It IS not the stuff that is being attacked as garbage, glutted as our screens are with it, that is depressing these days. What truly depresses is the stuff that gets praised by critics who ought to know better. One such supposedly adult entertainment is Roger Donaldson’s No Way Out, although some of the encomia are hedged with “as summer movies go,” as if dog days were automatic justification for dogs. Compared to much of what is around, the film may indeed be better; but is it any good?
No Way Out has style, but it ought to have heeded Paul Valéry’s warning: “There are nasty styles. … A good style presupposes a sort of organization of singularity, a harmony that rejects the excess of fantasy. . . . Everyone concedes that a tiger has quite a different style from a monkey: he has magnificent balances; the other is all instability, pointless capers, leaps without a goal.” A triumph of the simian style, No Way Out is remotely based on Kenneth Fearing’s novel The Big Clock, which, under that title, was filmed, more faithfully and better, in 1948. John Farrow’s movie dealt with passion and crime in the world of publishing, which in itself gave it a certain novelty and idiosyncratic flavor —publishing, like books, being terra incognita to most moviemakers. Robert Garland, the screenwriter and producer of the new film (beware of producers who do their own writing!), transfers the locale to politics, Washington, and, in particular, the Pentagon. Though crime remains crime—becomes, indeed, even uglier—passion is diluted to mere carnality.
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