Dark Deeds, Dangerous Blonds
By Richard Zoglin
She's blond. She's seductive. She's just killed her husband. Oh, sure, it was probably self-defense: the guy had disguised himself as a burglar, broken into their house and tried to kill her before she plugged him with a .357 Magnum. Still, you know she's trouble.
He's a police detective with a seedy apartment, a 5 o'clock shadow and, against his better judgment, a yen for the blond. It's the old story: boy meets girl. Boy suspects girl. Boy borrows girl's car and is almost killed when the brakes mysteriously fail.
The steamy couple, played by Harry Hamlin and Nicollette Sheridan, develop their near fatal attraction in Deceptions, a made-for-cable movie that aired on Showtime last month. It was perhaps the definitive example of the hottest new ticket on the cable dial: the film-noir thriller. Gotham, a moody mystery about a Manhattan detective (Tommy Lee Jones) investigating an enigmatic woman (Virginia Madsen) who is supposed to be dead, was Showtime's highest-rated made-for-TV movie in 1988. Third Degree Burn, starring Treat Williams as a private eye hired to tail another mysterious blond (Madsen again), was the most-watched original film on HBO last year. The USA Network, which is churning out made-for-TV films -- most of them murder mysteries -- at the rate of two a month, scored its best ratings ever with The China Lake Murders last January. Even Lifetime, the cable channel for women, will get into the act late this month with Memories of Murder, starring Nancy Allen as an amnesia victim.
In the mode of such Hollywood classics as Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep, these cable-noir thrillers feature tales of murder, treachery, lust and double-dealing. The mood is somber, the detectives usually disillusioned and the blonds nearly always dangerous. A bit more graphic in sex and violence than network movies, cable-noir films go straight for the gut. And their aim is true. The cable networks may get more attention for their high-minded docudramas (Mandela) and gourmet remakes (Charlton Heston in A Man for All Seasons). But these unpretentious B movies are their doughy bread and butter.
Which is not to say that many of them are not junk food. In Curiosity Kills, last month's USA entry, C. Thomas Howell and Rae Dawn Chong play a photographer and his neighbor who suspect a new tenant of being a killer; despite some bloody violence, it's routine Nancy Drew hokum. USA's Dead Reckoning contrived to place a rich doctor (Cliff Robertson), his wife and her former lover on a pleasure boat together in the middle of the ocean, then promptly sank in a sea of implausibility.
Others tinker more creatively with the familiar noir premise of treachery getting its just deserts. In Backfire (Showtime) the wife of a disturbed Vietnam vet plots to drive him crazy so he'll attempt suicide. He obliges only to the extent of lapsing (darn the luck) into a catatonic state, which is only the beginning of the wife's comeuppance. In Buried Alive (USA) another scheming housewife (Jennifer Jason Leigh) conspires with her doctor lover to bump off her husband with poison. Again the plan goes awry: she gives him too small a dose, and the authorities only think he's dead. What follows is Poe- etic justice.
The most interesting of these films explore another classic noir theme: the murky line between good and evil, the secret complicity between the innocent and the guilty. In Fear, which just debuted on Showtime, Ally Sheedy plays a psychic who helps the police track down serial killers. The twist is that she runs into a murderer with psychic powers of his own, who welcomes her as a telepathic compatriot on his sadistic binges. Fear is two-thirds of a good movie, stumbling only when it lurches toward the predictable chase-through-an- a musement-park climax.
The cozy relationship between good and evil is most deftly explored in the genre's one real gem to date: The China Lake Murders. A veteran Los Angeles cop named Donnelly (Michael Parks) takes his annual vacation in a small desert community, where he stops unsuspecting motorists and murders them. Director Alan Metzger and screenwriter N.D. Schreiner play out the story in surprisingly delicate chords. The murders are mostly bloodless and muted (the cop stuffs his victims in a car trunk and leaves them to fry in the sun), and the tracking-a-killer plot is downplayed. What counts is the wary relationship between Donnelly and the town's sympathetic sheriff (Tom Skerritt).
It's a good-cop, bad-cop story of psychological subtlety and resonance. The film plays craftily on the audience's fears of the police losing control but refuses to go for easy responses. The murderous cop is unfailingly composed and affable; the troubled sheriff is the one who flies off the handle while trying to arrest a wife beater. "Take it easy, pal. It's just a job," Donnelly tells him. "Lose control, you turn to garbage." The movie is unsettling in the best tradition of film noir: dark deeds taking place in the bright desert sun, where nothing is quite black and white.
With reporting by William Tynan/New York