Backtrack

Dennis Hopper's go-for-broke-on-a-slim-budget black comedy about a hit-man falling for his target, a strange but alluring young woman who makes pop art out of neon signs. I enjoyed bits of "Backtrack" (see that, not the butchered European print entitled "Catchfire") such as the gorgeous theater in New Mexico where Jodie Foster hides out or the funny scene where she's pacing around in the bathroom, trying to decide how far she should go with her pervy kidnapper. Unfortunately, the knockabout editing leaves the film feeling somewhat disjointed and the actors are occasionally encouraged to just wing it, but without funny results. I didn't mind the ending--I was hoping for an upbeat one--but these characters don't turn out to be particularly smart people. They're dizzy, lustful little cyphers, and they might've been more engaging if they'd been written with brains.

For about a decade, I swear I saw a number of films with the same trait: trying to make a hardened cold-blooded hit man into a sympathetic softie at heart. Oh, filmmakers just love to make evil look good.

Who better to play a twisted wacko than Dennis Hopper? Here, Hopper has the hots for Jodie Foster. To quickly summarize, the film is pretty interesting but with a bad message, as just mentioned. What's really interesting is the cast. Check this out: Hopper, Foster, Joe Pecsi, Fred Ward, Dean Stockwell, Vincent Price, John Turturro and Charlie Sheen. Obviously, this cast is what primarily makes the film fun for a viewing or two. The more you see it, and analyze it, the dumber it gets so don't see this more than twice....maybe once is more than enough. The dialog is pretty dumb in spots.

This is also unique because they can't seem to figure out how long this film runs. When I first saw it on VHS, the box said it was 102 minutes but it was really between 112-115 minutes. When the DVD came out, it also said "102" but only ran 99 minutes. They must have edited out quite a bit of footage from the tape! It was probably a smart move as the second half of the movie dragged too much. However, I've heard of a case like this with tapes and DVDs.

I really liked everything about this movie...until I watched it spiral out-of-control into a nosedive ending. At some point, the whole tone of the movie changed....probably when the hit-man and his quarry finally meet. The premise is enticing...a man is hired to kill a young woman...but first he must locate her. Difficult, as she is in hiding from both the Mob AND the cops. She abandons her apartment, and the hit man moves in....by going through her personal things, he hopes to discover where she might have fled. More and more, he discovers her personality, her soul....and begins to fall in love with a person he has never met. What a great story! And someday, someone will make a better version of it. This one fell apart too quickly. Perhaps, once meeting her, the hit man should have spared the victim's life....without explanation...just turned and walked away. The End.

Backtrack, aka Catchfire, is one of those classic "Alan Smithee" cases, but unlike say David Lynch's Dune it's hard to feel too sorry for the filmmaker in the case of producers fiddling with the "original" vision. Dennis Hopper's original cut of the film was three hours, which is more akin to a move out of Erich von Stroheim; maybe it is genius in its full form, but perhaps Hopper would have been better just taking what is a half-bitter, half-sweet neo-noir with pitch black comedy and crazy romance as a shorter feature. Is the question more that a 3 hour cut may *still* be a mess rather than it's a lost masterpiece? (Originally Easy Rider had a fate like this with Hopper's original cut something like 4 hours, then trimmed to 95 minutes it was great). A Magnificent Ambersons butchering it also is definitely not. No tears are shed over Backtrack/Catchfire's status.

Matter of fact there is a 2 hour director's cut, which somewhat sadly is hard to track down. So, taking into account this 98 minute "studio" cut (studio in a loose term since Vestron is no longer even around), it's bound to have flaws. To give Hopper his credit a lot of this is due to a choppy rhythm; sometimes there's a spectacular cut (i.e. when he jumps from a rooftop it cuts right away to him opening a drawer in a room), and sometimes it really does feel like a little extra detail or moment is excised in favor of keeping the plot going.

It's not a bad plot either, if somewhat typical in the film noir tradition: a woman has one of those freak chance of occurrences on a road as her tires go flat on a highway, and walking along the side of the road she sees in a wasteland a mob hit. The mobsters see her, she escapes in time, goes to the cops, and then when the mob comes by and kills her boyfriend she goes on the run - not taking into account a strange, soulful hit-man is on her trail, more as a stalker than a killer, leading to a very challenging moment halfway where the gears shift in tone.

The first half is fairly fun as a chase movie and has some surprises, mostly in cameos that had me smile (Vincent Price) and shaking my head and laughing like I was having a hallucination (Bob Dylan), with Hopper creating what looks to be another in a line of classic psychos (he has the skill of a puzzle-solver following Foster's trail, and sometimes plays the saxophone to relax). The mood also reflects wonderfully a sense of the noir with Foster changing her look (blonde wig and black jacket) with the conventional jazz music put behind her. When he finally tracks her down, however, there's a possibly great scene: Hopper, with a tie around her neck and handcuffs on her hands, gives Foster a choice, either die right now or be "mine" so that she would be under his total control. There's such tense acting here by the leads that it promises that this will lead to an electrifying second half.

This is not the case. Instead we get a fairly quickly unfolding of a romance, oddly enough, as Hopper's quasi-captive finally falls for her sort of sensitive and awkward hit-man, and there's even a weirdly "cute" scene where Hopper fulfills a secret that she has which is to have lots of pink Hostess cakes! There's a sort of absurdity here that maybe echoes Bunuel; it's kind of sadistically dangerous, and at the same time starts to make less sense even as it ratchets up some memorable, baroque images (the burning figure at night right before Hopper goes into Foster's room to take her sort of hostage). The acting isn't bad either, but again the sense of rhythm is off, and it's hard to look past that as the film is what it is and has to be seen like that.

As a curiosity it's surely a must-see - it's got a who's who of stars and character actors, from Charlie Sheen to Price to Joe Pesci to Catherine Keener to Jon Tuturro to Paulie from the Sopranos - though it's hard to exactly call it a very "good" movie. Too much of it ticks and tocks with a near originality to ignore it, but it's too flawed to see as some work of tortured genius either.

A very strange film with a sterling cast.

Anne Benton (Jodie Foster) was in the wrong place at the wrong time and witnessed a murder. Now, the mob and the police are after her as she flees rather than enter witness protection.

On the police side, we get Fred Ward (Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins). On the mob side, we have the boss, Vincent Price; John Turturro (Barton Fink, "Monk"); Tony Sirico ("The Sopranos"); and Joe Pesci (Goodfellas, Raging Bull).

Cameos by Bob Dylan, Charlie Sheen, and Catherine Keener added up to a great cast. Too bad the movie wasn't as good as the people in it.

Dennis Hopper (Hoosiers, Easy Rider), who also produced and directed the movie, played Milo, a hit man hired by the mob to catch the girl. Unfortunately, they didn't figure him to become obsessed with her, and what's more we didn't figure that she would develop Stockholm Syndrome.

This film came in between Foster's two Oscar winning performances in The Accused and Silence of the Lambs. We get a good look at Jodie's Fosters not once, but twice in the most skintastic performance of her career. She is one good looking woman.