On Screen

...Ruth tolerates him with a resigned affection that occasionally gives way to spasms of irritation and malice, and is motivated solely by pragmatism: He pays the bills, after all, and keeps an eye on her boy...

...There is a little teaser of a subplot concerning the deepening relationship between Sarandon and the detective assigned to the murder (played with his usual unsubtle flair by Raul Julia), but their romance is never permitted to flower...

...Even a sordid love affair that leads to desperation and murder is about feelings—and they can't be flagged by dead-on imitations of a smoke-filled drinking club or of a drab bed-sitting-room or of Marilyn Monroe interpreted by an aspiring cockney...

...The one soft spot in Ruth's existence is Desmond Cussen (Ian Holm), an affluent businessman suitor who demands nothing except that he be allowed to look after her...

...Much has been made of this movie's feel for period and place...

...Ruth is drawn to David sexually, and is equally star-struck into submission at the thought of gaining admission into the world of high society by his side...

...But David and Ruth merely share a kind of joint bale-fulness in the face of emotions neither of them can handle...

...Once Compromising Positions gets going, it displays an indefatigable energy...

...When we first glimpse her it strains the imagination to link her tight-featured face with a crime of passion...

...Although Sarandon's husband (Edward Hermann) is very much the disapproving, self-absorbed corporate lawyer annoyed by his wife's sudden interest in pursuing murder leads ("I fail," he says, "to see where it's so enthralling"), he is nonetheless there to help her clean up when their house is vandalized by a suspect...

...The doctor wears jewelry, exactly as we would expect of "the biggest gum surgeon on Long Island," and his office offers the very latest in the pyrotechnics of dental assurance, right down to a coded message that flashes on and off, exhorting patients to use umvaxed dental floss...

...Compromising Positions, based on the best-selling novel by Susan Isaacs, is a smoothly timed movie in which everything from the furniture in the characters' homes to their accents is played for laughs...

...director Frank Perry introduces new characters and ever less plausible machinations with a light and merry air...

...In Desperately Seeking Susan, director Susan Seidel-man created a genuinely contemporary (albeit fragmented) film about the dated subject of suburban malaise by juxtaposing a postmodernist hippie (played by the rock-star, Madonna) against a beauty parlor-going wife who fantasizes, in Walter Mitty fashion, about a wild and crazy life as a postmodernist hippie...

...The opening frames, showing an extended close-up of the still-living dentist cleaning a patient's teeth as he tries to get acquainted with her body, are flawless...

...David needs and disdains Ruth, slapping her around and taunting her for beinga "tart," then reclaiming her with an abject yet arrogant desire...

...He feels entitled to her, by virtue of his class superiority as well as the prerogative of his maleness...

...Compromising Positions feels so familiar, underneath its trappings of kinky sex and a leather-loving dentist, because it ultimately espouses values as traditional as the ones that guided Doris Day...

...Only one patient, the last to see him alive, was able to resist his advances ("I could never," sheexplains, "be intimate with someone who wore a pinky ring"), and it is this doe-eyed but intrepid heroine (Susan Sarandon) who sets out to solve the case...

...What turns Ruth on is something else—sadomasochism, in the form of one David Blakely (Rupert Everett), a good-looking and abusive patron of the drinking club...

...The script, by Shelagh Delaney (who wrote the play A Taste of Honey), while effective in a minimalist way, is remarkably unallu-sive...

...Style, in fact, may well be what Dance With a Stranger is really about, but it is questionable whether an accurate recreation of the fashions of 30 years ago can also stand in for the larger issues of ill-begotten passion and class antipathy that the script concerns itself with...

...Behind the hairdos and the clothes, love affairs are primarily about feelings...

...Perhaps more unsettling, during the course of the movie the transfiguring fury that drives her becomes increasingly unclear...

...Once the scenario of their romance is established, it doesn't so much descend to its fatal conclusion as arrive there by fits and starts...

...Desmond's muffled libidinal impulses hover on the border between the asexual and the homosexual...

...The result, however, is dead-eningly anemic rather than starkly compelling...

...Al the end, the movie comes out firmly for long-term commitment—however limited—over shortlived excitement—however wide-open: Raul Julia is regretfully kissed goodbye and Susan Sarandon, backed bv her hubby, is ready to track down and crack further homicides...

...the necessary questions aren't even raised...

...Every generation locatesitsdis-linctive region of the risible—the topics it finds irrepressibly funny...

...Judith Ivey and Deborah Rush are particularly good, respectively, as a wittily caustic friend and a frightened bunny of a wife who holds forth in an itty-bitty voice that speaks erotic volumes...

...Although it holds your attention, it doesn't linger in the imagination the way really evocative movies do...

...The institution of marriage is portrayed as a querulous good, the solid bedrock that allows women to confidently flirt with adventure...

...Exhibiting the steely determination of the true victim, Ruth fails to take in stride the one man who can afford, literally, to drop her...

...The biggest laugh comes early, and it is also the main plot device: Dr...

...Hairdos, clothes, cars, mannerisms—everything to do with style is caught and embalmed in the alembic of its chilly white light...

...Of course, it is this very enclave that David seeks escape from in his dalliance with Ruth, and that he retreats to when he tires of her...

...Dance With a Stranger revolves around Ruth Ellis (Miranda Richardson), who had the dubious distinction of being the last woman in England to be hanged...

...Now that the '80s cultural phenomenon known as "yuppies" has come into its own as a ripe subject for parody, you can be sure we will be seeing many movies about disaffected word processors and unhappy young careerists...

...Not only aren't there any interesting answers given...

...It has been designed as a cultural icon, a recognizable artifact from a not-too-distant past that is, all the same, light-years away from the present...

...For a movie that has been so carefully shaped to look like a piece of art, a found object from the desolate '50s, there is not enough interior consciousness...

...After this lady-killer is killed off it rapidly becomes apparent lhat any of his former female conquests, all of them patients, might be the murderer...

...the dynamics of the story suggest nothing beyond their own tawdry particularity...

...We come away knowing that a bad time was had by all, yet we never really learn why...

...Rather than seeming tragic, their liaison appears to be childishly misconceived...

...She takes them in her stride, and the same seems to be true for the other unalterable conditions of her life: the tiny apartment over the bar where she lives with her young son, the glamorous appearance that turns to lackluster weariness as soon as the club closes down late at night, the paunchy owner who doubles as her lover...

...The women in this movie are as varied in looks and type as those in The Group and, like them, have sex unremittingly on the brain...

...We are left with the characters' own sense of themselves—Ruth's unfurling pride and David's impenetrable narcissism—but without a nuanced perspective on their fate...

...Suburbia has continued to be good for a cinematic tweak ever since it was discovered in the late '60s, when a mournful Dustin Hoffman sought the refuge of his parents' swimming pool to avoid taking on Life After College in Mike Nichols' The Graduate, and Ali McGraw devoted herself to perfecting her tan around the pool at her parents' club in Goodbye Columbus...

...As portrayed by Richardson, Ellis is Marilyn Monroe incarnate—or as close to Monroe as the platinum-blonde " hostess" of a shabby club in a socially stratified country can get without the requisite charisma...

...And he is around at the end to beam proudly at her handiwork when she nabs the culprit...

...The movie-going audiences of the '40s and the '50s were tickled by theeccentric rich and the conventional battle of the sexes...

...Based on a real-life murder case in mid-1950s England, the film is marked by a flatness of affect—an emotional neutrality—that is undoubtedly meant to simulate a documentary...

...He is set apart from the other men who wander in and out of her orbit by the glitter of his being a racing-car driver and his upper-crust background...

...The odd thing about Compromising Positions, set on Long Island, is that it is really a '60s/'70s move decked out in au courant trimmings...

...Unlike Desperately Seeking Susan, another recent movie set against a suburban backdrop, Compromising Positions is satisfied with updating an old formula—the restless housewife as sleuth—rather than seriously rethinking it...

...The plot unfolds against the backdrop of a down-at-heels London, and director Mike Newell practically drenches us in the icy tones of a painstakingly maintained " atmosphere...

...Doomed love affairs require some kind of inexorable logic to make them haunting...

...If there is anything one can point to as a " cause'' for the outcome of their affair, it is the inborn sense of privilege Ruth realizes she can never obtain—the raw accommodations of her own life (she eventually gets pregnant and loses her job) as opposed to the insularity of her rich and caddish lover's existence...

...I may be reading too much into Dance With a Stranger, though, in attempting to account for its denouement, the moment when Ruth Ellis pumps her pretty ex-boyfriend full of bullets...

...Shot in the palest of black-and-white tones, Dance With a Stranger is a visual approximation of an essentially aural experience: It looks bluesy and heartsick, the way a Billie Holiday recording sounds...

...With her pin-curled waves, dark eyebrows and painted mouth, Ellis is every ordinary man's dream, and she is indeed ogled and pawed by the regular sots at her club...

...Fleckstein (Joe Mantegna), otherwise known as "the Don Juan of dentists," is brutally murdered in his office...