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Reynolds' Sharky's Machine is a forerunner, brought to bear on a view of Manhattan and Queens like Kipling's East and West. Aerial shots give the Chrysler Building in the middle of a nocturnal sprawl lit by traffic like a jewel box, the working-class realm is immediately sketched as if populated by bus drivers from a Fifties sitcom, the better to contrast with the perfume-ad models swanning around the upper echelons. "A babysitting job" for the rookie police detective (Tom Berenger), protecting the socialite (Mimi Rogers) who's witnessed a murder by the tuxedoed ogre (Andreas Katsulas). "Where you go, I follow," that includes the Guggenheim Museum for the plebeian's enchanted-disbelieving glimpse of a Pop Art sculpture shaped like a giant Swiss army knife. Romance inevitably blossoms, suddenly the blue-collar earthiness of the cop's wife (Lorraine Bracco) strikes him as unduly common. "I'm on duty." "What kind? Gigolo?" Proles and aristos through the stylist's ornate prism, cf. Sternberg's An American Tragedy, thus Ridley Scott's stab at human drama as a fastidious folding of people into scenery. The hero is something of a lunkhead, acquiescing to becoming a blueblood's plaything while dismissing her crowd as "a bunch of screaming squirrels." (His partner at the moneyed crime scene is curter still: "All you beautiful people shut the fuck up!") Burnished textures for days: Voluptuous steam out of manhole covers, rain-speckled windows that turn marble into sapphire, a mirrored dressing room that doubles as a Lady from Shanghai stalk when an assassin infiltrates the penthouse. "Marriage is an ideal whose time has come and gone," snaps the divorced joker in NYPD blues, a wisecrack rebuffed by Reaganite cinema's mandatory return to the status quo. Cinematography by Steven Poster. With Jerry Orbach, John Rubinstein, Daniel Hugh Kelly, Harley Cross, Tony DiBenedetto, Jim Moriarty, and Mark Moses.
--- Fernando F. Croce |