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I Think I´ll never see again the city of Los Angeles so beautiful like in this movie. The sky is so blue that the color seems made in a laboratory. The shining California sun gives a very lighted look to all the scenes filmed on street locations. Jane Fonda, playing an alcoholic but also a sensual lady, is brilliant too and so sexy as she was in 1971, when she won the Oscar for "Klute". You´ll enjoy watching "The Morning After", if you love LA, the sunny days and ladies like Jane Fonda.

The film takes place in LA in the 1980's. So you know what that means- I don't even need to say do I? Any film from the 80's has a very distinct look and while you see glimpses here and there of that era it's not too much to be distracting even if some screen time takes place in a beauty salon.

The film is interesting to watch because of the actors. They all do a good job here. Jane especially. Jeff Bridges and Raul Julia also are very good here. So it is the acting, the performances that make the film. The sets too are great-they almost are a character themselves from Alex's Pink and Mauve art deco place to the low budget but homey place of Turner's garage pad.

The flaws. There are some. Some of the dialog is cheesy and clichéd with laughable lines. The references to different cultures here in crude and crass terms. This was way BEFORE "politically correct".

This is not the greatest movie but I still love it and drag it out to watch about once a year.

The Morning After opens with an extraordinarily effective scene prototypical of director Sidney Lumet's pared-down building of tension. As Jane Fonda crawls out of bed, we sense her hangover, one of those inordinately miserable mornings when nothing about you is sufficiently functional, and we also sense how accustomed she's become to these mornings as she is not only passably functional but also recognizes herself in the mirror and indeed spills some gin into a glass, speculating about the guy in her bed. Who is he? She doesn't comprehend the true gravity of her predicament until she turns him onto his back. She sees no cop is going to buy her story, so she attempts to remove all the evidence of her stopover. And then she rambles back out, into the intense Los Angeles light. And in a shot from high overhead, she seems like a lab rat, ensnared in some sort of a experiment. It's so well directed that we almost forget how preposterous it is to think this frame-up would ever work. This beginning promises an exceptional thriller. Alas, The Morning After never matches its initial potential, not as a thriller, at least. The narrative has some gaping disparities in it, and thrillers need to be impermeable. This one chalks various elements up to pure coincidence, the ultimate motives are flimsy at best and the fact that the body keeps reappearing like a cartoon or a take-off on The Trouble with Harry brings the movie too close to qualifying as '80s schlock for one to become seriously absorbed in the plot. But The Morning After merits a look anyhow, owing to the characters that it cultivates, and the performances of Fonda and Jeff Bridges in the two leads. She plays an alcoholic actress long past her heyday. He plays an ex-cop who happens to be fixing his car right where she topples into his back seat and implores him to get her away from there, quick. Bridges stays in a petty, manufactured shed, where he repairs appliances. This is all Fonda needs. She's a veteran of the live-fast-die-young subscription, her friends all bartenders and drag queens, her separated husband Raul Julia the most upmarket hairdresser in Beverly Hills. Nevertheless Bridges is reliable and sound, and she could do with a friend. Naturally it's axiomatic that they fall in love. The plot of The Morning After is not nearly as well captured or interesting as the day-by-day grinds of these characters. Actually, I can picture a movie that would omit the murder and just trail the genuine human development between Fonda and Bridges. The thriller filler isn't needed, although given that they used it, couldn't they have made it credible? The entire murder plot gets such slapdash treatment that perhaps I oughtn't have been startled by the big scene in which the killer's exposed. I've seen innumerable revelations in innumerable thrillers, but seldom one as transparent as this one, where the surprises are just announced in an improbable monologue. Indeed, the fact that nearly every opinion I've heard or read of this film seems unanimous in terms of James Hicks' script, including mine, even down to the 'It starts off well but then it gets really forced and jerry-built' gist, it seems pretty clear-cut what makes the film not quite work, though it'd be a misstep to write this movie off simply because the story is so rickety. It's worth making an allowance for due to the performances. Fonda and Bridges are superb in the film, and their rapport, founded on skeletons in the cupboard, bitterness and ulterior motives, gets especially remarkable. They create tangible unspoken feelings together, and they have some dialogue that feels more alive than most starry-eyed chatter in the movies. Before the schmaltzy final scene, not even close to prototypical of Lumet, there's a single shot in which all Bridges and Fonda do is face each other, and we know, and fee, that they want to have sex with each other. It's just energy, and it works wonders. I also admire how Lumet reinforces every color. Living in Los Angeles is part of the debilitating influence on the character played by Jane Fonda. All color is exaggerated: red redder, blue filters, orange hazes. He creates an L.A. comprised of vast flat surfaces of pastels and aggressively sunlit exposed areas. He traps the inebriated Fonda on this landscape like a helplessly insignificant insect sought for squashing by unknown feet, and the imagery makes the whole first hour of the movie much more ominous than it merits. Too bad they couldn't have take steps with the script.

This movie was much better than I had reason to expect after reading the comments on IMDb. Its biggest flaw must be the way The Morning After is marketed. It is not really a taut whodunit thriller but rather a study of a particular place in a particular era with particular characters – a dark comedy and a love drama at the same time. The second biggest flaw is the grating, almost ever present musical score. But for the rest this movie is nearly perfect.

I should call The Morning After an expose of Southern California in the mid 1980s. The sets and the photography (a lot frontal or near frontal wide angle shots of curbside sceneries) are very accomplished – Schrader's American Gigolo came to mind. The sun is always shining, the air seems to be absolutely pure, even places that should be dirty (back yards, industrial sites etc.) are painted in gaudy colors and squeaky clean. But the minds of the principal protagonists are desperately foggy and muddled. California appears to be a big, decaying fake idyll. People go there to die, I once read in a novel by Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust – also made into a great, underrated California movie, by the way). And that more or less sums up the feel of it.

The cast is kept wonderfully small. Jane Fonda is brilliant and she would have deserved the Oscar for this part. For several long scenes she acts alone in front of the camera and she really conveys the desperation and the natural charm of the character (and she's really attractive, too, despite the boozing). Jeff Bridges is a reliable support here. Also very good is Raul Julia as Fonda's somehow estranged husband. He plays a high end hairdresser with a snazzy salon and at times displays an unexpected but highly welcome gentlemanly charm.

Until now I always thought of Sidney Lumet as an American East Coast director. It is the only one of his movies I know that is set in California. He seems to have his own way of appreciating that place. There is a director's comment on the DVD I purchased and I am looking forward to listening to that.

While Jane's last Oscar nominated performance (before she retired from films) has its moments, the film falls apart after she takes off her blonde wig. I thought she looked like a knockout with it on. Some really well photographed scenery pops up near the first half and there's a long extended sequence that has her clean up the dead man's apartment, which is filled with many sly touches; alas the beginning is ten times better and more developed than the weak conclusion. Jeff Bridges adds a nice touch to the story but was it really wise for the Fonda character to place all her trust in a total stranger? Kathy Bates has a cameo as a neighbor before she hit the big time scaring everyone in Misery. She's on the screen maybe 10 seconds to a minute, tops. Overall, the parts, as other reviewers have stated, are juicier than the whole.