Back in the 1980s I was the beneficiary of two generous pulp crime fans with dog-eared paperbacks to lend — sometimes with a rubber band holding loose pages in place. Both were film editors. Alex Renskoff clued me in to writer David Goodis. Steve Nielson talked up the legendary Jim Thompson, whose small-scale crime yarns scraped the limits of T&S: Tawdry and Sordid. Thompson’s books were surprisingly sophisticated; he occasionally used eccentric narrative structures, as in The Kill-Off.. For the last chapter of A Hell of a Woman, he employed a radical layout of sentences on the paperback page.
James Foley’s After Dark, My Sweet is one of Thompson’s books that center on an impaired protagonist. Typical were sociopaths (The Killer Inside Me) but it also might be someone deranged by extreme circumstances (The Nothing Man). If the book uses a narrator’s voice, said voice reflects the derangement. The movie adaptation of After Dark, My Sweet is so spare, so pared-down in character, that it captures some of the emotional rawness of the classic noir Detour. When our ‘hero’ offers a voiceover, we aren’t at all sure we can rely on what he says.
Even after it was championed by critic Roger Ebert, After Dark, My Sweet didn’t make a splash on its first release. Stephen Frears’ star-studded Thompson adaptation The Grifters arrived a few months later and won much more attention. But Foley’s picture may be the one that best captures author Jim Thompson’s skin-crawling vibe. We saw it first run at the late great Fairfax Theater — just now being demolished — with an enraptured crowd of pulp fiction fans.
Collie (Jason Patric) stumbles out of some desert rocks, hitches a ride into the fringes of a desert resort town and irritates the counterman at a diner — until he’s picked up by the attractive Fay (Rachel Ward). Back at Fay’s house, Collie is given a trailer to live in, with the understanding that he’ll work on rehabilitating the property’s date trees. Once well-known as a boxer, Collie is now an escapee from a mental institution. He apppears to have a slight mental impairment — his walk is a bit ‘off’ and his eyes can be twitchy. Collie insists that he’s only feigning these difficulties, because living in institutions has worked out well for him.
Collie intuits that Fay’s solicitude is too good to be true — but what can her angle possibly be? His suspicions aren’t eased when Fay’s associate ‘Uncle Bud’ shows up, with more interest in Collie’s welfare. Bud is an ex-cop equally at loose ends. He apparently owes money to a violent local, Bert (Rocky Giordani). Collie runs away, and stays for a time with a sympathetic loner, Doc Goldman (George Dickerson). The unmarried Goldman doesn’t turn Collie in. He’d rather they stay together to work on Collie’s problems, quietly, at Goldman’s house.
But Collie is soon back with Fay. She and Uncle Bud pull Collie into their plan to kidnap and ransom the child of a local millionaire, by having Collie pose as the family chauffeur. Collie seems willing to go along with this doubtful scheme. Has he no self control? Or does Collie have some notion that he’s going to protect the transparently shifty Fay?
After Dark, My Sweet only works in widescreen, where the sandy, pale expanse of the low desert can dominate the drama. This writer knows California’s desert life, and the visuals of cameraman Mark Plummer and designer David Brisbin express it well. Residents with money admire the scenery from the air-conditioned side of tinted windows, while dispossessed losers like the disgraced cop Uncle Bud must drift from one spot to another, to stay out of the sun. Fay says she’s a widow and the house is hers, but we know better than to believe this pair. A propertied woman shouldn’t be willing to play along with Bud’s get rich quick scheme. They’re already driving junker cars.
It’s the familiar case of criminals cultivating a patsy: even Orson Welles constructed a romantic noir around the idea. The wrinkle is that neither the dialogue nor the performances telegraph an objective truth. In this crooked three-way alliance, we know Fay and Bud are putting over a Big One on somebody they think can be manipulated. But little is for certain. Collie thinks he’s got a measure of control, but from what we can see he’s a mess of mental disorganization. Off on the margins are two wild cards: Bert is a just a bruiser and a thug, and Uncle Bud is terrified of him. Doc Goldman is sympathetic but too intense. Does he sincerely wish to help Collie, or is there a homosexual aspect to his concern?
Like the classic Detour, Foley’s After Dark, My Sweet stays ‘poisonously intimate.’ Fay shows plenty of emotional cracks — is she also being manipulated by Uncle Bud, or is she a genuine femme fatale willing to kill a small boy in the course of a sordid crime? When Collie and Fay come together in bed, are they really needy and desperate, or is it just another level of deceit?
We’re often skittish about movies that put children in jeopardy. With the Production Code long gone, there’s no reason why this show can’t paint itself black and go murderously dark with its child kidnapping. An interesting set of developments lead to a satisfying finish. Everything remains unsentimental and bleak — except that our hero manages to perform a very Jim Thompson-ish backhanded feat of chivalry.
James Foley’s claim to fame (to date) is tied up in the feature Glengarry Glen Ross and the big Netflix series House of Cards. His After Dark allows three very capable actors to flesh out characters without delineating everything in dialogue, or Hitchcockian ‘director’s touches.’ Events aren’t determined by a Fritz Lang-ish Noir Fate. Uncle Bud is obviously a liar and con man … but to what degree? Fay has sincere reactions of fear and uncertainty, and we don’t think she’s capable of murder. Can her romantic overtures to Collie be sincere?
Bruce Dern gets to show what he can do with a minimum of scripted detail. Rachel Ward’s Fay is refreshingly believable — we know just enough about her to be seduced like Collie. Ward’s theatrical opportunities may not have led her to first-rank roles, but all we see here is excellent, nuanced playing.
We’re sorry to say that in 1990 we only knew Jason Patric from the awful Sci-fi feature Solarbabies. Patric’s difficult part requires a strange walk and facial tics, and he keeps Collie from becoming a parody. The voiceover may be unreliable, but we believe Collie when he says he’s only faking mental problems — it’s how he sees things.
Does Thompson ‘explain’ his characters more than do co-writers Robert Redlin and James Foley? A big mystery to understanding Collie is the painfully soulful Dr. Goldman. Actor George Dickerson made disturbing impressions even in very small roles, especially his detective in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Goldman’s relationship with Collie is beyond intense; it ends with a sudden act that shocked the theater audience: is Collie totally off the rails, or is his act one of greater compassion?
Foley includes some big-time boxing flashbacks, which explain why Collie is at one point recognized by a Sheriff’s deputy on the street. Foley’s fine direction makes unnecessary the cliché of a climactic Big Action scene. The quirky violence of the finale feels very original. One armed conflict is seen from a distant remove, across an airport parking lot; the other is squeezed into a small space in the back seat of a station wagon. We couldn’t predict a single event in After Dark, My Sweet, which is exactly why it made such a strong impression.
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