Morando com o Perigo

Pacific Heights is required viewing in all Apartment Management courses in San Diego County. It is a chilling tale of decent but uneducated and unprepared new owners with a dream unknowingly up against a seasoned player in the professional renter game. This viewing requirement is one of the tools used to introduce starry-eyed management newcomers to the harsh and not-so-easily apparent world of the sick, the dangerous and the sue-happy portion of the rental market who will try to get the management stripped of all their personal assets and possessions, fired and possibly jailed, who work diligently to get the owner's property away from him/her, and who have no objection to going down as long as they can take others with them. Great movie.

Prior to this film,we only saw Michael Keaton in comedic,and good guy roles.In Pacific Heights,he proves to us that he is not afraid to turn on us and be the bad guy.Keaton is excellent as Carter Hayes,the worst kind of no account,as he knows how to stay just out of reach of the law. The character is very similar to that of Max Cady in Cape Fear,though Cady is the far more memorable of the two.Carter Hayes is a nightmarish tenant wreaking havoc on the lives of his helpless landlords,wonderfully played by Melanie Griffith and Matthew Modine.I consider this film to be an overlooked classic that never really got the attention it deserved,perhaps because no one wanted to see Keaton,particularly after his Batman success,as a villain.Those looking for a modern day "Hitchcock-esque" thriller will find a winner here.Thumbs up!

I saw this movie again recently, and I have to say that upon reconsideration I think this film is a bit underrated. There are a few deeper sociological issues being explored here that I perceive but are quite subtle in their appearance in the film.

It is a study about the law to some degree, and it has some critical things to say about the ability for one who knows the law and its loopholes and thus exploits others with tools that were originally intended to preserve civil society. Keaton plays a psycho, but one who is highly educated and quite adept at his craft of fraud and deceit.

Further, Modine's character is irrational, befuddled, and ultimately marginalized. I wonder if the director took some liberties with him (as this is a true story, I don't know everything about the real person he portrays) to bring out a few of his close-minded tendencies that may have contributed to the awful situation in which he finds himself. Obviously, there is the closet racism which keeps him from renting to a black man (this is thrown in the viewer's face later and is quite obvious), but there is also the way he perceives a man's role as the solver of problems and his wife as nothing more than a spectator.

That she ends up being the one to calmly and coolly affect a search for and investigate Keaton's character, assaults the traditional notions of a man's role as a protector. Her temperament is ultimately more appropriate for the solution to the problem, and I think it is no accident that the director portrays it in this way.

This film didn't completely win me over like I was hoping it would, but some solid acting, a good premise, and a few clever scenes made it worthwhile. There was never anything particularly suspenseful about the film, and you pretty much know who will win by the end, but the loathesome Michael Keaton character helped to keep me interested throughout. There were also a few things that especially annoyed me, including the terminally stupid Matthew Modine character, but this movie just has too many positives for me to dwell on the negatives. It's by no means perfect, but it's an effective thriller nonetheless.

William Goldman says that the last 15 minutes are the most important of any movie and that's what saves what is otherwise a sometimes fascinating but often dull film in "Pacific Heights."

The plot line is fairly interesting but feels rather drawn out through most of the film, until the fantastic ending pulls out all the stops and turns the film into something good. The writing in general is a bit contrived and the dialogue fairly wooden, but it isn't quite enough to destroy the film even early.

The acting is very uneven, led by a terrible Melanie Griffith and a middling performance by Matthew Modine in terms of screen time, but certainly controlled by the fantastic performance of Michael Keaton, one of the world's greatest actors. Keaton is especially fantastic in the final sequence, from his charming act with the old woman to his harrowing, venemous final scene there is a complete change in who he is and it is all the more frightening and powerful for the juxtaposition.

Schlesinger's direction, besides Keaton's performance, is probably the saving grace of the film. He manages to inject a beautiful dark style to the film that the script rather lacks but seems to want while also keeping us in a blunt reality with the plain, simple outdoor shots. His use of lighting and well-chosen camera angles wonderfully play up the situation.

Overall, "Pacific Heights" is a middling film with a fantastic performance by Michael Keaton and good direction by John Schlesinger that turns into something better with its fantastic, surprising, venemously satisfying ending. If you watch it, though, don't give up on it 'til it's over.