After Dark, My Sweet

While watching the exquisitely photographed film After Dark, My Sweet, one has to admire Jason Patrick's heartbroken voiceover. His narration is a combination of punch-drunkenness, paranoia, and a surrendering to fate. Like in many noirs, Collie knows there is no way to escape one's destiny; the only thing to do is ride it out and see what happens.

After Dark, My Sweet is one of those little gems, a film that came out just as independent cinema was experiencing an upswing in popularity. And, although the film was no huge hit when it was released, After Dark, My Sweet was at the beginning of a new trend: the neo-noir film. John Diehl would later impress us with Last Seduction and Red Rock West, but while those noirs had the style of the older genre, After Dark...has the dialogue and attitude of old; the words coming out of Patrick's mouth are clearly classic Jim Thompson. That sort of dementia, a kind of poetry, is hard to fake. James Foley has translated the novel to screen without losing the feel. When Collie is flashing-back to his boxing days, our heart races with him. When Collie recalls all of his past regrets and his own self-loathing, the sound of his voice and the words he is speaking are haunting and haunted. Jason Patric's performance is his best; he is pathetic yet endearing, stupid but savvy. A tough role to pull off, but he does it in true shaggy-dog ease. Rachel Ward and Bruce Dern(always the crazy one) play good backup, especially Ward with her 1940's-era fast-speak witty banter, straight out of Barbara Stanwick movies. But, this is Patrick's (and Thompson's) show.

Bravo to James Foley for this top-notch adaption of Jim Thompson's nightmarish reality, one that is desperate and life-threatening and sometimes all too real.

Intense actors like Bruce Dern, Jason Patrick and Rachel Ward combine to make this modern-day film noir a winner. Of the three, I don't know who was most interesting as all offer good performances and intriguing characters.

Patric does the narration in this noir, playing an ex-boxer and mental patient. Wow, that alone makes for an interesting guy! He looks dumb, but he isn't. Ward is the slinky, attractive, cynical, intelligent and compassionate co- conspirator of a kidnapping plan that goes bad. Bruce Dern also is in the mix and Dern never fails to fascinate in about any film.

The movie could be considered kind of downer to the average viewer, but I found it fascinating....and I don't like depressing movies normally. What I found was a kind of quirky crime film. Take a look and see if you agree. This is pretty unknown film that shouldn't have that status because it's simply a good story and well-done.

In James Foley's After Dark, My Sweet, drawn from Jim Thompson's moody suspense novel, Jason Patric gives a late riff on early Brando. He plays `Kid' Collins, a `retired' boxer who spent some spells in mental institutions after killing an opponent in the ring; now he's frozen into a perpetual fighter's crouch.

Now on the road, he drifts into a bar frequented by Rachel Ward and her unexplained Cornish accent (still a juicer, she's not quite the slatternly shrew of the book). She takes him home and stashes him in a trailer out back among the date palms. Next, up pops `Uncle' Bud (Bruce Dern), who suborns Patric into a half-baked scheme for kidnapping a rich kid. As happens with such schemes, things go awry (the kid turns out to be a diabetic, for one thing), and it falls to Patric to put matters right by a supreme act of self-sacrifice.

But the somnolent pace and elliptical plotting that worked in Thompson's telling sit uncomfortably on the screen. Even in the 1950s, the novel felt that it belonged to the conventions of a decade (or two) earlier – it's a Depression-era, or immediate post-war kind of story. Fast-forwarding it to the 1990s proved more a shock than it could sustain, a disparity exaggerated by misguided fealty to the book.

While there's some fussy updating (the anonymous sticks of Thompson's vision become a faintly upscale desert enclave; an airport replaces the bus terminal), elements that need freshening stick out as anachronisms. For instance, the solicitous attraction felt by the 50-year-old bachelor doctor (George Dickerson) toward Patric can only be homoerotic. While Thompson, chafing under the constraints of his time, left that to be distantly inferred, there's no reason to be coy about it more than 30 years later (there's little coy about the lovemaking between Ward and Patric). To his credit, Dickerson gives the game away with his doomed looks of longing; was it Charles Laughton who remarked `They can't censor the gleam in my eye?' And the long fuse between Ward and Patric sputters on and on; the movie could only be improved by losing half an hour of downing drinks and exchanging alternating glances of hatred and lust.

The best thing about After Dark, My Sweet is Patric's performance, even if, in keeping with the fads of the 1950s, it gives off too many whiffs of `method.' At least he gives the role his best shot. The movie's flaws, however, can't be ascribed to Thompson. Latter-day filmings of his work, like The Grifters of the same year and (especially) The Kill-Off a year before, show there's plenty of punch left in the old pulpmeister.

'Noir' is a film style which is now long gone. There were some good noir films and there were a great many mediocre ones, but that era, and the monochrome (posh word for 'in black and white'). But they were very much of their time, what with the supercool narration, hip dialogue, amoral heroes and generally being downs. The good guys weren't good guys and if they died, well, what did they think they were supposed to do?

At their best they weren't action films but psychological, and although many did have a passable plot, the plot wasn't what you watched them for. You watched them for the double-dealing, the treachery. When the time came for all films to be made in colour (and these days if you want to make a 'monochrome' film, you have to shoot it in colour, then let the lab reduce it to black and white because no one manufactures black and white film stock any more) they seemed to have died a death, which is probably when the mediocre noir films were made.

But writers and directors being a certain breed, they were still attracted to 'noir' in which plot comes second to character and psychology. The rather fanciful term 'neo noir' was coined to somehow contain them, but I for one put the term down more as a pretentious phrase to drop into conversation when you are chatting up a female film buff than anything which means much these days.

After Dark, My Sweet – the title is utterly gratuitous, by the way, and relates to nothing in this film – is, at the very least, a genuine neo noir, despite my misgivings about the phrase. Don't watch it for the plot, watch it for the acting, the interaction between three losers – Jason Patric, always worth the price of admission, Bruce Dern (ditto) and Rachel Ward – and the utterly convoluted, at times quite hard to follow, storyline.

It has its flaws but will keep you watching if this is your bag. It is mine. It would be pointless to outline the plot, as so many do here in IMDb reviews, and all I shall say is that if you reckon this is your bag, you won't be disappointed. Fans of car chases, shoot-outs, violence, neat endings and 'story' would be well advised to look elsewhere. If, on the other hand, you fancy an intriguing 'neo noir' give it a whirl. You won't be disappointed. And if you can make head or tail of it, award yourself a brownie point or two. But it ain't half bad, and then some.

It was easy not to notice this in theaters a decade ago, but time has been exceedingly kind to AFTER DARK & likely will continue to be. Already it stands as one of the 90s best films. Though its Southwestern locations (Indio, California was used) are both a bit too sparse and modern to suit the source material, in every other way this captures the ineffable aura of Jim Thompson's prose (and anyone who's actually READ "The Getaway" knows how utterly impossible a task translating his best effects to film really is). Director Foley has done a splendid job in setting a tone of dreamlike, sunburned melancholy and maintaining it throughout, aided immeasurably by fine performances by Rachel Ward & Bruce Dern and an absolutely riveting one by Jason Patric. I had faint hopes for this film before seeing it, due mostly to Patric in the lead; I was floored watching it, and all DUE to Patric's performance. Though a little young for the part, he captures perfectly the likable ambivalence and roiling inner pathology of the Jim Thompson Hero: you never stop feeling for the guy even as you know he will inevitably be compelled by his inner torments to do monstrous things before the story ends. Patric's complete immersion into "Kid Collins" steals a little thunder from one of Bruce Dern's most chillingly indelible portrayals of slime personified, "Uncle Bud". (Fans of Dennis Hopper's "Frank Booth" from BLUE VELVET would take to Uncle Bud immediately, I think.) More than any other film adaptation of Thompson, AFTER DARK -even more than THE GRIFTERS - embodies that peculiar cowtown existentialism of his that tells us we're each of us alone in a world where things start bad and only get worse, pretending we're sane the way kids pretend there's a Santa Claus. A film without an audience in 1990, but little by little, year by year, a growing and appreciative audience is building. See this movie.