Books, Arts & Manners: Sounding Tin

It IS interesting to note about recent American movies how few of them make sense. This is especially true of thrillers, though by no means limited to them. Even in a mystery, however, where the plot may be several jumps ahead of the spectators, everything should make some kind of sense while it is happening, and all must fall into place in the end. Logic can be stretched in various ways but cannot be dispensed with entirely, and intelligent plotting used to be expected from a movie like syntax from a sentence.

Suddenly, everything is changed. Motivation is as obsolete as the hoop skirt: It no longer matters why a character does something provided it is splashy, violent, or cute. A sprinter may wear a top hat as long as, at the finish line, he produces a rabbit from it. Or even if he doesn’t. In the current Black Widow, for instance, we are asked to believe that a humble Justice Department employee, following a hunch, will sell her apartment, car, and other possessions to track a killer to Hawaii at her own expense when the department is not interested in pursuing the case. Again, in Dead of Winter . . . but forget it: Nothing in Dead of Winter makes the slightest bit of sense. And now we have Angel Heart, a film by Alan Parker based on a novel by William Hjortsberg, Falling Angel, said to be charming by those who have read it. The film, functioning as a private-eye thriller on one level and as a supernatural horror story on another, falls apart in both.

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John Simon

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It IS interesting to note about recent American movies how few of them make sense. This is especially true of thrillers, though by no means limited to them. Even in a mystery, however, where the plot may be several jumps ahead of the spectators, everything should make some kind of sense while it is happening, and all must fall into place in the end. Logic can be stretched in various ways but cannot be dispensed with entirely, and intelligent plotting used to be expected from a movie like syntax from a sentence.

Suddenly, everything is changed. Motivation is as obsolete as the hoop skirt: It no longer matters why a character does something provided it is splashy, violent, or cute. A sprinter may wear a top hat as long as, at the finish line, he produces a rabbit from it. Or even if he doesn’t. In the current Black Widow, for instance, we are asked to believe that a humble Justice Department employee, following a hunch, will sell her apartment, car, and other possessions to track a killer to Hawaii at her own expense when the department is not interested in pursuing the case. Again, in Dead of Winter . . . but forget it: Nothing in Dead of Winter makes the slightest bit of sense. And now we have Angel Heart, a film by Alan Parker based on a novel by William Hjortsberg, Falling Angel, said to be charming by those who have read it. The film, functioning as a private-eye thriller on one level and as a supernatural horror story on another, falls apart in both.