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The grimy smudge in the Alcatraz cell might be Proust's "little patch of yellow wall," thus the refinement of underworld vengeance into a constellation of memory and emptiness. "Did it happen? A dream. A dream." Walker the betrayed thug out for his share of the loot, Lee Marvin as a rock-ribbed zombie clomping down a phosphorescent airport corridor. Reunion with the perfidious wife (Sharon Acker) on a bullet-riddled bed, neither looking at the other while she launches into a dazed incantation ("How good it must be... being dead"), she's last seen as a rainbow of vanity liquids in a bathtub drain. Fight at the psychedelic nightclub, plunge from the fortified penthouse: The pop-art nightmare of Los Angeles, sliding by in John Boorman's glittering spree of jump cuts and wide angles. "Somebody's got to pay." Imagery as hard and sleek as the protagonist, who simply stands in place while his sister-in-law (Angie Dickinson) exhausts herself attempting to smack him down. Up in the glassy pyramid with the traitor (John Vernon), down in the storm drain from the vantage point of a pipe-smoking assassin, under the freeway for a bit of automobile interrogation. (The car rammed into concrete pillars is part of the surreal violence against inanimate foes—telescopes, kitchen appliances and speaker phones also get theirs.) "A pathetic sight... chasing shadows." A pileup of Antonioni and Resnais and Godard for the noir rampage, an impersonal corporate for the criminal realm with a blowhard at the top (Carroll O'Connor), "we deal in millions, we never see cash" (Polonsky's Force of Evil). The phantom dissipates as soon as the quest is over, just like that, the vacant stage is a darkened prison with a helicopter spotlight. "What's my last name?" "What's my first name?" Soderbergh's The Limey is a magnificent cubist analysis. Cinematography by Philip Lathrop. With Keenan Wynn, Lloyd Bochner, Michael Strong, and James B. Sikking.
--- Fernando F. Croce |