Word: noire
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...spoke last week, he seemed a little tired and rambling. It had after all been an exhausting 77-year circuit from the room where he was born to this ritual of fulfillment. But even in the mellowness of the moment, Nixon still gave off emanations of the film-noir pol that a part of him has always played, the shadow of that something in his character that is remorseless and bruised and unforgetting...
...steamy couple, played by Harry Hamlin and Nicollette Sheridan, develop their near fatal attraction in Deceptions, a made-for-cable movie that aired on Showtime last month. It was perhaps the definitive example of the hottest new ticket on the cable dial: the film-noir thriller. Gotham, a moody mystery about a Manhattan detective (Tommy Lee Jones) investigating an enigmatic woman (Virginia Madsen) who is supposed to be dead, was Showtime's highest-rated made-for-TV movie in 1988. Third Degree Burn, starring Treat Williams as a private eye hired to tail another mysterious blond (Madsen again...
...mode of such Hollywood classics as Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep, these cable-noir thrillers feature tales of murder, treachery, lust and double-dealing. The mood is somber, the detectives usually disillusioned and the blonds nearly always dangerous. A bit more graphic in sex and violence than network movies, cable-noir films go straight for the gut. And their aim is true. The cable networks may get more attention for their high-minded docudramas (Mandela) and gourmet remakes (Charlton Heston in A Man for All Seasons). But these unpretentious B movies are their doughy bread and butter...
Others tinker more creatively with the familiar noir premise of treachery getting its just deserts. In Backfire (Showtime) the wife of a disturbed Vietnam vet plots to drive him crazy so he'll attempt suicide. He obliges only to the extent of lapsing (darn the luck) into a catatonic state, which is only the beginning of the wife's comeuppance. In Buried Alive (USA) another scheming housewife (Jennifer Jason Leigh) conspires with her doctor lover to bump off her husband with poison. Again the plan goes awry: she gives him too small a dose, and the authorities only think...
...blonds are dangerous, the detectives are disillusioned, and the action is steamy: made-for-TV film-noir thrillers are heating up the home screen and grabbing the ratings...