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Totally underrated movie - great acting and great plot!

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.

2000: I have not seen this movie since it first aired twelve or so years ago, but I remember it as having a powerful impact. I remember thinking it was better than the theatrical film "Sea of Love." Good performances by Armand Assante, Beverly D"Angelo and Blair Brown. Good plotting and dialog, too.

2008: Since originally commenting eight years ago, I have seen this title again. It holds up pretty well although it certainly is longish for one sitting. (It was originally shown in two parts on two different nights.) The plot is involved, but for those not suffering from a short attention span, the multiple story lines are intriguing especially when they fold on each other.

Especially amusing now are the hair and clothes that date the movie, but the performances hold up. I say this notwithstanding the appearance of a fourteen-year-old actor named Ben Affleck. This movie could be culled for clips to be used in a "Before they Were Stars" special. The cast includes Affleck, Forest Whitaker, and Canadian actor/director Sarah Polley (acting: "My Life Without Me," "John Adams," "The Sweet Hereafter"; directing: "Away From Her," etc.). But Sarah was only about eight and had maybe ten short lines at a maximum.

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.