更新时间:2021-07-21

激情沸点:[Film Review] The Hot Spot (1990)

Dennis Hopper’s side hustle as a movie director is sporadic and overshadowed by his prolific credits and versatility in front of the camera (we shall never forget he is also the helmer of EASY RIDER, 1969). THE HOT SPOT, the penultimate feature film he directs, didn’t set the world on fire when it was released. It is a slow-burning neo-noir fantasy showered in dramatically saturated hues, a mixture of THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1946), BODY HEAT (1981), DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) that highlight a femme fatale with her hapless prey of the opposite sex, its source is a Charles Williams’ hardboiled novel that dates back to 1953.

Our antihero Harry Madox (Johnson) is so level-headed that not for a minute, can he be fooled by Dolly Harshaw (Madsen), the wife of his boss George Harshaw (Hardin). He knows she is a trouble at the glance, but it takes one to know one. There is no smoke and mirrors in Dolly’s wiles, she is an open book, she wants Harry because they are cut from the same cloth. A woman like Dolly cannot survive without a man in her life, so she carefully chooses a virile Harry as George’s successor, the only hurdle is, Harry thinks he deserves better, manages to sweep the feet of a 19-year-old girl Gloria Harper (Connelly), whose purity seems inviolable, he plans to marry her and start a new life somewhere else (interestingly, the connotation that Gloria might be swinging both ways doesn’t seem to bother him at all).

Were it not for his ambition, Harry might have a chance to wangle his holy grail, a drifter with no past fetching up in a small Texas town, Harry is conferred with the gift of gab, but he is not satisfied to live on the straight and narrow as a used car salesman, after carrying off an ill-conceived (and ridiculously easy) bank robbery, the local sheriff (and by extension, almost everyone around him) is much smarter than he reckons, his fate is sealed.

But just when feminine manipulation and masculine misogyny reach the boiling point near the end, tragedy seems ineluctable, Hopper asserts himself as a mischievous nonconformist, the send-off takes a u-turn and any attempt of moralization is dispelled. Dolly always gets what she wants, unlike Matty Walker in BODY HEAT, who also gets what she wants, Dolly has no disguise, she doesn’t pull wools over Harry’s eyes, and their tryst is also for her pleasure, she is unapologetically true to herself and her evilness has grits in it. Madsen arouses us with stunning sultriness, along with her discordant southern accent; Johnson is so singularly hard-nosed, when he fights off a sleazy deadbeat in the person of William Sadler, the type once he leeches off on you, he will not let you off the hook, you dread he doesn’t pull punches, and Sadler certainly knows how to take a beating and play a stiff convincingly. Connelly, on the cusp of adulthood, is as gorgeous as hell albeit Gloria doesn’t necessarily belong to that milieu, she is a lady!

On the minus side, THE HOT SPOT is weighed down by a lackluster tempo, especially during the first half, and a slapdash reveal (Gloria’s change of heart is noticeably contrived). Also it becomes quite conspicuous that Hopper’s characters’ sense of perception is delimited within the frame, imagine after Harry kisses Gloria good night, he turns back, a police officer standing just beside the frame, where is everybody’s peripheral vision?

Lastly, the icing on the cake is its soundtrack, scored by Jack Nitzsche with a potpourri of dazzling jazz tunage. THE HOT SPOT might not be a chef d’oeuvre, but for it is worth, the “hotness” is there from A to Z.

referential entries: Lawrence Kasdan’s BODY HEAT (1981, 7.9/10); Tay Garnett’s THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1946, 6.4/10); Billy Wilder's DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944, 8.2/10).