago).  Bikers get away with stripping innocent citizens nude in the street and dragging them across the asphalt trailing behind their roaring bikes as they smash every storefront window in their vicious path, but they cross a line when they kidnap a famous rock ‘n roll singer in the middle of her sold-out concert.  The heist mission to rescue that singer from biker-gang territory nearly burns the entire city to the ground, and it’s legitimately terrifying in a way few—if any—1950s biker films were allowed to be.

The only thing that really slows Streets of Fire down is its dead-eyed lead, Michael Paré, which is bizarre since the rest of the cast is packed with exciting, charismatic people you always love to see.  Willem Dafoe is a gorgeous sex goblin as the main biker villain, recalling his leather-clad brute performance in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Loveless.  Likewise, Diane Lane’s performance as the kidnapped rock ‘n roll singer feels like an MTV-era update to her persona in The Fabulous Stains, right down to the red & black color story of her wardrobe.  Rick Moranis is maybe the only main player who’s cast against type as the tough-guy music manager who hires a vigilante to rescue his missing talent, playing the part of a macho bully that’s usually reserved for men three times his size.  Paré does not bring much to the table as the mercenary hero in contrast.  He’s generically handsome, but he’s got no personality to speak of.  Walter Hill directs every single character to deliver action hero one-liners in amphetamine-rattled noir speak, and Paré’s the only one who mumbles his way through them like a long-lost Stallone brother.

While Paré is a major liability as the narrative center of attention, Hill’s high-style visual theatrics more than compensate for his lack of screen presence.  Flaming motorcycles, S&M butcher outfits, neon crosslighting, and a music video performance of the soft-rock hit “I Can Dream About You” all violently combine to make a singular genre picture – one that revitalizes a long-subdued subculture that’s rarely as tough as it looks.  For the record, Cool as Ice is also a high-style delight; I just wouldn’t say that Vanilla Ice was exactly “scary” in it.  Meanwhile, Willem Dafoe is a goddamn nightmare.

-Brandon Ledet

Red Heat (1988)

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Every year for my birthday I treat myself to a movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, the greatest action star who ever lived. Along with Arnie’s award-winning physique and willingness to commit, I’ve always appreciated that he approached his action roles with a cartoonish sense of humor, often using the emotionless affect of his thick Austrian accent to deliver over-written one-liners in pitch-perfect deadpan. Because I’m watching these movies in self-indulgent celebration, I often choose pictures with a deliberately comedic bent: Twins, Junior, The Last Action Hero, etc. That’s likely why my expectations of this year’s indulgence, Red Heat, were way off from the tone of the actual picture, which steers away from Arnold’s deadpan goofball humor to achieve something much nastier & less fun than his usual mode. With a premise that pairs Arnold as a Soviet Moscow police officer with Jim Belushi’s red-blooded Chicago Cop, I expected Red Heat to be a fish-out-of-water buddy cop comedy along the lines of a Rush Hour, or at least a Lethal Weapon. Admittedly, there are a couple stray moments of that buddy cop action humor spread throughout Red Heat. For instance, when Arnold’s Soviet officer first arrives at his shitty Chicago hotel, he slips a quarter into a coin-operated television only for porn to appear on the screen. He shakes head in disgust and mutters in his traditional deadpan, “Capitalism.” For the most part, though, Red Heat trades in Arnold’s usual deadpan humor for a much more straightforward slice of jingoistic Cold War action schlock than what I knew to expect.

What Red Heat lacks in comic relief, it more than makes up for in shameless brutality & sleaze. Cult genre director Walter Hill (The Warriors, Streets of Fire, The Driver) brings his usual knack for style-over-taste schlock cinema sensibilities to what could have just as easily been a Shane Black-style yuck-em-up. There’s a novelty to that tonal shift, especially if you’ve seen one too many tough-guy Arnold performances before; you just have to know to expect it. The film sets the table early on for the cold, brutal sleaze it’s going to deliver throughout with a Moscow-set fight scene in a public sauna. A lurid exercise in culture-gazing, Hill shoots the scene with immense interest in the Soviet comrade’s mixed-gender nudity in the sauna, fixated particularly on Arnold’s naked ass & all nearby tits. This sexual leering quickly erupts into a violent display as Arnold attacks some drug dealing baddies, smashing them through windows into the cold Northern snow. There’s a vicious, mostly naked fistfight against that snow-white backdrop, followed by a second location shootout that leaves multiple cops dead and a drug kingpin on the run to Chicago. Arnold is tasked to escort the drug dealer back to Moscow for trial, paired with Belushi’s street-wise Chicago cop to keep tabs on his collateral damage. That chaperone duty is all for naught; a blood-soaked trail of bullet-riddled bodies is left behind in Arnold’s wake as he fights his way towards a violent showdown involving Greyhound buses at the film’s climax. There’s also a McGuffin locker key that the two factions fight for possession of throughout, but it’s an object that could easily be circumvented with a crowbar & some elbow grease. The real prize this film is chasing is cheap sex & cold-blooded violence.

Although Red Heat is not a buddy cop comedy, it does extensively play with the tropes of one, almost to the point of subversion. Belushi plays the Rob Schneider to Arnold’s Sly Stallone, functioning as the useless, wiseass sidekick no one finds especially funny. It’s difficult to gauge, but it seems the movie doesn’t find him amusing either, often playing his jokes & general demeanor as macho grotesqueries. Belushi is introduced ogling sex workers form the distant safety of his squad car, to his coworkers’ vocal disgust. He commences to hit on every woman in his path with all the charm of your average misogynist slob, only for every flirtation to be immediately shut down with fervor. When he sexually harasses a citizen on the street with a slimy “How ya doin’?,” she immediately retorts, “Blow yourself,” which the movie posits as a reasonable response. This macho blowhard caricature is in direct opposition to Arnold’s stand-up professional gentlemen of a Soviet officer who, despite having the same depth of humanity as his performance in the original The Terminator, is the film’s de facto protagonist. It’s difficult to tell how much of this cultural reversal was intended by Hill, but Red Heat often portrays Arnold’s Soviet, straight-laced demeanor as being much more palatable than Belushi’s sleaze-ball American counterpart. Then again, there’s a villainous crossdressing gag in the film that feels like an early warning shot for Hill’s most recent, flagrantly transphobic film (Re)Assignment, so I may be reading the film’s politics the wrong way. Either this is a total anomaly in the Cold War action cheapie genre in the way it contrasts Soviet & American sensibilities or my own POV is so far outside Hill’s eternal sleaze that I saw a comic relief character he meant to be charming as an irredeemable scumbag on my own volition. I know which scenario is more likely, but I also know that I found Arnold’s character vastly more tolerable than Belushi’s.

Outside the Walter Hill-level brutality of its violence, there’s nothing especially significant about Red Heat as an action cheapie. Any interest I had in its subversions of buddy cop tropes & Soviet-American cultural contrasts are so personally subjective and out of character with Hill’s larger catalog that their merit is questionable at best. The only minor historical significance achieved by Red Heat is that it was the first American production allowed to film in The Red Square in Moscow. The film only puts that location to significant use for police-marching background imagery in the opening credits (which does include the beautiful image of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name in cyrillic typeface). The majority of its Moscow-set sequences were instead filmed in Hungary. Likewise, the film boasts an incredible cast of supporting characters (Laurence Fishburne, Gina Gershon, Peter Boyle, Kurt Fuller), but all are relegated to little impact in bit roles. The best chance anyone has to enjoying Red Heat is for the cheap thrills of a straightforward, hyperviolent action thriller, one where dead cops, naked flesh, and jazzercise all mix together in schlocky 1980s excess. That excess is not at all boosted by the typical Arnold humor the way you’d see in classics like Commando & The Running Man, which is a large part of why it’s a more middling entry into the affable muscle-man’s canon, even if a remarkably sleazy one.

-Brandon Ledet