Double Feature

The Bedroom Window has the kind of premise that’s hard to resist: Our naïve hero tries to do good by telling a lie, and quickly finds himself on the Road to Hell. I saw this in a theater 21 years ago (?!) and thought it was like an American version of one of Truffaut’s Hitchcock homages –- an impression obviously fostered by the presence of Isabelle Huppert, but supported by the film itself and by a second viewing on DVD this week. As with Truffaut, the movie goes limp somewhere after the halfway mark, even though the story remains involving. It would be easy to blame this failure on the star, Steve Guttenberg, unless you have happened to see him in the movie Diner and thus realize that he gets a Lifetime Pass. No, it’s his character –- he’s an Architect, which in movies means Underwritten –- that lets some of the tension dribble away. Director Curtis Hanson, who would go on to adapt and direct the sublime L.A. Confidential, doesn’t fix the character into the story the way that Hitchcock or DePalma or David Lynch did in films with similar premises. Even when the guy is sitting up all night in an alley, staking out a killer’s house, there’s no sense of what’s driving him; when, late in the film, he tells Elizabeth McGovern that he has a “crush” on Huppert, it sounds about right -– and completely wrong. It’s just a lark? Don’t tell that to the villain! (It’s a master stroke by Hanson that the villain has only one line in the movie. He makes the most of it. You laugh, realizing -- “Hey! He spoke!” -- and then your blood runs cold.)

The much-lauded second-person voiceover narration in Blast of Silence left me feeling churlish. The style is so hardboiled you could crack a floor tile with it, and it has more than a touch of Nietzche -– the Nietzche who so impresses undergraduates. That aside, the film’s a gem, a terrific specimen of the lonely-stunted-life-of-the-contract killer sub-genre. You could draw a straight line from Blast of Silence through The Prone Gunman through Grosse Point Blank to Who Is Conrad Hirst? and come out with a pretty good essay. I’ll expect it on my desk next week.