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| Images courtesy of Kino Lorber |
Prolific outlaw actor-director Dennis Hopper made a career
out of playing rebellious, mentally disturbed characters and even starred in
some of his own directorial efforts including but not limited to Easy Rider,
The Last Movie and Out of the Blue. A longstanding film worker whose onscreen
roles painted the portrait of a dangerous madman, Hopper’s debut film Easy
Rider remains one of the quintessential American road movies chronicling social
divisions between the hippie commune and local residents who don’t take kindly
to the free love and druggie movement.
The film was a major hit, taking in well over $60 million against a
meager $400,000 production budget.
Sadly however, Hopper failed spectacularly with his
criminally underrated 1990 neo-noir The Hot Spot, one of the few times
Hopper remained completely behind the camera.
An ensemble piece starring Don Johnson, Virginia Mardsen, Jennifer
Connelly, Charles Martin Smith and even David Lynch actor Jack Nance, the film cost
around $10 million for Orion Pictures before taking in a measly $1.2 million thanks
to little promotional efforts from the two lead cast members Don Johnson who
was busy filming Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man and Virginia
Madsen who disliked her amount of onscreen nudity. Despite the lukewarm reception, the good
folks at Kino Lorber Studio Classics have put together a new 2K restoration
supervised, graded and approved by cinematographer Ueli Steiger and also offer interviews
with Madsen and William Sadler in the extras.
Drifter Harry Madox (Don Johnson) wanders onto a used car
lot where he manages to sell a car under fellow salesman Lon Gulick’s (Charles
Martin Smith) nose. Despite the
illegality of his actions, Harry is hired anyway and develops a crush on Gloria
Harper (Jennifer Connelly) who works in the loan office of the dealership and soon
begins an affair with his boss’ wife Dolly Harshaw (Virginia Madsen). After sneakily setting a building across the
street from a bank he intends to rob on fire, he finds himself being threatened
with blackmail by Dolly unless he kills her boorish money-grubbing husband. All the while a local criminal named Frank
Sutton (William Sadler) sneakily took nude photos of Gloria on the beach one
morning without her knowledge and is threatening to expose her publicly. All of the ingredients of these disparate
criminal threads gradually converge into a devastating coda of murder and
double-crossing.
Based on the 1953 Charles Williams novel Hell Hath No
Fury who adapted his own work for the screen with Nona Tyson, Dennis Hopper’s
channeling of classical film noir tropes into the then-new millennia finds
itself somewhere between Repo Man, Lost Highway and just a hint
of Vertigo with Madsen’s sultry femme fatale nymphomaniac dressed in
white. The original score by Cruising
composer Jack Nitzsche is kind of amazing with much of the soundtrack
performed by John Lee Hooker, Miles Davis, Taj Mahal, Roy Rogers, Tim Drummond
and Earl Palmer. The film’s exquisite,
hot and sweaty photography by Ueli Steiger, like Spike Lee’s Do the Right
Thing has the inescapable aura of intense suffocating heat, threatening to cook
the film’s sordid cast of characters.
Acting across the board on this effort is splendid with
Virginia Madsen giving a pitch perfect performance as the beautiful seductress
with her own scheming mind and spider webbed planning. Don Johnson makes the film’s hero a morally conflicted
and dangerous man who just sort of wanders into the scene and before he knows
it finds himself being preyed upon by the black widow. Jennifer Connelly is good and notably does
her first nude scene here, but its awhile before she would turn up the heavy
heat with Requiem for a Dream and her Oscar winning turn in A
Beautiful Mind. The supporting cast
is generally good though Jack Nance basically looks the same with his top
cowboy hat and quirky demeanor.
Despite dying a tragically quiet death at the American box
office and still flying under the radar of many a film noir junkie, The Hot
Spot nevertheless manages to be a solid Hopper effort that reimagines many
of the tropes of crime fiction with a new skin that sweats, bruises and
bleeds. While not the first Hopper film
to start with, it is still a solid piece of the beginning of 1990s filmmaking
where neo-noir continued getting steadily steamier. Don Johnson and Virginia Madsen are great and
the pulpy sleazy form of the story is infectious, if not compulsively
watchable. Say what you will about
Hopper as an actor or some of his earlier, somewhat more pretentious film
directing efforts. In this case he
grafted a taut, sexy thriller that proves he knows more than a thing or two
about the machinations of old Hollywood noir.
--Andrew Kotwicki
