 After Dark, My SweetBrooding Noir at Its Best Reviewed by Bruce Cantwell KevinCollins (Jason Patric) is a shabby, seemingly slowwitted drifter who stumbles upon sultry, cynical Fay Anderson (Rachel Ward), a regular at Bert's (Rocky Giordani) bar. He tries to strike up a conversation about his mythical traveling partner Jack Billingsley but Bert wants none of it. Collins doesn't want to start trouble, but he doesn't take kindly to getting booted out of a bar for no good reason, so when Bert threatens to get physical, Collins puts him away with a sharp blow to the face. As Collins walks up the road, a car pulls up beside him. Fay likes the way he handles himself. She wants to take him home. The best thing about James Foley's adaptation of the hard-boiled Jim Thompson novel After Dark, My Sweet is its laser-like focus on this fatal attraction. From the way Collins looks at Fay when she walks into the bar, we know that they're going to become involved, and from the tone of the film, we sense that nothing good is going to come from it. For all of its inevitability, we're never quite sure exactly what is going to go terribly wrong. The film is remarkably sparse. Apart from Collins and Fay, there are only two characters who have more than a handful of lines, Uncle Bud (Bruce Dern), the ex-police detective on the make and Doc Goldman (George Dickerson) the compassionate homosexual friend. The setting, dusty dry and bleak. With all of its detailed observation and deliberate pacing, there isn't a wasted moment in the inexorable march toward tragedy.
If you like this film and haven't seen some of its predecessors, check out The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) Also The Grifters |
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