Fenêtre sur Pacifique

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!

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.

Sometimes art imitates life and truth is stranger than fiction. I say that because last year four homeless women in Oakland, California squatted in a vacant house and refused to leave. They called themselves Moms4Housing and they made a mini-movement out of their theft. Instead of being summarily evicted from the house, the matter had to go to court. Their claim was that housing is a human right and since this home was vacant they had a right to it. The whole ordeal took about five months or so to be settled with the court ruling in favor of the company that owned the home. In this case, the owner of the home was a business that could afford to go to court and wasn't pressed for an immediate need of the house.

Which brings us to "Pacific Heights." A man by the name of Carson Hayes (Michael Keaton) simply moved into a vacant unit in a Victorian home in San Francisco without paying money and without permission. Due to the tenant-favoring laws, Drake (Matthew Modine) and Patty (Melanie Griffith) could not simply kick Carson out. They had to go through a lengthy and costly process to remove him which cost them all their savings and nearly their lives.

Carson wasn't a rent paying tenant whose rent just got jacked up by 50%, nor was he a rent paying tenant that was being evicted for some arbitrary reason, he was a slick con man that found a loophole in the system that protected his conniving con.

This was a tense movie in which you hoped to learn what Carson's motives were and what was his end game. The onion was peeled back a little, but I was never really satisfied with the explanation.

Michael Keaton was strong as the antagonist. This was back when he was crushing it on screen with movies like "BeetleJuice" and "Batman." Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith were weak castings. I must admit, I think Melanie is a weak casting in anything, but she was an especially weak casting in this movie.

The story itself and the pacing was good. I liked it as a suspense thriller, but whatever the intent of the writer was, I don't think the cities in the S.F. Bay Area heard him.

Pacific Heights works because of Michael Keaton. Pacific Heights is an underrated movie and has Michael Keaton playing a sinister role as the tenant from hell. Melanie Griffith and Mathew Modine play a yuppie San Francisco couple who rent out their sublet to others. Unfortunately Michael Keaton- a rich but shady customer enters the fray and immediately convinces them to let him stay. It's a psychological thriller with a nice setting. I suggest you go in with an open mind.

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.