Word: noire
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Shepard, better known as a playwright than as an actor, successfully portrays Cal's violent transition from skeptic to zealot. Shepard's brooding, understated intensity adds a dash of noir to the film...
Lawrence Sanders' novel could serve as the basis for a taut, lurid little film noir, but this adaptation is as plodding and routine as most police work-or as a police novel unredeemed by narrative surprises or a galvanic prose style. The plot doubles back on itself and wanders off on pointless tangents. A subplot involving Delaney's critically ill wife (Faye Dunaway) is never integrated into the manhunt story, and Dunaway is wasted in a role that keeps her flat on her back. Mostly, she is forgotten as the gumshoe and the hobnail boots approach each other...
Union City, made for $500,000 by Mark Reichert, 32, has been called the first punk-rock film noir. At first glance, the phrase fits. Deborah Harry, making her dramatic-film debut, is the blond of Blondie; Chris Stein, who composed the sepulchrally melodious score, is Blondie's lead guitarist; Pat Benatar, in a featured role, has an album of her own. And Union City is faithful to the tones and undertones of film noir, that postwar style of moviemaking that transposed Raymond Chandler's mean-streets prose and James M. Cain's haunted losers to celluloid...
...Union City has other things on its mind. For a start, this is a film noir in garish, ominous primary colors; the design takes its cue from the camp surrealism of modern Germanic directors like Daniel Schmid and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. More important, however funny-peculiar the plot, Union City tracks its characters' shabby lives and squalid passions so relentlessly that it becomes a portrait of lower-middle-class despair. And Lipscomb's performance is devastatingly acute. His gestures are just too broad, his harsh voice much too loud; Harlan's swagger and insecurity...
California is by no means the vinous El Dorado pictured by its publicists or by many writers who would not know a Chardonnay grape from a supermarket Thompson Seedless. Americans using the Pinot Noir grape of Burgundy have yet to make a red wine that is remotely equal to its ancestor in body and authority. Many California wines, particularly the often overpraised Zinfandels, lack finesse and balance. Some, like Heitz Martha...