Word: noire
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Odds is one of those remakes that inexplicably leave out everything that was interesting and memorable in the original in order to concentrate on the conventional and the routine. Eric Hughes' screenplay is based on Out of the Past, which may be the most deliriously convoluted film noir ever made, and the new picture retains the clockwork heart of the 1947 Robert Mitchum movie: a gangster hires an investigator to find the woman who has run away from him; when hunter and hunted meet and fall in love, the hood suffers a criminal loss of temper...
...warning about giving too little power in the 1946 constitution to the presidency, he gracefully retired. Twelve years and 24 governments later, De Gaulle returned to save France from civil war over Algeria. He eventually gave the rebellious, predominantly Muslim province its independence, earning the animosity of the pied-noir settlers and the rightist supporters of Algérie francaise who plotted to kill him. (One assassination attempt inspired Frederick Forsyth's 1971 thriller The Day of the Jackal...
...needn't have worried. In satire of the often-facile plot turns of film noir, the clues are simply handed to the characters, at intervals of about five minutes apiece. While this plot succeeds in commenting on the genre, it also robs the film of any interest it might otherwise have held...
...recurring clues, recurring thugs, and recurring murders, the plot features a murderous priest, a mystery-lady in a leopard coat, a grotesque pimp and a complete cast, shuffled and re-shuffled, of the stock characters. Throughout the film, in fact, the plot contains all the typical characteristics of film noir...
...conscious but not detached, Confidentially Yours neither works as frank satire, nor does it hold the suspense of a thriller. The bizarre jumbled reality of Vercel's world has more in common with that of a Thomas Pynchon novel than with the finely-crafted artifice of the classic film noir. Pynchon, however, has wit. Sustaining little of the illusion that is vital in, for example, Scarlet Street, Confidentially Yours makes no bones of having ketchup for blood and a pacemaker for a heart. The movie actually seems to be the director's private joke--he is having his cake...