The Talkies/Thrillers

...Brice isn't aware of Susan's affair with Farrell, however...

...But the truth is that whereas The Big Easy is a genuinely entertaining romantic thriller—a glossy Hollywood picture with some of the gloss removed—it hardly provides a realistic view of New Orleans, of the judicial system, or (I suspect) of the real nature of institutional corruption...

...One of these computers, by means of a process the explanation of which didn't sound quite kosher to me, is gradually turning an all-black photo-graphic negative found in Susan's house into an image of Farrell—and Farrell knows that the moment he's recognizable in the picture, Pritchard will have him killed...

...She's now full of contempt for him—and her contempt increases when his pals at the police department manage to get him off by destroying the evidence against him...

...Your printed translation is keyed to numbers on the screen for easy reference...

...It's Fun To Practice A Second Language For Business Or Pleasure A Home Video Cassette Just $49.95 French • Spanish • English It's just like being there...

...the Cajuns are essentially a rural phenomenon...

...The script is based on a computer-assisted selection of over 1000 basic words plus 60 verbs in all tenses...

...Please allow 2-3 weeks for delivery...

...This sort of thing would not be sodisturbing except for the impression one gets, every so often, that McBride (who previously directed the Richard Gere epic Breathless) would like us to take this movie more seriously than it deserves...

...The acting is good, too: Costner brings to his role the same wonderful controlled intensity that made him so impressive in The Untouchables...

...Naturally, the job of finding this "Yuri" is given to Brice's intelligence expert—Farrell...

...Or charge my ^ Visa ^ M/C ^ Amex Acct # Exp...

...have been laughing it up over certain details in this film—for instance, over the anachronistic depiction of Duvall, the Senate committee chairman, as a bossy, drawling Southerner...

...Brice wants to kill plans for an expensive sub called the Phantom, which he considers unnecessary but for which a Southern committee chairman named Duvall (Howard Duff)—with the support of CIA reports on Soviet naval buildup—has been lobbying hard...

...I'm informed by folks who know the city well that I'm right: the majority of its Caucasian residents are of Irish, Italian, or German heritage...

...But the most remarkable presence is that of Sean Young, whose vivacity, sensuality, and naturalness bring to mind the screen icons of generations ago...

...But, though I've never been to New Orleans, it seemed to me that there were too many people in this film with Cajun accents...

...He goes straight to Pritchard, who comes up with a plan to save his skin: they'll declare that Susan was the mistress of, and was murdered by, a Soviet mole in the Defense Department named Yuri, whose existence has long been suspected by the CIA...

...One wonders why Farrell doesn't simply ask the computer to search the file for mention of the jewelry box—a process that would take a few moments—instead of having it spend hours printing out the whole list...

...and Ann (who else...

...Of the two Ann is the more interesting character, and when Remy finally does bed her down, she becomes even more interesting—an endearing combination of shyness, self-possession, and sensuality...

...she makes this silly thriller seem more distinctive than it is, makes these hokey proceedings seem real...

...The movie is grainy-looking, almost as if it were shot on 16mm stock, and it has an overcast look, for the most part, as if it were filmed on a couple of cloudy weekends in October...

...We're all that stands between you and them, sugar...

...she believes purely in truth, justice, and the American way, and so apparently do her colleagues at the D.A.'s office...

...When Remy gives his heartfelt climactic speech about the way corruption, er, corrupts, it seems more forced than forceful...

...Full refund in 10 days if not satisfied...

...It appears to pride itself on its clear-eyed, unsentimental view of things...

...Ned Beatty is particularly good as a cop named Jack who's like a second father to Remy...

...You follow a young business man on a trip and learn how to hail a cab, check into a hotel, use the phone, make appointments, close a deal and go to the bank...

...7-The Big Easy is not a movie, then, that is calculated to warm the hearts of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association...

...The idea here, apparently, is not to look slick—McBride wants a gritty, homey, y'all-take-ya-shoes-off tone...

...Remy's from a police family: half the members of the force seem to be related to him...

...He goes to court (in what must be record time—less than a week after his arrest...

...Finally...

...Follow that...

...to Farrell's mind, this is apparently the only way of establishing definitively that Brice himself was Susan's lover—and murderer...

...But the whole film comes down in the end to a ridiculous race between two computers in the basement of the Pentagon...

...YES...

...Like The Big Easy, this is a film that patently prides itself on its supposedly authentic mice en scene, its familiarity with the way things work in the corridors of power...

...Remy tries to soften Ann up by taking her out for dinner, but when the meal turns out to be free`his money's no good here," the restaurateur explains to Ann—she's incensed...

...For a while these two remind one, just a little bit, of Tracy and Hepburn—he the laid-back, plain-talking man's man (who, we know, will prove capable of tenderness), she the high-strung, high-toned, no-nonsense career woman (who, we know, will prove capable of passion...

...The other computer is printing out the Office of Protocol's gratuity gift list...

...No Adam's Rib, this...

...We're the good guys...

...Here's how to order (VHS only) Call Toll-free 1-800-835-2246 ext...

...You watch a funny, one-hour romantic movie, filmed in Hollywood with no subtitles...

...in New Orleans these days, the Cajuns are a small, colorful minority, aren't they...

...Kevin Costner, who portrayed the terminally earnest Eliot Ness in this summer's The Untouchables, here plays yet another clean-cut, quietly forceful government man, Lieutenant Commander Tom Farrell...

...T he film has some things going for 1 it: a few genuinely suspenseful moments, a couple of arresting reversals, a lively pace...

...But the film has energy and wit, and is blessed with a number of splendid performances...

...Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...

...But she's implacable...

...This intelligent, strong-minded Yankee blonde is a strict believer in law and order who frowns on the easygoing way in which Remy and his Cajun-drawlin' colleagues enjoy their "perks...

...He claims that there's a difference between taking advantage of "perks" and being a criminal—the real criminals are muggers, killers, burglars...

...Remy doesn't give up, however...

...is the prosecuting attorney...

...The movie appears to pride itself, too, on its realistic at-mose-phere...

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...for such a baroquely plotted picture, it moves along quite smoothly most of the way through...

...You're supposed to uphold the law," she snarls, "but instead you bend it and twist it and sell it...

...Indeed, just about everybody in the film talks Cajun, with the major exception of Ann Osborne (Ellen Barkin), a Yankee-born-and-bred assistant district attorney who, Remy complains, "bust[s] cops for a living...

...Like these other films, No Way Out forces you to listen to its theme song several times before the picture's through, the idea apparently being thatif it irritates you enough you'll run right out and buy the record...

...The film's setting, of course, is New Orleans, where Remy McSwain (Dennis Quaid) is the youngest man on the police force ever to be promoted to the rank of lieutenant...

...Several months before going to work for Brice, Farrell meets a striking young lady named Susan Atwell (Sean Young) at an inaugural ball and—in what has become the film's most publicized sequence—makes love to her in the back seat of a limousine...

...Send me the Linguex Home Video in quantities checked below: — Spanish — English for Spanish _ French speakers ^ Check enclosed for $49.95 plus $3.00 shipping (payable to Linguex) New York residents add sales tax...

...Roger Donaldson's No Way Out is yet another recent thriller in which a diverting plot has been yoked to an outsized moral about corruption within The System...

...Quaid had better be careful, though, or his prominent performances in this movie, as Gordon Cooper in The Right Stuff, and as the fantastic voyager in the recent Innerspace will stereotype him forever as the cockybut-lovable type...

...This fiction will make it possible to keep the D.C...

...A couple of other quibbles: the sound is rather poor, the cinematography murky...

...Aside from Miss Young's performance, in fact, the main thing that distinguishes this movie from other romantic thrillers of the day is its ending: I don't intend to give it away, but suffice it to say that the film's last moments contain a cheap dramatic twist that violates the most basic rules of dramaturgy and that sent this viewer, for one, out of the theater feeling cheated...

...he doesn't realize she's been two-timing him until one night when he shows up at her house and sees Farrell—whom he doesn't recognize in the dark—leaving by the back way...

...There's the requisite chase scene, of course—in which Farrell hightails it through Rock Creek Park, a couple of Special Forces agents nipping at his heel—and another murder...

...The film's extraordinarily convoluted plot revolves not around the Phantom sub controversy, however, but around a murder...

...From there on it gets really convoluted, and, alas, sillier and sillier...

...What a lovely fiction...

...and Will Patton delivers a bravura performance as the psychopath who's determined to "save Brice no matter what it takes...

...Both the lead actors, moreover, are very appealing...

...Farrell's assignment is to serve as liaison between the secretary and the intelligence community—especially the CIA, whose closely guarded raw data on Soviet sea power Brice wants him to obtain...

...but this is the sort of movie in which the only real explanation is that, well, if he did that, there wouldn't be any movie...

...Dat's at-mose-phere...

...Every moment that she is on screen, the film has life, vigor, charm...

...The picture opens with a series of helicopter's-eye views of the Mississippi delta and a generous helping of sultry, down-home Loo-siana style background music...

...It takes a series of local murders—which Remy at first attributes to a "drug war" among rivalfactions of the local mob, but which Ann suspects, correctly, to involve corrupt police officials—to make Remy forsake his family loyalty to the police department and its sleazy ways and to rejoin the "good guys...

...Rough as it is on cops, however, it's amazingly soft on assistant D.A.'s: Ann Osborne doesn't seem to have any political ambitions or, for that matter, any ulterior motives whatsoever...

...police out of the case, and to have a DOD hireling track down Susan's other boyfriend (the sole witness to Brice's appearance at her apartment on the night of the murder) and, on the pretense that he is Yuri, to have him killed...

...A romance develops between them, although Farrell knows that Susan is the well-paid mistress of someone high up in government...

...You're not one of the good guys anymore...

...A veteran of Naval Intelligence who is attached to the USS Billings, Farrell is brought back to Washington by his friend Scott 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1987 Pritchard (Will Patton), the right-hand man of Secretary of Defense David Brice (Gene Hackman...

...The moment her character dies, the movie's dreary contrivance becomes manifest...

...Folks like to show their appreciation...

...In the final analysis, No Way Out is yet another '80s romantic thriller, not much better or worse than—or, ultimately, different from—a score of others which have not only interchangeable titles (e.g., Against All Odds) but interchangeable pop-rock title songs of surpassing insipidity...

...certainly it is nowhere near as dramatically powerful a moment as the makers of this film seem to think it is...

...Susan eventually confesses that the man in question is none other than Farrell's own boss, David Brice...

...Hackman offers a wise portrayal of a man who's not really malevolent, just cowardly...

...Remy tries to explain: "This is New Orleans...

...and the late Charles Ludlam is weirdly amusing as a dandified defense lawyer right out of Tennessee Williams...

...Like Remy McSwain, Farrell is a cocky fellow whose gifts have taken him very far for someone so young...

...And, what to say if you fall in love...

...But The Big Easy ceases to be a latter-day Tracy-and-Hepburn film when Remy's arrested red-handed for taking graft from the owner of a topless bar...

...And they all have thick, syrupy Cajun accents...

...Farrell hopes to find a reference on this list to a jewelry box which a Moroccan diplomat gave to Brice, and which was among the items found in Susan's house...

...How, she wants to know, is this any different from accepting a bribe...

...Ann turns him on, and before long it's clear that his cocky charm is getting to her, too, in spite of everything...

...Or, just send in the coupon at right...

...Catch dat name, Remy...

...AS LINGLIE3Ck THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1987 37...

...We have a certain way of doing things down here...

...But people I know in D.C...

...Incensed, Brice slaps Susan around and inadvertently kills her...

...What's more, though the film is competently shot and edited for the most part, there is one slip-up that particularly bothered me: when Brice and Pritchard are shown dining al fresco at the Hay-Adams Hotel, the film unit's big, white production vehicles are plainly visible in the background...

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