The Hot Spot

Dennis Hopper takes some curious turns with The Hot Spot, a thriller that had potential to become a neo-noir classic. Drawn to a directing proposal by his former producer Paul Lewis (Easy Rider, The Last Movie), Hopper soaks an excellent cast and a sure-fire story with atmosphere … so much so that it slows to a crawl. A show with just enough incident to flesh out a leisurely hour and a half is allowed to linger … the moody, drawling Jack Nitzsche soundtrack can’t hold the picture up forever. This 4K release looks so good, we have to conclude that Hopper fell in love with his images and couldn’t part with any of them. Viewers might be hypnotized as well: as shot by cameraman Ueli Steiger, the parched Southwest looks fantastic.

Star Don Johnson reported that Hopper switched scripts at the 11th hour, giving his cast and crew an older draft by Nona Tyson and Charles Williams. Williams had adapted from his hardboiled novel Hell Hath No Fury with Robert Mitchum in mind. He had previously written the source stories for or contributed to the screenplays for René Clément’s  Joy House and Phillip Noyce’s Dead Calm. In the late 1960s Orson Welles had attempted to film Dead Calm as The Deep, with Laurence Harvey and Jeanne Moreau.

Johnson loved the script’s noir-inflected main character, an amoral drifter looking for willing female companionship and a crooked angle to exploit. Drifter/hustler/lady’s man/thief Harry Maddox wanders broke into a Texas town, needing fuel for his (very trendy) Studebaker. He wangles his way into a job selling used cars on the lot of George Harshaw (Jerry Hardin of The Second Civil War), where his slick sales skills show up Harshaw’s other employee Lon Gulick (Charles Martin Smith of  The Untouchables and American Graffiti). Harry is soon romantically involved with the dealership’s demure bookkeeper Gloria Harper (Jennifer Connelly of The Rocketeer), as well as the owner’s wife Dolly Harshaw (Virginia Madsen of Dune), a flagrant tease. Harry soon has more criminal things on his mind, after he learns that the local bank’s security system is sitting in its box, uninstalled. Folksy bank manager Julian Ward (Jack Nance of Blue Velvet) is easily distracted; all Harry has to do is get him out of the way for a few minutes.

It’s soaked in Texas atmosphere. 

The Hot Spot arrived just as Orion Pictures began to implode, and became one of the weak box office performers that hastened the studio’s end. Yet the finished film can be praised for capturing fully the langorous menace of Texas-set pulp thrillers like those written by cult author Jim Thompson. Beginning with a lengthy sequence in the desert, almost every shot is a beauty, with saturated colors and contrasts between interiors and exteriors that make us feel the heat of day. We watch as Harry Maddox wanders the streets on hot nights, looking for a way to grab enough cash to blow town. He eventually robs the bank by arranging a distraction by committing arson. Harry encounters far more difficulty handling the two women in his life, each of whom is a dream girl beyond mortal expectations. Gloria Harper is innocent on the outside but eager for some corrupting experience. Dolly Harshaw initially strikes Harry as a rich but trashy playgirl lacking in brainpower. He discovers her aptitude for connivance the hard way. When two murders occur and various secrets slip out, Dolly isn’t above a little amorous blackmail.

The storyline is workable and the dialogue excellent but director Hopper is in love with atmospheric effects that slow the story to a crawl. It’s a matter of editorial choices. The running time stretches to linger on beauty shots of Don Johnson leaning against walls or gazing out the window of his seedy hotel room. All of this material looks great, via Ueli Steiger’s painterly cinematography. In 4K UHD, the movie plays like a Dennis Hopper art exhibit.

Hopper certainly got his actors into the spirit of the show. Johnson’s Harry and Madsen’s Dolly could have sprung from the cover of an overheated pulp paperback. They generate the kind of lust that runs wild on a hot summer night, in the back seat of a convertible Cadillac parked somewhere far off the highway. More tension builds with Connelly’s not-so-innocent Gloria, whose chemistry with Maddox is even stronger. But gee, all the crimes and schemes and lies do get in the way of True Love. We do remain interested in finding out if Harry will get what he wants. Will ‘everybody end in mincemeat’ as in  a classic annihilating noir?  Or will The Hot Spot’s amoral hero find himself a neo-noir neo-escape route?

Much of Dennis Hopper’s movie sizzles, like a dirty adult fairy tale. These actors know they’re going to participate in steamy love scenes, and they actively contribute to make them feel intimate and sexy. Most of the time Hopper does seem to their natural exhibitionism isn’t abused. But we wonder if Jennifer Connelly’s situation was perhaps a repeat of Hopper’s (alleged) dishonest treatement of Jodie Foster on his previous movie. After all of his elegant neo-noir scene blocking, Hopper films Gloria Harper’s quasi-lesbian flashback incident using angles that would appeal to a prurient 14 year-old boy. Scenes with actress Virginia Madsen also seem to go for maximum skin. Quotes from Ms. Madsen indicate that she talked Hopper down from a full-on nude scene or two.

A good director can be his own worst editor. 

Dennis Hopper sometimes shows a fine eye for camera angles. But the director lost his grip on the movie’s narrative flow. The editing room is a place where long rough cuts get pared down to tell a story, and Hopper had encountered difficulty in that area before. Twenty years before he hadn’t been able to make himself cut Easy Rider down to a reasonable length, and other hands eventually whipped it into viewable shape. The Hot Spot plays as if Hopper just doesn’t want the movie to progress. We like the dreamy slow scenes, but there really was a commercial contender here, a potentially more memorable box office winner.

Could The Hot Spot really have been improved? Perhaps only credited editor Wende Phifer Mate knows for sure. Fans that like to soak up noir atmosphere, that identify with Don Johnson’s posture as a moody lone wolf in the henhouse, think the movie is a classic just as it is. This near-perfect 4k presentation is for viewers that like their murder mystery thrills in slow motion, with the scenery and the stars viewed as objects for a voyeur.