La nuit tombe sur Manhattan

Doesn't this movie remind you a lot like the new movie "Derailed"? When I first saw the preview for Derailed I immediately remembered a movie with Beverly D Angelo, where she has a fling, someone breaks into the hotel room, her and the Guy (the fling) are tied up or handcuffed, bad things happen to Beverly's character. I haven't seen Derailed yet. And I have not heard from anyone else that these movies seem a lot alike. In the reviews I've read Clive and Jennifers characters have a fling and a Bad guy breaks in and rapes Jennifer's character, and then there is a major twist. Also the reviews on Derailed have not been the best. But just from the reviews and the trailer I thought Derailed had to be a remake of this old movie I had seen years ago. And only located it today on IMDb under Beverly D Angelo.

I am seeing Derailed this weekend and will update.

Armand Asante must have gained more of an understanding of gender roles from his Italian father than from his Irish mother because he is so much more believable as a hard-boiled macho cop than he would be as a drunken poet. He's got the cop down pat here.

The story starts promisingly enough. Asante doesn't understand or pay attention to his wife, DeAngelo. She dyes her hair and asks him what he thinks about it. "Your hair? What did ya do to your hair?" The guy is genuinely puzzled.

Subsequently, in a wanton moment, DeAngelo agrees to go to the sort of motel room usually called "seedy" with her son's narcissistic basketball coach. She backs out of the affair at the last moment but as she opens the door to leave, a stranger enters with a gun. He robs them both, has them strip, gags and blindfolds them, and then rapes Mrs. Asante. When he's gone, the handsome coach makes an abrupt departure, telling her, "I was never here."

That is, roughly, a half an hour into the film and constitutes its most interesting part. What follows makes "Gone With the Wind" look like a technical manual. Mrs. Asante feels guilty about having been in the motel room with the coach so she concocts a story about having been abducted while alone on the street. Asante becomes suspicious. He begins to tape his wife's phone conversations and follow her around. Meanwhile he has an overly warm relationship with Blair Brown who is in the movie for that sole purpose. Let's not get into it. Several hours later the story gets back on the rails. The rapist, who is given the spiciest lines of dialogue and has a most engaging way of delivering them, kind of while looking like Hume Cronyn, finally reappears and tries blackmailing the wife and the coach. He fails. Assante has a pistol pressed against his neck and the rapist asks, rather reasonably, I thought, "Sir. I mean no offense, but shouldn't it be your wife you shoot instead of me?" And, "I can see, sir, that there is a part of you that is conflicted over killing me. It is that part of your character I would like to address." (Doesnn't do him any good.)

This is a long movie and could, and should, have been cut almost in half without losing a thing. Langeurs are okay if the time is taken up with character development. There are plenty of soft spots in good movies like "Chinatown," where nothing much happens except that Nicholson gets a shave in Barney's barber shop. A five-minute sequence of Nicholson getting shaved, having an argument with another customer, and listening to a joke. There are no such five-minute sequences here to breathe life into what is, in the end, another rather routine cop thriller with a lot of domestic drama padding it out.

What great promise this had, but what a "yawner" it was. I saw this on the Lifetime Cable Network, all in one sitting. I assume when it aired originally in 1987, it was in mini-series form, or shown over several nights. I guess seeing it in smaller installments, it would be more tolerable, but it just dragged, and dragged, and dragged.

I thought with the talent involved, this movie had huge potential, but I was snoozing by the third hour. As I said, I'll assume that in hour long chapters, this might have been more enjoyable, but as a four hour showing, it was not fun, at all.

The concept was good, but it took waaaaaaaaay too long to get the story moving, and at times, the actors seemed to be sleep walking thru their roles. Yes, we know Armand Assante is trouble by what's going on, but the act becomes really tedious. I'm amazed "Joe Hearn" kept his job, for as long as he did with all the time he was away from the office.

If you dig "The Repercussions of Adultery" type movies, this will suit you just fine. If not, "The Weather Channel", is a better watching experience...

Although it is a shade on the long side, "Hands Of A Stranger" is a distinctly superior crime thriller with an unusual though plausible plot. A senior detective is assigned to crack a gang who are raping women and videoing them while doing so, then his own wife is raped, not by one of the gang but by a two-bit crook whose usual pastime is robbery coupled with blackmail. His modus operandi is taking embarrassing photographs of adulterers in one of those room-by-the-hour hotels. Our hero's wife has been flattered by a younger man who takes her to one of these places on impulse after a liquid lunch - who says romance is dead? She changes her mind at the last moment, then the crook walks in. Embarrassing or what?

The plot develops from there with Detective Hearn slowly waking up to the full truth; she tells him about the rape but gives him a cock and bull story about how it happened. What now? Well, quite a lot. One question, was it really possible to determine the sex of a person from a strand or two of hair in 1987?

If one is inclined to see a movie that has about everything, romance, good detective development and raw scenes - you have hit the jackpot in Hands of a Stranger. The U.S. Version which was done for TV - and then put on VHS is featured in two parts, and it's kind of long, almost 3 hours. However, I found it so intriguing that time flew by. The casting was excellent, Armand Assante, and Beverly D'Angelo are at their best. Each and every player did a great job - extremely convincing. The story line is great, and you'll want to see the whole thing at one time. In today's world, many movies lack convincing story lines and sensible scenes - not so with this one, done in 1987. If you haven't seen it - go for it, you won't be disappointed.