Out of Sight

 

Director Steven Soderbergh

Soderbergh with Jennifer Lopez

George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez

OUT OF SIGHT         A-                                                                                                             USA  (123 mi)  1998  d: Steven Soderbergh     

I'm just gonna sit here, take it easy and wait for you to screw up.                                                   —Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez)

This foursome of films from 1998 to 2000, OUT OF SIGHT (1998), The Limey (1999), ERIN BROCKOVICH (2000), and Traffic (2000) represent Soderbergh working at the peak of his creative powers.  This is one of his finest efforts, named Entertainment Weekly’s Sexiest Movie Ever (50 Sexiest Movies Ever - Nick Kaufmann - LiveJournal) in a 2008 poll, a smooth, sophisticated and very sexy Hollywood thriller that features early performances in the budding careers of George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, not yet stars, yet both sizzling onscreen and romantically involved in the most unorthodox fashion, as he is the handsome and charming Jack Foley, a career bank robber incarcerated at Glades Penitentiary in Florida, while she is Karen Sisco, a smooth-as-ice, intoxicatingly beautiful FBI Federal Marshal.  They meet while locked in the trunk of a getaway car as she’s kidnapped during a prison breakout when he is covered with mud, where the two have time on their hands to chat with one another and break the ice, actually discovering they have a mutual interest in classic Hollywood movies, talking about Faye Dunaway movies of all things, including the bad end of the otherwise likeable Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Clooney misstating the famous line from Network (1976), also wondering whether Robert Redford hooked up romantically with Dunaway a little too easily in THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975), while he continues to stroke her thighs, “But in a nice way,” he insists.  Capturing the best of his directorial ideas, with an emphasis on stylish editing, sound, camerawork, frame compositions, and color, while still managing to maintain an independent director’s control over his films, Soderbergh has imported into Hollywood some of the formal preoccupations of experimental filmmaking, such as challenges to character identification and narrative structure, where his visionary style and his habit of playing with the timeline of events gave a new impetus to American cinema, though this inexplicably didn’t do well at the box office.  Adapted by screenwriter Scott Frank from a 1996 Elmore Leonard crime novel, best known for character-driven stories, the ongoing dialogue is exquisite, exuding razor-sharp wit, making excellent use of secondary roles, so much so that the directors could just as easily have been the smart-mouthed and wise-assed Coen Brothers, who perfectly recaptured Clooney’s acerbic criminal persona a few years later in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), while also generating a short-lived TV series appropriately named Karen Sisco, starring Carla Gugino as Sisco.  Casting is one of the more imaginative aspects of the film, as character development through the introduction of new faces continues to surprise the viewer from the first to the last shot, including Catherine Keener as Adele Delisi, Foley’s eccentric ex-wife, also brief appearances by Michael Keaton as FBI agent Ray Nicolette (Sisco’s husband) reprising his role in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997), while lifelong criminal Samuel L. Jackson from that film also plays a similar role, beautifully photographed by Elliot Davis, typically using a handheld camera, featuring interior hotel scenes with a warm and memorable glow, and a jazzy score by Irish composer David Holmes.  Despite the passage of time, this film has lost none of its sophisticated elegance and charm.    

Seemingly brought together by fate, Foley, with a dubious reputation of more than 200 bank robberies while never using a weapon, fortuitously acknowledges the moment, “It’s like seeing someone for the first time, like you can be passing on the street, and you look at each other for a few seconds, and there’s this kind of a recognition like you both know something.  Next moment the person’s gone, and it’s too late to do anything about it.  And you always remember it because it was there, and you let it go, and you think to yourself, ‘What if I had stopped?  What if I had said something?’  What if, what if... it may only happen a few times in your life.”  Or maybe just once, she adds.  While the relationship is the pulsating heart of the film, like a throwback to the golden age of Bogart and Bacall, both displaying the self-assurance and sexiness that makes them naturally irresistible both to each other and to audiences, there is a novelistic structure onscreen, with more than enough subplots involving a host of vividly drawn characters.  Foley and Sisco don’t really acknowledge their interest in one another, yet in their minds they do, and in an oddly embarrassing moment where neither one is supposed to be where they are, he gives her a short little wave from an elevator as she’s sitting in a hotel lobby, eyes fixed on his before he disappears from view with his fellow partner in crime, Buddy Bragg (Ving Rhames), who helped break him out of prison.  While Foley exercises the buddy system, working professionally in public, or being surrounded by hordes of prison inmates, or ex-cons once he escapes, it’s as if he’s never alone and one wonders if he’s capable of private, reflective thought.  Lopez, on the other hand, sexy and determined, has a smart-mouthed, over-protective, yet adoring father, a now retired marshal (Dennis Farina) who worries about his daughter’s dating habits and thoughtfully gives her a gun for her birthday, but for the most part she exhibits a loner policy, as she doesn’t trust the current misogyny and system of male favoritism in place that represents the state of mind in the ranks of the FBI.  So she’s used to going her own way and taking care of herself, irrespective of what they may think of her.  When she goes looking for a career criminal named Maurice (Don Cheadle), aka Snoopy, a murderous ex-prizefighter, but instead finds Mosella (Viola Davis) as his embittered, long forgotten wife, Sisco does a number on Maurice’s brother, Kenneth (Isaiah Washington), an over-controlling serial rapist and male thug, who instantly senses a hot-blooded woman with a taste for violence, exhibiting a sensual lust for getting down and dirty on the floor with her, so she zaps him with a collapsible baton that leaves him otherwise immobile, saying “You wanted to tussle.  We tussled,” as she calmly walks out the door unscathed.

Following another Elmore Leonard novel brought to the screen, Barry Sonnenfeld’s GET SHORTY (1995), both adapted by Scott Frank and produced by Danny DeVito, this is a collective mosaic of genre pieces from past decades, including shootouts, a jewelry robbery, and prison breaks, full of zooms, jump cuts, flashbacks, flash-forwards, close-ups, freeze frames, and grainy images, as if to remind viewers we are watching a movie, with a heated romance at the center, bathed in the warmth of a retro design, with a deep respect for the classical forms, where much of the beauty of this film is the dazzling interplay between characters, which in the world of criminals is all about exuding an air of confidence, refusing to be defeated or brought down by anybody.  Oddly enough, this is also the same method for initiating romance, which is beautifully done here, one of the highlights of the film, a clever mix of image and dialogue and music, preceded by Sisco sitting alone in a near empty hotel bar being hit on by a bunch of out of town male imbeciles before Foley walks in and they have a serious conversation, where their thoughts jump ahead out of sequence and we see what they are about to do before they actually do it, a co-mingling of the sexual imagination and the real, gorgeously understated, memorably jazzy and intoxicating.  Fascinated by his carefree behavior, in the mold of Clark Gable, even their post-coital conversation has an air of authenticity not shared anywhere else in the film, where Sisco is allowed to have doubts creep in, and Foley, of course, ever vigilant, puts her mind at ease.  They call this little interlude a “timeout” before they resume back to their normal lives, where Foley and Maurice are in competition for finding the big score, the teaser in all film noirs, which in this case is the robbery of $5 million dollars worth of uncut diamonds hidden somewhere in the giant estate of fellow white collar criminal Ripley (Albert Brooks), a Wall Street billionaire who did time in Lompoc for insider trading, where he met Maurice, amusingly paying his accounts in prison by checkbook.  While the first half of the film is set in sunny Miami with those south Florida vibrant colors, where there is a perceived lack of real menace, the second half moves to Detroit in winter, viewed as a dangerous, oppressive place, rendered in darker tones, dominated by nighttime scenes in tightly enclosed spaces.  It’s a snowy night in Detroit filled with sinister possibilities where anything can happen, with an elevated level of suspense galvanized by the unfocused impulses of sadistic black criminal gangsters, yet the film is really about the sexual swagger of Karen Cisco, one badass woman who’s sitting on the outside waiting to bust them.  Generally regarded as one of the most overlooked gems of the 90’s, the film is smart, tense, stylish, well-directed, character driven, atmospheric, and moves at a fast clip, like a screwball comedy, beautifully edited by legendary British editor Anne V. Coates, but the believable chemistry between the unconventional connection between Clooney and Lopez makes all the difference.   

Watch Out of Sight Full Movie Online Free With English Subtitles  FShare TV (2:02:49)

Devil in a Blue Dress

 

Director Carl Franklin

Franklin on the set with Denzel Washington

Novelist Walter Mosley

DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS                         A-                                                                         USA  (102 mi)  1995  d: Carl Franklin

It was summer 1948, and I needed money.  After goin’ door-to-door all day long, I was back again at Joppy’s bar trying to figure out where I was gonna go looking for work the next day.  The newspapers was goin’ on and on about the city elections – like they was really gonna change somebody’s life.  But my life had already changed when I lost my job three weeks before.         —Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins (Denzel Washington)

Recalling the Raymond Chandler film noir style of criminal murkiness surrounding Los Angeles in the works of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Howard Hawks’ THE BIG SLEEP (1946), Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973), or Roman Polanski’s CHINATOWN (1974), this is an early example of Denzel Washington’s rising star power, demonstrating a commanding screen presence, bringing a sexual swagger to one of his most compelling performances, coming on the heels of GLORY (1989), MO’ BETTER BLUES (1990) and MALCOLM X (1992), but years before he’d win a Best Actor Oscar for portraying a rogue cop in a deeply corrupt LA police department in TRAINING DAY (2001).  Directed by Carl Franklin, who began his career as an actor, working in theater before moving to television and a few movie roles, enrolling in the AFI Conservatory in Los Angeles where he obtained a Master’s degree in directing, with an opportunity to direct several Roger Corman films before getting his big break with the critically acclaimed neo-noir One False Move (1992).  Adding depth and social realism to a film noir aesthetic, beautifully captured on 35 mm by Tak Fujimoto’s elegant camerawork, including a magnificent opening crane shot, the film’s opening credit sequence plays out over the backdrop of Archibald John Motley Jr’s 1949 painting of Bronzeville By Night, a depiction of a South Side Chicago street at night during the 1940’s, offering a safe haven for blacks migrating from the South, displaying vibrant lights and colors to depict a bustling black entertainment district, filled with a jazz and blues infused soundtrack and an original score written by Elmer Bernstein.  Exploding off the screen, the film is transformed into a South-Central neighborhood in Los Angeles that is equally energized in motion, setting the stage for what follows, scandal, blackmail, racial turmoil, and a mayoral race with sinister implications, with one candidate mysteriously dropping out, yet bad luck seems to follow the protagonist in a convoluted plot of murder and intrigue, turning into a self-styled detective mystery, where solving the crime himself is the only way of keeping him from being charged for multiple murders, with cops typically blaming the nearest black man as the fall guy instead of actually solving the crime.  That’s just the way it works.  Adapting a 1990 hardboiled mystery novel by Walter Mosley, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins (Denzel Washington), providing his own noir voiceover narration, is a war veteran transplanted from Houston, Texas, part of the migratory tradition of blacks from the Deep South of Texas and Louisiana heading West to Los Angeles after the Great Depression and the war in search of jobs while escaping the Jim Crow South, finding good paying work in the shipping and aircraft industries, where Easy is a machinist who has taken advantage of the GI Bill and is one of the few blacks owning his own home at the time, a product of the American Dream and a continued source of pride, as property ownership wields power (largely confined to whites), “That house meant more to me than any woman I ever knew,” yet the film opens just as he’s losing his job, putting him in a precarious position.  Mixing humor with scenes meant to unsettle and disturb, the film openly intends to challenge perceptions on race and interject a black realist sensibility, largely by advancing an intelligent narrative seen exclusively through the eyes of a strong black protagonist, taking us on an odyssey through the moral cesspool and racial fault lines of greater Los Angeles, as alienation, political corruption, and a cynical view of human nature were central to the postwar film noir aesthetic, yet with the notable exception of No Way Out (1950) or Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), noir films always ignored the rampant racism of the times, where the law shelters and protects wealthy whites, no matter how despicable their crimes.  Set primarily in the black community of Watts in 1948, the film eloquently depicts the everyday oppression and harm that comes to black Americans simply living ordinary lives in the postwar years after WWII, a marked difference from the noticeable exclusion of black characters and black communities from the classic noir films from the era that conveniently highlighted white neighborhoods.  Evading the poverty and crime-infested life in Houston’s 5th Ward, Easy moved West only to discover that the same miseries are inflicted upon blacks in Los Angeles.  Securing a job at one of the many aircraft plants, he purchased a house and settled into a working-class neighborhood, but was fired for refusing to work overtime, acknowledging that whites routinely refused, yet he was the one fired by a white boss who felt threatened by a black man standing up for himself, recalling a similar scene in Michael Roemer’s Nothing But a Man (1964), quickly discovering his mortgage is nearly two months overdue.  While sitting in his local bar reading the classified ads in the newspaper, the bartender Joppy (Mel Winkler), an ex-boxer also from Houston, invites him over to meet a friend, DeWitt Albright (Tom Sizemore), who turns out to be a sleazy white businessman who does “favors for friends,” handing out $100 just to find someone, a missing white woman known for frequenting black establishments, apparently hiding out in the black juke joints along LA’s Central Avenue.  Against his better judgment he accepts the job, acknowledging “It was easy money, too easy,” but he’s in no position to find a better offer.  

It was the success of Franklin’s earlier film One False Move (1992) that paved the way for someone like Jonathan Demme to help produce the film, having worked with actor Denzel Washington in his acclaimed yet heavily criticized film PHILADELPHIA (1993), the last movie where Washington did not have a starring role.  Following in the footsteps of Steve McQueen’s Bullitt (1968), Paul Newman’s HARPER (1966) and THE DROWNING POOL (1975), the Coen brother’s Blood Simple (1984), William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in LA (1985), or Michael Mann’s Thief (1981) and HEAT (1995), this film subversively navigates a predominantly black milieu in search of a missing white woman, with Easy finding himself contending with crooked cops, sleazy politicians, and an increasing number of dead bodies that he will be accused of murdering, yet the film surprisingly failed at the box office despite critical acclaim, perhaps a fallout from the nonstop, yearlong media coverage sensationalizing every minute detail of the O.J. Simpson trial (2016 Top Ten List #4 O.J.: Made in America), leaving viewers oversaturated with bombshell racial implications and needing a break, where it didn’t help that the film opened the same week as the verdict, also contending against the massive popularity of David Fincher’s Se7en (1995), and eventually overlooked by the overwhelming success of L.A. Confidential (1997), an all-white perspective and one of the “whitest” films ever made, which in 2008 was voted the best film set in Los Angeles in the last 25 years by a group of Los Angeles Times writers and editors (L.A.'s story is complicated, but they got it - Los Angeles Times).  A complex and otherwise engrossing story that is fabulously entertaining while also a social critique, this movie might have been franchised, with Franklin acquiring the rights to the first three Mosley-written installments, proposing a series of films, but it never happened, though novelist Walter Mosley, reportedly President Bill Clinton’s favorite novelist, wrote 15 popular crime fiction novels based upon the Easy Rawlins’ character, earning him the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2020, making him the first black man to receive the honor.  What immediately stands out is that Easy makes an enormous effort to avoid breaking the law, priding himself in living a respectable and morally principled life, easily interacting with his neighbors, conveying a sense of community, where it’s clear he hasn’t yet become a detective, but is just a guy who’s constantly pulled into a criminal underworld, drowning in a subterranean network of dishonesty and moral hypocrisy, caught up in a white power struggle that has a way of eliminating marginalized figures, lured into unjust fates, which only reflects their lowly position in society, as the black community has felt powerless for generations, deprived of basic human rights, which is only exacerbated in the film noir genre, living like shadows, unseen by the majority white population where they literally don’t exist.  Blacks hoped to find a sense of empowerment by serving in the armed forces in WWII, but returning home, no matter how hard they worked, they still ended up at the bottom.  In postwar film noir, there are distinct color lines, as Los Angeles is divided into forbidden zones for blacks, where venturing into those areas, especially after dark, they run the risk of being physically attacked by racist whites or being singled out by the police as potential thieves or burglars, where racism and abuse of power are cut from the same cloth.  The film delves into different facets of white oppression, blatantly exhibiting a fear of miscegenation, with the absurdity of anti-miscegenation laws, where it’s easy to link whiteness to black deaths, exuded in the contaminated characters of his white employer at Champion Aircraft, expecting blacks to be completely subservient, obeying each and every employer request, Albright, a ruthless white gangster who does the bidding of more powerfully connected whites, routinely resorting to unethical practices and cold-blooded violence, the threateningly corrupt white LAPD homicide detectives (Beau Starr and John Roselius), whose whiteness is sanctified by the law yet they routinely commit the most flagrant acts of violence against blacks, or plant evidence against innocent victims, with blacks demonstrating a futile yet all-consuming helplessness in the 40’s and 50’s, having no legal recourse against unending atrocities, Todd Carter (Terry Kinney), a wealthy and well-connected white businessman and mayoral candidate who throws his money around to ensure his white privileged status in the community is protected (ironic that the character most associated with cowardice would attain the highest political power), and even casual encounters with racist white youths, who see Easy as a threat to white womanhood, defined as the exclusive domain of white men, viewed as their own personal possession.  It’s the film noir narration that offers insight into Easy’s viewpoint as a black man, worldly in ways viewers are not accustomed to, as blacks are routinely targeted for crimes white people commit, not shocking or earth-shaking, common knowledge in black communities, where social justice is equated with moral outrage and contempt, meaning something entirely different than anything perceived by whites, having never experienced the uniquely different historical perspective of American blacks.

Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals) is the entitled femme fatale character who sets the entire narrative in motion, the object of Easy’s search, fiancé of the mayoral candidate Todd Carter, yet also runs with Frank Green (Joseph Latimore), a black hoodlum with a fondness for a blade, quickly caught up in a disastrous web of lies and crime, as he’s easily hoodwinked into believing he’d found her, thrown off by the sultry sexuality of Coretta James (Lisa Nicole Carson), the girlfriend of Dupree Brouchard (Jernard Burks), both old friends from Houston.  As a friend of Daphne, she withholds information, deflecting the truth, instead luring Easy into a steamy sexual encounter while Dupree is drunkenly passed out in the next room.  Albright arranges for a meeting with Easy at the Malibu Pier, an exclusive white neighborhood where he’s accosted by racist youths for talking to a white girl, but Albright comes to his defense, pulling a gun on one of the kids and scaring him senseless, yet by the time he arrives back home the next morning, he’s greeted by a team of white detectives who savagely beat him during an extensive interrogation, where Easy knows they’re not after the truth, just someone to convict, claiming he’s the last one seen with Coretta before she was brutally murdered, but no charges are filed.  Immediately afterwards, he’s ordered inside a car of Matthew Terell (Maury Chaykin), another mayoral candidate, understandably hesitant, but his driver insists, “If he wanted to hurt you, he would have done so already.”  This certainly sets an underlying mood of deeply agitated tension in the air, fertile grounds for Daphne to finally contact Easy, meeting at the Ambassador Hotel, having a bellboy escort him up a side entrance, as blacks are not allowed on the premises, growing more worried about being in a white neighborhood after dark in the company of a white woman when she asks him to drive her to Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills to meet Richard McGee (Scott Lincoln), a white man seen earlier at the club who’s apparently in possession of a very important letter, but they discover he’s been brutally murdered, with his house ransacked.  Daphne panics and takes off, leaving Easy behind, finding his way home by the next morning when Albright is waiting for him, pulling a knife, none too pleased that the information passed along turned out to be bogus, but having seen Daphne gives Easy one more chance to get it right.  Feeling threatened, as people keep breaking into his home, he sends for a friend back in Houston before confronting Joppy about his so-called friend who nearly took his head off, getting him involved in an underworld of unscrupulous criminality, the exact kind of people Easy had been working so hard to avoid in his new life in Los Angeles.  He heads into the luxurious, upscale neighborhood of Todd Carter, learning that Albright was actually hired by Terell, while Carter thought Daphne was miles away (paid by his family to leave town), delighted to hear she was nearby, offering him money to find her, yet when he gets home, he’s jumped by Frank Green, pulling a knife and quickly getting him to the ground and is about to slit his throat when Mouse (Don Cheadle) intervenes, his trigger-happy friend from Houston, a career criminal with homicidal tendencies, shooting Green in the shoulder while trying to get him to talk, allowing Frank to escape, “You only been in my house five minutes, and you already done shot someone.”  Mouse is the kind of friend who shoots first and asks questions later, and can be hilariously menacing, stealing nearly every scene he’s in, always one step over the edge while wearing a particularly dapper style of suit.  Easy is morally upright and thinks things through, while Mouse quickly resorts to violence, like a defense mechanism, yet clearly he’s there to help Easy, which he appreciates, but he’ll also screw things up in a heartbeat, leaving Easy responding in horror, which plays out in due course.  Questioned again by detectives who are ready to arrest him for murder, he pleads for one more day to actually find the killer, leading to a whirlwind finale that takes us through a twisted and circuitous path, discovering hidden truths about several of the major players, turning into murky, atmospheric revelations in the style of CHINATOWN, exposing a seedy underbelly where Los Angeles is viewed as a breeding ground for sin and moral depravity, viewed fatalistically through a noir lens, with little hope for change.  Straightjacketed by the race issue, black expression is suffocated and stifled, confined to their limited space, while political payoffs allow much bigger crimes to flourish, poisoning the waters of the future.  Franklin does an excellent job recreating images of the 40’s and 50’s, using racial dividing lines as a litmus test for moral transgressions, where Easy can’t rely upon any white authoritative control, but must set his own standards for principled justice, serving as his own moral compass.  One attribute of Easy is that he has untrustworthy friends, like Coretta supplying him with bad information, or Joppy setting him up in business with dangerous company, or Mouse’s sheer sociopathic instability, despite being one of his most trustworthy friends, yet at the end of the film, sitting with a friend on the porch in front of his home, he ponders, “If you got a friend that you know does bad things, I mean real bad things, and you still keep him as a friend even though you know what he’s like, do you think that’s wrong?”  The unequivocal reply is “All you got is your friends.”  

Carl Franklin Interview with Eddie Muller - Pt 1 - YouTube (8:57)  Recorded onstage at the Music Box Theater during the 2018 Noir City Film Festival in Chicago, August 17, 2018

Carl Franklin Interview with Eddie Muller - Pt 2 YouTube (13:58)

Carl Franklin Interview with Eddie Muller - Pt 3  YouTube (12:29)