spinnicks

This low-budget MGM crime flick is surprisingly entertaining. The best way to enjoy it is to suspend what you know about today's film-making and settle into a more innocent time when plots—like the movies themselves—were in black and white, when characters were labeled good or bad, when dialog was crisply effective (though artificial) and when even the deadliest dramas ended with wedding bells. One thing that separates "Kid Glove Killer" from similar films of the 1930s and '40s is the fact that its protagonist, Gordon McKay (Van Heflin) is not only a cop. He's in charge of a police crime laboratory. With the aid of his assistant, Jane Mitchell (Marsha Hunt), McKay solves murders and rids the city of corruption by using a microscope, a spectrograph and other tools that—mutatis mutandis—will be used again in crime-scene-investigation stories for decades to come, up to and including the current "CSI" television series. McKay scrapes beneath fingernails, vacuums people's hair and analyzes fibers to get trace evidence that will nail the crooks. The fact that you know all along who the crooks are doesn't spoil the fun—it's that kind of movie. Embedded in the investigation is a love triangle whose outcome is so obvious that you can go for popcorn without missing a beat. The acting is above par. Van Heflin's performance is adept if unspectacular. (That same year Heflin won a best-supporting-actor Oscar for "Johnny Eager.") Lee Bowman is suavely manipulative as a power-seeker. Marsha Hunt makes what she can of a role that has her wearing a lab coat one minute and an evening gown the next. In those days, of course, it was a Hollywood cliché that a professional woman would slog away at her job only till she could junk it in favor of marriage. This movie observes the cliché, but there is a hint of feminism in the fact that Jane Mitchell—whom everyone calls simply "Mitchell"—works as a chemist, a job more often held by men. Notable among supporting players are John Litel as a crime boss and Eddie Quillan as a victimized citizen. If you look fast, you can see Ava Gardner and Robert Blake in uncredited bit parts. This was Fred Zinnemann's first feature film, and he keeps the whole thing moving to a time clock. The bare-bones production and its repeated use of the same interior sets are not major drawbacks. "Kid Glove Killer" was never intended to be pâté de foie gras. It's a ham sandwich. Pass the mustard.

If all our relationships are like the ones in this film, we might as well give up. In "Your Friends and Neighbors" we are introduced to a group of upwardly mobile urbanites who run around a lot but haven't learned how to play well with others. Frustrated desire and strained hopefulness shove the characters around as if some socio-sexual Grinch were gumming up their lives. Watching this movie, you may be tempted to ask if this is the way the world turns or if it is merely the way writer-director Neil LaBute likes to pretend it turns. Produced with an abundance of cool, the film strikes an odd balance between surface and structure. By using a naturalistic veneer, LaBute invites us to accept the characters as if they had been lifted straight from the apartment next door. "Wow," we might say, "So this is real life as it is lived by real people in today's world!" Beneath the surface, however, things look different. If you peel back the actors' performances, you may find yourself staring at some carefully skewed scaffolding. You may even conclude that this picture is more the product of the director's artful calculations than of keen observation into the way people live. Of course there's nothing wrong with a director's offering a vision. Most good directors do. And if you like LaBute's work, you probably won't notice him just off-screen, fussing with his blueprints. An example: an important clue to verisimilitude in fiction is the way characters speak. Here they are presented as intelligent young professionals, yet they turn out to be astonishingly inarticulate types who say things like "I just…I don't know what to say…I mean…it just makes me feel…even if you…because…" After a while this dialog comes off like an acting-class exercise, and while the fractured syntax may be central to LaBute's approach, it can get tedious. One exception stands out: Midway through the film, the stutter-speech is interrupted by a remarkable monologue delivered by Jason Patric. Except for this burst of eloquence, however, we find ourselves listening to people who struggle to express themselves as they stumble through days and nights trying and failing to connect with others who are similarly afflicted. (That's the whole point, you say? Well…I mean…it's just…yeah…right.) There are places in this movie where a certain amount of cuteness can be forgiven—as when a patch of dialog recurs several times in the mouths of different characters—and there are other clever touches here and there. But the best reason for watching "Your Friends and Neighbors" is not the director's vision (assuming he has one) but the performances. The six principal actors make the most of their roles, and it is fun to watch a frenetically unfulfilled Ben Stiller, a romantically perplexed Amy Brenneman, a terminally self-satisfied Jason Patric, a mad but sad Catherine Keener, a well-meaning but clueless Aaron Eckhart and an attractively vapid Nastassja Kinsky wander through a maze that—unfortunately for their characters—leads nowhere.

The multi-talented Carl Reiner blows the crime-drama genre wide open in this film, but the results are nowhere near as funny as intended. A handful of clever gags are interspersed with tons of leaden jokes. This over-the-top takeoff on movies like "Fatal Attraction," "Basic Instinct" and numerous B movies tries much too hard. It announces its intentions with tough-guy voice-over narration delivered by the main character, Ned Ravine (Armand Assante), who is a lawyer/cop and an intended murder victim. Kate Nelligan is his cheating wife, and Christopher McDonald is her auto mechanic/insurance salesman/lover. These two hatch a murder scheme loosely based on the one in "Double Indemnity," and they quote (and misquote) lines spoken by Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in that classic 1944 film, but to no avail. Slapstick vies with verbal gymnastics and Hollywood in-jokes as David O'Malley's script lurches from one silly situation to another in an effort to get audiences rolling in the aisles. Maybe some audiences do roll, but unless you find bouquets flushed down toilets the height of hilarity, you probably won't. The sad thing is that this picture has an excellent cast—including Sean Young as a film-noir temptress and James Remar as a maniacal goon—and features cameos by Eartha Kitt, Tony Randall, Rosie O'Donnell and the director himself, who appears standing at a urinal. Reiner has done many good things on television over the years, and it's possible some of the hi-inks in this movie might work in a sketch. Here, unfortunately, the old pro steps up to the plate and swings mightily but whiffs. It's a strikeout, leaving several fine runners on base.