Private Eyes

Angel Heart (Special Edition)

Set in Harlem and New Orleans in 1955, this supernatural thriller stirred a brief controversy when released in 1987 because some scenes featuring Lisa Bonet (then a popular cast member of The Cosby Show) were considered too sexually explicit to be rated R. The edited material was restored for the unrated video release, and the movie now makes a fitting double bill with Fallen, with its similar plot about a sullen detective (Mickey Rourke) who is hired to find a missing person by a shady client with pointy fingernails named Louis Cyphre (Lucifer, get it?), played with subtle menace by Robert De Niro. Rourke's investigation leads him into an underworld of voodoo and forbidden desires, and as the mystery unfolds director Alan Parker fills every scene with conspicuous style and atmospheric excess, compelling critic Pauline Kael to observe that, "Parker simply doesn't have the gift of making evil seductive, and he edits like a flasher." And yet, this movie does cast a spell of its own (Roger Ebert's review was considerably more charitable), and the performances of Rourke, De Niro, Bonet, and Charlotte Rampling are well suited to the ominous mood. --Jeff Shannon

Vertigo (Collector's Edition)

Although it wasn't a box-office success when originally released in 1958, Vertigo has since taken its deserved place as Alfred Hitchcock's greatest, most spellbinding, most deeply personal achievement. In fact, it consistently ranks among the top 10 movies ever made in the once-a-decade Sight & Sound international critics poll, placing at number 4 in the most recent survey. (Universal Pictures' spectacularly gorgeous 1996 restoration and rerelease of this 1958 Paramount production was a tremendous success with the public, too.) James Stewart plays a retired police detective who is hired by an old friend to follow his wife (a superb Kim Novak, in what becomes a double role), whom he suspects of being possessed by the spirit of a dead madwoman. The detective and the disturbed woman fall ("fall" is indeed the operative word) in love and...well, to give away any more of the story would be criminal. Shot around San Francisco (the Golden Gate Bridge and the Palace of the Legion of Honor are significant locations) and elsewhere in Northern California (the redwoods, Mission San Juan Batista) in rapturous Technicolor, Vertigo is as lovely as it is haunting. --Jim Emerson

Twilight

Burned-out private eye plunges into a murder mystery tied to a long-unsolved case involving an aging actor.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: R
Release Date: 28-MAR-2006
Media Type: DVD

If it hadn't been released in 1998 with a veteran cast of Hollywood's finest, you could swear that Twilight was a movie from the 1940s--the kind of intelligent mystery that would've made Humphrey Bogart feel right at home. To be sure, that was exactly the intention of director and co-writer Robert Benton (in collaboration with Nobody's Fool writer Richard Russo), but the film's blessing is also its curse. Benton and Russo are so enamored of vintage mystery plots and characters that their movie nearly succumbs to the burden of old-fashioned familiarity. As the title suggests, the movie's aging characters, led by Newman as a private eye who's almost literally on his last legs, are all on the downhill of life, their Hollywood glory days behind them. Newman's character lives in the luxury home of two fading stars (Gene Hackman, Susan Sarandon) who may or may not be connected to a murder plot that also involves one of Newman's old colleagues (James Garner). Whether they're literally in their final days (as in the case of Hackman's character) or just grasping for some comfort in their twilight years, these characters interact with the kind of worldly, intelligent dialogue that was common in the better movies of Hollywood's past. But while Twilight gives Newman yet another role to fit into like a favored old suit, the movie's so low-key that some viewers may find it hard to sit through. That's a shame, because the bombastic, frenetically paced films that dominated the 1990s may have diminished our collective capacity to appreciate the solid, character-driven movie tradition that Twilight attempts to revive. --Jeff Shannon

Devil in a Blue Dress

Despite rave reviews as one of the most stylish and intelligent detective pictures in a number of years, this 1995 adaptation of Walter Mosley's novel never found a mass audience. Too bad, because Carl Franklin's film is nearly perfect in every way, from its rich, shadowy look to its depiction of life in post-World War II black America (L.A.-style) to the acting of Denzel Washington, Don Cheadle, and others. Washington plays Easy Rawlins, an aircraft factory worker who is laid off only to find his true calling: as a private eye, albeit an unlicensed one. Hired to find a missing woman, he becomes entangled in a complex but satisfying case involving sex, corruption, racism, and of course money. Top-notch from top to bottom--and Cheadle is dangerously funny as Easy's best friend, a killer named Mouse. --Marshall Fine

Dead Again

British thespian and sophomore director Kenneth Branagh follows up his adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry V with this abrupt change of pace, a slick, stylish thriller evocative of Hitchcock, classic film noir, and gothic shockers. Sporting an exaggerated American accent, Branagh stars as L.A. private eye Mike Church, a hard-boiled but softhearted detective who takes on the case of a mysterious amnesiac (Branagh's then-real-life wife, Emma Thompson). With the help of an offbeat furniture dealer and part-time hypnotist (Derek Jacobi), Grace (as Mike has named her) dredges up her hidden memories. Little do they realize that her recollections are of a past life in L.A.'s recent history, and as she recounts the details of a famous marriage that ended with a notorious murder (played out as black-and-white flashbacks starring Branagh and Thompson), events of the present begin to mirror the past, as if fate were pulling the two into fatal replay of history. Branagh's flashy, flourished direction echoes with an array of '40s and '50s classics and near classics (most notably Hitchcock's Rebecca and Spellbound) and drives the story with an edgy urgency, all the better to distract from some of the sillier elements of the plot. But while this film may not make literal sense in the harsh light of day, in the twilit, shadowy world of classic Hollywood this slyly inventive thriller is a bravura bit of old-fashioned entertainment, done up with modern flair. --Sean Axmaker

The Maltese Falcon

Still the tightest, sharpest, and most cynical of Hollywood's official deathless classics, bracingly tough even by post-Tarantino standards. Humphrey Bogart is Dashiell Hammett's definitive private eye, Sam Spade, struggling to keep his hard-boiled cool as the double-crosses pile up around his ankles. The plot, which dances all around the stolen Middle Eastern statuette of the title, is too baroque to try to follow, and it doesn't make a bit of difference. The dialogue, much of it lifted straight from Hammett, is delivered with whip-crack speed and sneering ferocity, as Bogie faces off against Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, fends off the duplicitous advances of Mary Astor, and roughs up a cringing "gunsel" played by Elisha Cook Jr. It's an action movie of sorts, at least by implication: the characters always seem keyed up, right on the verge of erupting into violence. This is a turning-point picture in several respects: John Huston (The African Queen) made his directorial debut here in 1941, and Bogart, who had mostly played bad guys, was a last-minute substitution for George Raft, who must have been kicking himself for years afterward. This is the role that made Bogart a star and established his trend-setting (and still influential) antihero persona. --David Chute

Sam Spade is caught in a frantic search for the jeweled falcon of Malta and his partner's killer. His pursuit leads him to a group of desperate individuals who also want the bird.

Klute

Bree Daniels, a high-priced call girl is the only clue to the whereabouts of a missing research scientist. Sutherland is the detective who falls in love with her as he attempts to solve the mystery.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: R
Release Date: 30-AUG-2005
Media Type: DVD

Jane Fonda came into her own with this Oscar-winning performance as an insecure high-class call girl who can't make it as a legitimate actress or model yet can't give up her addiction. She loves the control too much. But when she's stalked by a killer, she's forced to confront the darker aspects of her nature and profession. It's a complex and authentic performance and Fonda plays it cool and smart. Typical of early '70s films, Klute peels away social inhibition and hypocrisy with precision and candor. It's also typical of director Alan J. Pakula's intelligence and ability to work so well with actors. Donald Sutherland plays John Klute, the vulnerable detective trying to determine if his missing friend is the stalker and sexual deviant. This is the kind of moody, character-driven film so many of us miss today, even if the plot is pure hokum. --Bill Desowitz

Chinatown

Roman Polanski's brooding film noir exposes the darkest side of the land of sunshine, the Los Angeles of the 1930s, where power is the only currency--and the only real thing worth buying. Jack Nicholson is J.J. Gittes, a private eye in the Chandler mold, who during a routine straying-spouse investigation finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into a jigsaw puzzle of clues and corruption. The glamorous Evelyn Mulwray (a dazzling Faye Dunaway) and her titanic father, Noah Cross (John Huston), are at the black-hole center of this tale of treachery, incest, and political bribery. The crackling, hard-bitten script by Robert Towne won a well-deserved Oscar, and the muted color cinematography makes the goings-on seem both bleak and impossibly vibrant. Polanski himself has a brief, memorable cameo as the thug who tangles with Nicholson's nose. One of the greatest, most completely satisfying crime films of all time. --Anne Hurley

Lady in Cement

When it was released in 1968, Lady in Cement was the perfect movie for "The Man Who Reads Playboy." It was tailor-made for middle-aged martini-and-poker men who enjoyed Frank Sinatra in Tony Rome a year earlier, and this slapdash sequel finds Ol' Blue Eyes in sun-soaked Miami, where his treasure-hunting discovery of a naked blonde (the ill-fated lady in cement, found dead underwater) gets him tangled up with a massive thug (Dan Blocker), a retired Mafioso (Martin Gabel) with an over-ambitious son, an ultra-sexy heiress (Raquel Welch, in her sexpot prime at age 27), and a variety of Floridian lowlifes who lent the film its R-rated appeal for the cocktail crowd. With its disposable mystery, rampant homophobia, go-go club lechery, peekaboo nudity, bursts of red-blooded violence, and swinging score by Hugo Montenegro, this not-so-lucky Lady bombed at the box office and tested Sinatra's legendary temper, but it's still raucously entertaining (it partially inspired the Austin Powers comedies), and there are plenty of in-jokes to be seen (and especially heard) for anyone steeped in '60s pop culture. Nestled between The Graduate and Easy Rider, Lady in Cement was a cinematic fossil even before the cameras rolled, but Frank's fans are sure to love it anyway. --Jeff Shannon

In this solid suspense drama, Frank Sinatra stars as detective Tony Rome who, while working on a case, discovers everybody he talks to winds up dead.

Kiss Me Deadly

Kiss Me Deadly starts off with a bang--a young woman (Cloris Leachman) in bare feet and a trench coat runs along a highway, frantically trying to flag down help. In desperation, she finally throws herself into traffic, and the car she stops belongs to detective Mike Hammer. The pace never lets up--we're not even 15 minutes into the movie and there's already been a murder, a mysterious letter, an attempt to kill Hammer, and, of course, a warning to just stay out of it. Hammer, tired of lowlife divorce cases, smells something big and can't let it go. The film is exciting, about as dark as a noir can get, and full of skewed camera angles and mysterious whose-shoes-are-those shots. At the center, of course, is Mike Hammer, a detective so cool he can win a fight with nothing more than a box of popcorn as a weapon. Hammer knows his opera singers as well as his amateur prizefighters, and he makes the ladies swoon, but he's far from a conventional hero. In fact, he's rather emphatically not a nice guy; Hammer happily whores out his secretary-girlfriend Velma to cinch up those divorce cases and has a penchant for slamming other people's fingers in drawers. Even the bad guys know he's a sleazebag. ("What's it worth to you to turn your considerable talents back to the gutter you crawled out of?") Ralph Meeker plays Hammer's ambivalence brilliantly, swinging easily between sexy and just plain mean. Kiss Me Deadly is just terrific. Stop reading this review and watch it already. --Ali Davis

A brilliant film noir classic based on Mickey Spillane's bestseller, Kiss Me Deadly is masterfully directed by Robert Aldrich (The Dirty Dozen) and hailed as one of his best (Leonard Maltin). This DVD edition of Kiss Me Deadly features the fully restored original endingwhich contains over one minute of crucial footage that clarifies decades of false interpretations. In order to illustrate the vastly different impressions left by each version, the altered/shortened ending has been included as well. When callous thugs beat Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) senseless and viciously murder the gorgeous blonde he's been trying to help, the hard-boiled detective retaliates theonly way he can: by hitting first and asking questions later. Cutting a brutal swath through the city's sleazy underside, Hammer uncovers a mysterious black container whose deadly contents not only solve the murder...but trigger an apocalyptic climax as well!