Word: noir
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DIED. Henry Hathaway, 86, reliable Hollywood action-movie director who learned the trade from prop boy up and from 1932 crafted more than 60 rousing adventures, big-sky westerns and film noir mysteries that starred some of the screen's greatest names, including Gary Cooper (The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, 1935), James Stewart (Call Northside 777, 1948), Tyrone Power (The Black Rose, 1950), James Mason (The Desert Fox, 1951) and John Wayne (True Grit, 1969); in Los Angeles...
...this time. Blood Simple (the title comes from Dashiell Hammett) works terse, elegant variations on a theme as old as the Fall; it subverts the film noir genre in order to revitalize it; it offers the satisfactions and surprises of a conniving visual style. Most important, it displays the whirligig wit of two young men--Joel Coen, 30, a graduate of New York University film school, and his brother Ethan, 27--in a debut film as scarifyingly assured as any since Orson Welles was just this wide...
Here is film noir stripped down to its basics--a road, a bar, a motel, an affair, a private eye, a murder, a pinwheeling series of betrayals--then customized with camera style. Strapped to a car fender, or sauntering at ankle level through a rowdy party, or tracking smoothly down a long bar counter (and over a passed-out customer), the Coens' camera is a participant in the action, and worlds hipper than anyone on-screen. "Hi, I'm here," it as much as says, "and I'm soooo smart." It is too; it creates elegant riddles of space...
...substance of new wave could not always keep pace with the style, which may be one reason why Souther sounds so good right now. Another, of course, is that he is a very skillful writer whose love songs have both the toughness and the solid sentimentality of film noir. A tune like the title track is a very neat piece of backbeat sleight of hand. It starts out like a celebration of male swagger ("He said goodbye and just walked right out the door"), then turns into a deft bit of deflation ("He looked so good he must have practiced...
...level, The Terminator is a hip retelling of the D Annunciation: Sarah is a blissed-out Virgin Mary, John is her divine son, and Reese the messenger angel sent to impregnate Sarah with the holy word. But there is plenty of tech-noir savvy to keep infidels and action fans satisfied. The violence is copious, clean and discreet. Director James Cameron (who wrote the script with Producer Gale Anne Kurd) has a superefficient editing style that uses slow motion, pixilation and infra-red opticals to make this the smartest looking L.A. nighttown movie since The Driver...