Femmes Fatales

October 26 2017

CON’ ARTIST

In a mirror, darkly.

Jennifer Connelly is one modern actress we often see cited as having classic looks, which we suppose to mean she could have been a star in 1945. We imagine she’d have been a star anytime. She debuted on the showbiz scene in the 1982 television series Tales of the Unexpected, appeared in one our favorite movies of the 2000s Requiem for a Dream, and a couple of years later won an Academy Award for A Beautiful Mind. The above imagery of her is from 1990, the same year she starred in, appropriately, The Hot Spot.

Academy Award, The Hot Spot, Tales of the Unexpected, Requiem for a Dream, A Beautiful Mind, Jennifer Connelly, television

Modern Pulp

October 26 2017

INTO THE FIRE

Worse comes to worst in a dusty western town.

We told you the film was on the slate. When we noticed its premiere date was right around the corner we watched it immediately after finishing Hell Hath No Fury. First order of business—the poster and tagline are terrible. It shows how easy it can be for a studio to screw up both. The text tells you The Hot Spot is a film noir, but the triptych style art provides no compelling imagery. Worse, you don’t see Don Johnson clearly, though as a huge television star thanks to Miami Vice he was the movie’s greatest asset. And you don’t see Jennifer Connelly at all, who even back then was one of Hollywood’s most beautiful women. Posters are seen before they’re read, and the visuals here give no reason to examine further. We grade it a major fail.

But what of the film? Well, it got generally good reviews, but the public never turned up to see it. Johnson is nicely cast as the drifter/grifter Harry Madox, so he isn’t to blame. Jennifer Connelly and Virginia Madsen were less known, but as supporting characters they more than did their part. Other modern noirs had performed well in cinemas, so it’s not the style of The Hot Spot that hurt it. The direction from Dennis Hopper sticks reasonably close to the novel, and he gets the overheated small town atmosphere right, so we’ll give him a pass too. Most likely the studio simply didn’t make an effective push behind the movie—a theory backed up by the bad poster.

But The Hot Spot holds up well these years later. Some might find Madsen’s honeydripping femme fatale improbable, but she’s channelling both the source material and classic noirs. Other viewers probably doubted a nineteen-year-old Connelly could develop feelings for a Johnson on the far side of forty, but it happens. People who doubt that just haven’t spent enough time in the real world. In the film the age difference does not go unaddressed. Johnson’s feelings for his inappropriate crush prompt him to act against his best interests. Whether he pays a price hangs less on his cunning than on chance. Or perhaps it hangs on someone else’s cunning—that’s where the best femmes fatales always come in. The Hot Spot premiered in the U.S. today in 1990.

The Hot Spot, Charles Williams, Dennis Hopper, Don Johnson, Virginia Madsen, Jennifer Connelly, poster art, cinema, film noir, movie review

Vintage Pulp

October 26 2017

CLEAR AND PRESENT ANGER

I am happy. You wanna see mad? Keep telling me to cheer up.

Charles Williams wrote more than twenty novels, and though the ones we’ve read have been good to serviceable, we were expecting eventually to come across an absolute winner. Hell Hath No Fury is that book. It was Williams’ fourth novel, written in 1953, and features a tough drifter who becomes a used car salesman in a brokedick country town where he happens to notice bank security is lax. But robbing the bank is the mere entry point to all the problems he encounters. There’s also a one-woman nightmare of a femme fatale, a shockingly adept sheriff, a filthy blackmailer, an irascible boss, and a sweet local beauty ripe for love. Williams uses the best line in the book on her:

I took her face in my hands and kissed her. And then they dynamited the dam.

There’s no dam. That’s just what the kiss does to him. And it’s a brilliant pulp moment. A book like this screams for film adaptation, and it was eventually put onscreen in the form of 1990’s The Hot Spot, with Don Johnson, Virginia Madsen, and a radiant Jennifer Connelly. We haven’t watched the film, but it’s on the slate. The only flaw to the book, besides the usual stuff general to 1950s crime fiction, is the title. The main character Harry Madox thinks he’s rid himself of the femme fatale Dorothy Harshaw, but hell hath no fury. Those four words tell us she’ll be back plenty mad and will have a say in how matters conclude. It takes a little of the suspense away. Otherwise, top notch.

Fawcett Publications, Dell Books, The Hot Spot, Charles Williams, Don Johnson, Virginia Madsen, Jennifer Connelly, Barye Phillips, cover art, literature, cinema

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

February 13

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

February 12

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

February 12

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the painting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

February 11

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.

February 10

1962—Powers Is Traded for Abel

Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.