A Brisa da Morte

Having grown up in Northern Arizona and living next to the Navajo Reservation, I was very excited when Hillerman's book became a movie; until I saw it. Navajo friends told me that Lou Diamond Phillips actually spoke pretty good Navajo in the film. It's too bad those in charge of production didn't care enough to make the quality film this story should have been. When you see microphones dangling during key scenes (or any scene for that matter) you know somebody didn't give a rip about this project.

Film adaptations of novels are a mixed bag at best, and The Dark Wind, allegedly based on Tony Hillerman's novel of the same name, isn't one of the best. The screenwriters took several unnecessary liberties with the storyline and characters, including stealing details from other Hillerman novels and dropping Captain Largo entirely in favor of Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn. Fans of Hillerman's novels won't like the portrayal of Jim Chee as an awkward, barely-competent rookie, either.

It's hard to tell whether Lou Diamond Phillips is just failing to portray Jim Chee as he's intended to be, or whether he just didn't bother to read the book and find out. Having replaced Captain Largo's character with Fred Ward as Joe Leaphorn, the script doesn't take advantage of either character's personality, but at least they didn't turn him into one of those generic shouting police captains we see so much of in the movies.

Despite all of this, it's a fairly likeable movie. The film was shot on location in and around the Navajo reservation in Arizona and New Mexico. The scenery is magnificent, and judging from the names in the cast and crew, the producers took advantage of local talent to fill in some of the smaller roles, which adds a good bit of authenticity. If you close one eye and pretend it has nothing to do with a Tony Hillerman novel, you'll probably enjoy it.

Here's Agent Johnson's take on it. Something did go wrong. Erroll wasn't big on action/fight scenes, but he was very hip to Navajo humor. Some would call it dry. The producers, (over half way through), opted for an action movie but the script wasn't able to support it on that basis. Mr. Hillerman wrote a mystery. Redford brought in an action director for all the fight scenes and Erroll went to his trailer, and it became a stuntmans' movie. (If the mic is in the shot on a 1-take dangerous stunt you just go ahead and use it, I guess.)There were a slew of re-writes and plot changes for the last several scenes in order not to denigrate a particular Hopi ritual that was supposedly pre-approved. The logical resolution of the plot suffered to say the least. I really enjoyed Erroll being there, and felt bad for him in the latter part of the shoot. Lou hung in like a trooper throughout and I thought gave a nuanced and skillful performance.(I hope to get a chance to hear his version of events someday) I don't think the film solved

the mystery of filming a Tony Hillerman mystery completely but as long as Erroll was in charge it had heart. There were rumors about the lack of distribution being brought on by Carolco's overspending on The Last Action Hero and taking a huge bath. There was no money to advertise Dark Wind or so the gossip was at the time.

Having read the book of the same title by Tony Hillerman, I believe the movie is one of the best in being as close to the book as possible. The story is great but film-making was terrible. There is at least one shot in the movie where the boom mike is clearly visible at the top of the screen. Also, the acting from most of the people wasn't that great. As far as Lou Diamond Phillips goes, I have seen him do much better than this film, and I think the best actor was Gary Farmer in the role of Cowboy Dashee. However, if you're a fan of the books, I recommend seeing this and I hope that the upcoming Hillerman stories on PBS are better than this one.

Plenty of films of this vintage suffer from boom mikes in frame and the top and dolly tracks visible at the bottom: this is an artifact born of failed productions. When the camera operator composed the shot, he had been told the film was being made for theatrical release, in a 1:1.85 ratio and so when the boom dipped down slightly, but not enough to make it into the "letterbox" they let it slide. Then, after the film failed on the festival circuit or preview process, etc and was dumped to video no one cared to correct the errors - they were all just trying to dump the project on the market as quickly as possible. Had the final "release print" been made, instead of a video transfer from the camera original (mivees and all) we would have been spared the spectacle of seeing mister boom mike. Most of these types of film were being dumped onto the video market before consumers cared to see letterboxed releases, so the transfer was made full frame.