Red Rock West
R, 98 m., 1994
Nicolas Cage (Michael), J. T. Walsh (Wayne), Dennis Hopper (Lyle), Lara Flynn Boyle (Suzanne). Directed by John Dahl and produced by Steven Golin. Screenplay by John Dahl and Rick Dahl.
Red Rock West is a diabolical movie that exists sneakily between a western and a thriller, between a film noir and a black comedy. When I saw it at the Toronto Film Festival a couple of years ago, I assumed it would be arriving in theaters in a few weeks.
Instead, it almost missed theatrical release altogether, maybe because it’s so hard to categorize. After playing on cable and being released on video, it was booked into the Roxie Theater in San Francisco, whose owner liked it so much he thought it deserved to be seen on the big screen. After breaking the theater’s house record for any feature, it went into theaters around the country.
No wonder. This is a movie like Blood Simple (which it somewhat resembles) or the David Lynch movies, constructed out of passion, murder, revenge, and a quirky sense of humor. The plot is incredibly complicated. It is also easy to follow and, eventually, makes perfect sense. This kind of lovingly contrived melodrama requires juicy actors, who can luxuriate in the ironies of a scene, and the movie has them: Nicolas Cage, J. T. Walsh, Dennis Hopper, and Lara Flynn Boyle. They must have had a lot of fun with this material.
The movie stars Cage as a poor but honest drifter who arrives, nearly broke, in the small Western town of Red Rock. He walks into the local saloon and is mistaken by the owner (Walsh) for the professional killer from Texas that Walsh has hired to murder his wife (Boyle). Cage plays along with the joke, collects an advance on the hit, and goes out to Walsh’s ranch to visit the wife. There is, of course, an immediate sexual attraction between them. He thinks it only fair to let her in on the secret. She then offers to pay Cage to murder her husband.
So Cage has two offers on the table when a stranger (Dennis Hopper) drives into town. This is, of course, the real hit man from Texas. Walsh is not amused to discover he has paid an advance to the wrong man.
OK. So that’s the setup. It’s ingenious, but it doesn’t even begin to suggest the pleasures of this movie, which depend less on plot than on the reactions of the characters to finding themselves in such a plot. Cage’s drifter is especially interesting, because most of the time he’s operating without a good idea of the whole situation; he has to keep quiet and look like he knows what the others think he knows.
At some fundamental level, all he really wants to do is get out of Red Rock and never come back again, and the movie’s running gag is that he keeps leaving town and finding himself returning to it. The “Welcome to Red Rock” sign turns up in the movie like a signpost in a nightmare. And eventually it’s clear that Cage, and all of the others, are going to be trapped there until they bring their deadly quadrangle to some sort of a conclusion.
J. T. Walsh, whose character has secrets I will not reveal, is one of the most interesting of recent movie villains because he seems so superficially open and honest (one of his first big roles, significantly, was as a Chicago alderman in Backdraft). Other villains snarl and bluster. He desperately tries to reason things through, to appeal to logic or to dependable strategies such as threats.
In a way he’s the most confused by the labyrinthine situations he finds himself in, since they don’t seem to respond to reasonable strategies.
Hopper plays a version of the character he has become famous for: The smiling, charming, cold-blooded killer with a screw loose. All he really wants to do is collect his money and do his job, and he gets dangerous only when he realizes how thoroughly a simple hit has been screwed up. Lara Flynn Boyle, cool under fire, diabolical in her ingenuity, has both Cage and the audience wondering how she really thinks about him; one of the pleasures the movie saves until the very end is a revelation of what she really values, and why.
Red Rock West was directed by John Dahl, who cowrote it with his brother, Rick. John is thirty-four, Rick is twenty-eight, and this is their second feature. It’s the kind of movie made by people who love movies, have had some good times at them, and want to celebrate the very texture of old genres such as the western and the film noir. In a sense, we’ve been in Red Rock many times before: It’s a town where plots lie in wait for unsuspecting visitors, where hatred runs deep, where love is never enough of a motive for doing anything when cash is available.
Strangers on a Train
NO MPAA RATING, 101 m., 1951
Farley Granger (Guy Haines), Robert Walker (Bruno Antony), Ruth Roman (Anne Morton), Kasey Rogers (Miriam Joyce Haines), Patricia Hitchcock (Barbara Morton). Directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Raymond Chandler, Czenzi Ormonde, and Whitfield Cook, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith.
The abiding terror in Alfred Hitchcock’s life was that he would be accused of a crime he did not commit. This fear is at the heart of many of his best films, including Strangers on a Train (1951), in which a man becomes the obvious suspect in the strangulation of his wife. He makes an excellent suspect because of the genius of the actual killer’s original plan: Two strangers will exchange murders, each killing the person the other wants dead. They would both have airtight alibis for the time of the crime, and there would be no possible connection between killer and victim.
It is a plot made of ingenuity and amorality, based on the first novel by Patricia Highsmith (1921–95), who in her Ripley novels and elsewhere was fascinated by brainy criminals who functioned not out of passion but from careful calculation, and usually got away with their crimes. The crisscross murder deal in Strangers on a Train indeed would have worked perfectly—except for the detail that only one of the strangers agrees to it.
Guy Haines, a famous tennis player, is recognized on a train by Bruno Anthony, whose conversation shows a detailed knowledge of Guy’s private life. Guy wants a divorce from his cheating wife, Miriam (Kasey Rogers), in order to marry Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), the daughter of a U.S. senator. Over lunch in his private compartment, Bruno reveals that he wants his father dead, and suggests a perfect crime in which he would murder Guy’s wife, Guy would murder Bruno’s father, and neither would ever be suspected.
Bruno’s manner is pushy and insinuating, with homoerotic undertones. Guy is offended by the references to his private life, but inexplicably doesn’t break off the conversation—which ends on an ambiguous note, with Bruno trying to get Guy to agree to the plan, and Guy trying to jolly him along and get rid of him.
But Bruno does murder Guy’s wife, and then demands that Guy keep his half of the bargain. As a plot, this has a neatness that Hitchcock must have found irresistible—especially since Guy has a motive to murder his wife, was seen in a public fight with her earlier on the day of her death, and even told his fiancée he would like to strangle Miriam.
Hitchcock said that correct casting saved him a reel in storytelling time, since audiences would sense qualities in the actors that didn’t need to be spelled out. Certainly the casting of Farley Granger as Guy and Robert Walker as Bruno is crucial. Hitchcock allegedly wanted William Holden for the role of Guy (he’s stronger, he told Francois Truffaut), but Holden would have been all wrong—too sturdy, too put off by Bruno (despite the way Holden allowed an aging actress to manipulate him in Sunset Boulevard).