*** This comment may contain spoilers *** It's the story that James M. Cain might have written if the period had permitted it. Here is Jessica Lange, sensuously kneading dough on the baking room table and practically radiating oestrus. Here is her husband, Nick the Greek, oily, drunk, spitting his plosives all over everybody. And here is Nicholson as the reckless drifter who eases himself into Nick's confidence and forces himself into Lange's pants.
The engine behind the plot is raw sex that turns to a rocky kind of love affair and then to murder and tragedy. Cain couldn't write the sex scenes in this movie, not even in Snappy Stories pulp magazines, the kind with covers showing some gorgeous doll with the shoulder of her dress ripped and a bra strap showing and some goon with a gun lurking in the shadows behind her.
You can't help comparing it to the 1946 version with John Garfield, Lana Turner, and Cecil Calloway. The earlier movie is much sleeker, more compact, and brought up to date, and the characters are sketched in with greater simplicity.
This one is a period picture. The time is the 1930s and the production design is just fine. They're always tooling around in cars. What cars they had in those days -- that yellow Model A convertible roadster with the rumble seat! I loved the one I once owned, even though I could never find replacement parts for it. The old days are gone forever. (Sob.) Anyway, neither Nicholson nor anyone else loves the cars as much as Nicholson winds up loving Lange, and vice versa.
There is a slight problem in this bond between the two of them, namely Nick the Greek. He's a nice enough guy -- trusting, not too bright, has ties to a vibrant Greek community which we don't see much of. As a matter of fact, except for some occasional run-ins with the law, this curious trio seems to live all alone at the Twin Oaks Roadside Stand.
Nicholson is required to show some range and he does a splendid job -- by turns dumb, sleazy, and horrified. Lange doesn't quite do the job that Nicholson does but she's more than adequate. When she finally gives in to Nicholson on the butcher block table she makes us believe it. The writers, though, have given her a strange and unanticipated quirk. After she's just watched Nicholson bash in her husband's head with a giant socket wrench, and she's just been severely punched in the face (twice) and knocked to the dirt among the shrubbery, she gets a case of the hots and invites Nicholson to join her in an al fresco romp. It just doesn't belong. Neither does Nicholson's brief tryst with Angelica Huston as a comic circus lion tamer. And it IS a little hard to swallow the notion that Lange is converted into a law-abiding, pregnant, willing Hausfrau because of her mother's death -- given that, until then, we didn't even know she had a mother.
But those are relatively minor issues. Overall, this is a superior movie, "gritty", as they say. Nicholson, unlike Garfield in 1946, looks like he really works at his job. What filthy hands. Not much can be said for his mind either. By the time he and Lange are reformed, the postman is at the door again.
The engine behind the plot is raw sex that turns to a rocky kind of love affair and then to murder and tragedy. Cain couldn't write the sex scenes in this movie, not even in Snappy Stories pulp magazines, the kind with covers showing some gorgeous doll with the shoulder of her dress ripped and a bra strap showing and some goon with a gun lurking in the shadows behind her.
You can't help comparing it to the 1946 version with John Garfield, Lana Turner, and Cecil Calloway. The earlier movie is much sleeker, more compact, and brought up to date, and the characters are sketched in with greater simplicity.
This one is a period picture. The time is the 1930s and the production design is just fine. They're always tooling around in cars. What cars they had in those days -- that yellow Model A convertible roadster with the rumble seat! I loved the one I once owned, even though I could never find replacement parts for it. The old days are gone forever. (Sob.) Anyway, neither Nicholson nor anyone else loves the cars as much as Nicholson winds up loving Lange, and vice versa.
There is a slight problem in this bond between the two of them, namely Nick the Greek. He's a nice enough guy -- trusting, not too bright, has ties to a vibrant Greek community which we don't see much of. As a matter of fact, except for some occasional run-ins with the law, this curious trio seems to live all alone at the Twin Oaks Roadside Stand.
Nicholson is required to show some range and he does a splendid job -- by turns dumb, sleazy, and horrified. Lange doesn't quite do the job that Nicholson does but she's more than adequate. When she finally gives in to Nicholson on the butcher block table she makes us believe it. The writers, though, have given her a strange and unanticipated quirk. After she's just watched Nicholson bash in her husband's head with a giant socket wrench, and she's just been severely punched in the face (twice) and knocked to the dirt among the shrubbery, she gets a case of the hots and invites Nicholson to join her in an al fresco romp. It just doesn't belong. Neither does Nicholson's brief tryst with Angelica Huston as a comic circus lion tamer. And it IS a little hard to swallow the notion that Lange is converted into a law-abiding, pregnant, willing Hausfrau because of her mother's death -- given that, until then, we didn't even know she had a mother.
But those are relatively minor issues. Overall, this is a superior movie, "gritty", as they say. Nicholson, unlike Garfield in 1946, looks like he really works at his job. What filthy hands. Not much can be said for his mind either. By the time he and Lange are reformed, the postman is at the door again.