Word: cains
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...life on the road, then split. Six: Frank returns to her. Seven: this time they do kill Nick. Eight: they make love over his corpse. Nine: they are charged with his murder. Ten, Eleven, Twelve ... In bold, remorseless strokes, and fewer than 100 pages, James M. Cain etched a portrait of animal lust and human need, of mania and the Depression, of the original sin and spectacularly convoluted forms of retribution. Its narrative travels the arc of electricity from the first shock of sexual attraction to the final jolt of death-row juice. The 1934 novel was a banned...
...film dispenses with the machismo verismo of Luchino Visconti's 1942 Ossessione and the platinum-blinded glitz of the 1946 version starring John Garfield and Lana Turner to concentrate on a purposefully paced retelling of Cain's story. It means to calibrate every movement in the desperate mating dance of Frank and Cora, "these unspeakably stupid, very simple people, filled with guile and tenderness." That is Director Rafelson's phrase, spoken without contempt for his characters but with an understanding of their selfish, consuming needs. Though Nick's café is just a short drive from...
...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...