Word: cains
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...title alludes to), like the scripts to practically all the noir classics, is a treatise on lust and betrayal. Frank Chambers (Jack Nicholson), is a small-time drifter with a record of petty crimes, who is being drawn into L.A.'s vortex out of sheer statis. As James Cain conceived him in the 1934 novel. Chambers is a sardonic son of a bitch with no past to speak of, and no future worth mentioning. On his way to the city, Chambers drops off at a roadside diner to scam a meal off the owner. The owner is a sleazy, belching...
...then all of this extremes, violent or boyish, flash out of those same, perpetually half-shut eyes. With his hairline receding and the lines of his face hardening now into some sort of death mask. Nicholson doesn't try to play Chambers as the twenty-three year old punk Cain envisioned. Instead he slouches around like a bored satyr. He seems to revel in his decay, in his unnerving ability to play an utterly reptilian Don Juan...
...Chambers and Cora plot to kill her husband so they can be together, and after one botched attempt, they succeed in murdering him in a staged car accident. This gets them in trouble with the law, but with the aid of a serpentine lawyer, they manage to get off. Cain wrote his novel in the mucous-ridden voice of the truly paranoid chain-smoker, and his hard-boiled story was really a then-shocking morality play where morality loses all together. Everyone turns on everyone else; Cora turns on Chambers in court, Chambers cheats on Cora, and eventually Fate turns...
...Scenes of furious violence are undercut by his reluctance to leave the action before every angle has been explored. The result is a collection of brilliant scenes which don't seem to be related in time. Playwright David Mamet has taken most of the xenophobia and complication out of Cain's novel, and left in their places huge gaps for Rafelson to muse over. But one suspects Rafelson didn't even notice...
...Cain saw it, woman was the temptress, and Cora was a wailing siren -Circe in a highway diner. Jessica Lange's Cora is trapped, no less than Nick and Frank, by the grim imperatives of the Depression and her search for the deepest sense of identity through sex. The actress's presence and gestural eloquence provided Rafelson with this point of focus: Cora knows who she is and what men will do to possess her. A fraternity of appraising eyes follows her on the streets, in court, at the diner. One managing, sad-faced, respectably poor-emerges from...