LOWLIFES: AFTER DARK, MY SWEET, MIAMI BLUES
Whenever the moral watchdogs descend on movies, they invariably ask why movies so often concentrate on characters who are morally depraved. The easy answer to that is bad characters are easier to play than good characters, but that's as facile as the moral watchdog's position. The real answer is a combination of a lot of things: virtue isn't really virtue unless and until we understand vice, we vicariously live out what we could never have living as members of "normal" society, life is full of bad people, and for artists to ignore that would be criminal, and since most stories about good people seem to be saccharine and preachy, the movies about bad people seem to be a relief by comparison because they don't preach. Whatever the reasons, movies about lowlifes aren't going away anytime soon, and two good examples of them in 1990 were James Foley's AFTER DARK, MY SWEET and George Armitage's MIAMI BLUES. By coincidence, both are based on crime novels.
AFTER DARK, MY SWEET was one of three films based on novels by celebrated pulp novelist Jim Thompson to be released in 1990 (the others were THE GRIFTERS and KILL-OFF). This isn't quite as good as THE GRIFTERS was, but it's still a fine example of film noir.
Jason Patric plays Collie, a boxer who's escaped from a mental institution. At a bar, he gets into a fight, which is bad, but he also runs into Fay (Rachel Ward), an alcoholic widow who nevertheless still can turn heads - Collie's head, anyway. She takes him home, and gives him a job as her handyman. She also, of course, is turned on by him, but at the same time seems to be warning him away from something. That something turns out to be an ex-cop Fay calls Uncle Bud (Bruce Dern). Turns out he and Fay have a scheme going to kidnap a rich man's son (James Cotton). But there are complications. Collie has been picked up by a doctor (George Dickerson) who seems sympathetic but might have an agenda of his own. And Collie turns out not to be the easy sucker Uncle Bud might have guessed.
Though this isn't a typical film noir in some ways - the major way I'll get to in a bit - one way it's quite typical is how the landscape is populated almost entirely by amoral characters (just as in THE GRIFTERS). No one really has sympathetic motives here, and that could very well be why this film went nowhere at the box office, despite some good reviews. That's too bad, because I found these characters fascinating for not being either cleaned up or obvious predators. Ward's character is a good example; in a typical noir, a woman is either an innocent or a black widow, and she's neither. You're always caught off balance by her motives towards Collie.
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