After Dark, My Sweet

Plot synopsis:
Ex-boxer Kevin "Kid" Collins is a drifter and an escapee from a mental hospital. In a desert town near Palm Springs he meets Fay Anderson, a widow, who convinces him to help fix up the neglected estate her ex-husband left. She nicknames him "Collie" and lets him sleep in a trailer out back, near her dying date palms.
Her acquaintance "Uncle Bud" shows up. Calling himself an ex-cop, he has long been hatching a scheme to kidnap a rich man's child and needs somebody like Collie to help carry it out.
Reluctant in the beginning, Collie tries to leave and encounters Doc Goldman, who immediately can tell the young man needs to be under medical observation. Doc takes a personal interest in Collie that might include a physical attraction as well. He intrudes on Collie's relationship with the alcoholic Fay.
Resenting this interference, Collie is persuaded by Uncle Bud to execute the kidnap plan. But things go wrong from the very beginning, including Collie snatching the wrong kid. It goes downhill from there, with tragic consequences for all involved.

Tags: tragedy, neo noir, flashback

Review:
Intense actors like Bruce Dern, Jason Patrick and Rachel Ward combine to make this modern-day film noir a winner.
Of the three, I don't know who was most interesting as all offer good performances and intriguing characters.Patric does the narration in this noir, playing an ex-boxer and mental patient.
Though its Southwestern locations (Indio, California was used) are both a bit too sparse and modern to suit the source material, in every other way this captures the ineffable aura of Jim Thompson's prose (and anyone who's actually READ "The Getaway" knows how utterly impossible a task translating his best effects to film really is).
Director Foley has done a splendid job in setting a tone of dreamlike, sunburned melancholy and maintaining it throughout, aided immeasurably by fine performances by Rachel Ward & Bruce Dern and an absolutely riveting one by Jason Patric.
Though a little young for the part, he captures perfectly the likable ambivalence and roiling inner pathology of the Jim Thompson Hero: you never stop feeling for the guy even as you know he will inevitably be compelled by his inner torments to do monstrous things before the story ends.
(Fans of Dennis Hopper's "Frank Booth" from BLUE VELVET would take to Uncle Bud immediately, I think.) More than any other film adaptation of Thompson, AFTER DARK -even more than THE GRIFTERS - embodies that peculiar cowtown existentialism of his that tells us we're each of us alone in a world where things start bad and only get worse, pretending we're sane the way kids pretend there's a Santa Claus.
Jason Patric is spectacular in this film and demonstrates powerfully his ability to control and maintain a troubled character.
Patric's performance with Foley's direction coupled with a completely terrifying secondary characters (like Bruce Dern and Rachel Ward), After Dark My Sweet is a true diamond in the rough.Grade: ***** out of *****.
The first of two Jim Thompson adaptations released in 1990 (the other being the more well-known GRIFTERS), AFTER DARK has all of Thompson's hallmarks: dangerous women, the confidence game, and characters that are either not as dim as others suspect them of being, or not as harmless.Jason Patric is superb as a former boxer disqualified from the sport for life due to an incident in the ring (director James Foley uses RAGING BULL-esquire sequences to flesh out the back story) and the too-little-seen Rachel Ward also delivers a great performance.
But Bruce Dern is the film's secret weapon: his sweet-talking grifter Uncle Bud subtly commands each of his scenes.there's almost no comic relief in this film, so watch it prepared to be sucked into the void..
Like Thompson's book this movie creates a dark and surreal world where passion overcomes logic and the double cross is never far at hand.
While not a perfect film noir, AFTER DARK, MY SWEET is a particularly unusual one in that it uses bright atmospherics as opposed to the standard dark ones used to enhance the downward decadence of the material.
While watching the exquisitely photographed film After Dark, My Sweet, one has to admire Jason Patrick's heartbroken voiceover.
Like in many noirs, Collie knows there is no way to escape one's destiny; the only thing to do is ride it out and see what happens.After Dark, My Sweet is one of those little gems, a film that came out just as independent cinema was experiencing an upswing in popularity.
And, although the film was no huge hit when it was released, After Dark, My Sweet was at the beginning of a new trend: the neo-noir film.
John  Diehl would later impress us with Last Seduction and Red Rock West, but while those noirs had the style of the older genre, After Dark...has the dialogue and attitude of old; the words coming out of Patrick's mouth are clearly classic Jim Thompson.
Rachel Ward and Bruce Dern(always the crazy one) play good backup, especially Ward with her 1940's-era fast-speak witty banter, straight out of Barbara Stanwick movies.
Rachel Ward is Fay, the sexy femme fatale who we can't quite figure out...It's not your standard film noir, nor is it intended to be.
After Dark My Sweet, along with The Grifters, are two excellent adaptations of novels by one of my favorite writers, Jim Thompson..
Seems to be full of its' own self indulgent importance in trying to say something meaningful but falls way short and all in all the picture is an unconvincing mess.It is one of those films classified as a film noir which can be defined as follows:"A film noir is marked by a mood of pessimism, fatalism, menace and cynical characters".Well that is the story here: 3 losers stumble upon each other with their collective problems that include mental illness, alcoholism, laziness, indebtedness etc and together they conspire to kidnap a child and outwit each other.Would have been a much better movie if the story was confined more to the kidnap instead of the character failings of the kidnappers.
Never mind the retro '40s pulp fiction title: this oddly haphazard adaptation of yet another Jim Thompson crime potboiler is Film Noir without the noir.
Patric does his best to give the role an appropriate smoldering intensity, but for all his posturing it's obvious he's a white-hatted good guy from the concern he shows for the diabetic young kidnap victim.
In James Foley's After Dark, My Sweet, drawn from Jim Thompson's moody suspense novel, Jason Patric gives a late riff on early Brando.
Next, up pops `Uncle' Bud (Bruce Dern), who suborns Patric into a half-baked scheme for kidnapping a rich kid.
As happens with such schemes, things go awry (the kid turns out to be a diabetic, for one thing), and it falls to Patric to put matters right by a supreme act of self-sacrifice.But the somnolent pace and elliptical plotting that worked in Thompson's telling sit uncomfortably on the screen.
To his credit, Dickerson gives the game away with his doomed looks of longing; was it Charles Laughton who remarked `They can't censor the gleam in my eye?' And the long fuse between Ward and Patric sputters on and on; the movie could only be improved by losing half an hour of downing drinks and exchanging alternating glances of hatred and lust.
The best thing about After Dark, My Sweet is Patric's performance, even if, in keeping with the fads of the 1950s, it gives off too many whiffs of `method.'  At least he gives the role his best shot.
Latter-day filmings of his work, like The Grifters of the same year and (especially) The Kill-Off a year before, show there's plenty of punch left in the old pulpmeister..
This had high intellectual pretensions.The main lead intends to give a "deep" "meaningful" rendering(with voice over for his frames of mind naturally) and he was certainly influenced by the fifties/sixties "method " -which,when the script and the direction were worthwhile did give stunning results (see Clift,Newman,Winters).But here the story is abysmal.Besides it moves too slow,you could edit at least 20 minutes -including pointless flashbacks-and the plot line would not be changed .At times ,it's very doubtful that Bruce Dern believes in his "Uncle "character and his portraying often verges on parody.An interesting side is only skimmed over:the relationship young boy/hero -if we admit that the hero is himself some kind of child- When he says to the young kid that he would let nobody do harm to him,some welcome tenderness emerges.But it's botched and only the final scene returns to it.Word to the wise:Take  Foley's "at close range" instead:it has two great actors (Christopher Walken and Sean Penn together!),it's also an offbeat movie ,but it's gripping,suspenseful.Here my hitchcockometer points sullenly towards zero throughout..
Escaped mental patient and ex-boxer (Jason Patric) gets involved with a widow (Rachel Ward) and her "uncle" (Bruce Dern).
Patric acts like he's playing Lennie in "Of Mice and Men." Ward vamps it up but she's no femme fatale.
Find a good classic forties or fifties film noir instead of wasting two hours on this failure..
After Dark, My Sweet is a film with a classic noir set-up: a desperate man teams up with a violent drifter and an alcoholic widow to kidnap a rich child.
Director James Foley takes this plot and makes the best film that could possibly have been made with an already good premise.
It helps that this is based on a short novel by Jim Thompson, a writer whose pulpy crime plots-which focus more on twisted characters than plot details-seem to work especially well on the screen.The main character here is ex-boxer Kid Collins, a drifter who is troubled by an incident from his past.
Given a chance to escape the plot he's about to be pulled into, he refuses it because he sees a chance for a real connection with the widow.So, this film has all the best elements of noir: a troubled anti-hero, a desperate criminal plot, and a sense of weary inevitability in the way the plot unfolds.
It's a shame that this wasn't very good because I really miss film noir and try my best to see as many of the newer Neo-Noirs as possible.
The first thing I noticed about this movie was the poor lead performance from Jason Patric.
The rest of the film pretty much falls apart around him, as the characters aren't consistent and the plot isn't very well worked, and never becomes overly exciting.
After Dark, My Sweet continually tries to instil the same feeling that made the classic noirs of the forties and fifties such a delight, but it always fails as the director has forgotten to give the audience any reason to care for the characters and their plights.
Director James Foley also directed the very decent Glengarry Glen Ross, in which he managed to pull very strong performances out of his cast members, which suggests to me that he's a director who needs big stars in order to make his films work.
On the whole, I can't recommend this film because it doesn't do what it set out to; but anyone going into the movie expecting only a nineties thriller shouldn't be too disappointed..
Having escaped a mental institution he wanders...And wanders...And wanders until one humid day he finds himself in the wrong town, stumbles into the wrong bar and meets Fay (Ward) -the wrong kind of older woman.In need of someone to care for him some way, some how Kevin is vulnerable to her entreaties though she pretty obviously looks down on him.
Taken back to her place and offered a job with room and board the fly contemplates settling into the web.Fay takes Kevin to dinner and introduces him to Uncle Bud (Dern) - a mysterious older man who is a hundred different kinds of bad news.
In his case the fly nearly settles into a different kind of web which makes Fay's look appetizing.Jason Patric was on the verge of Hollywood superstardom before he was 25.
The career on the A-list which seemed almost certain to be his eluded him perhaps because he eluded it.Patric's first screen role was as Bruce Dern's drug-addict son in a dumb 1985 TV movie called 'Toughlove'..
A spectacularly beautiful movie.From Wikipedia entry; I cannot put it any better: Roger Ebert in his Great films review of the movie wrote "After Dark, My Sweet is the movie that eluded audiences; it grossed less than $3 million, has been almost forgotten, and remains one of the purest and most uncompromising of modern film noir.
There were some good noir films and there were a great many mediocre ones, but that era, and the monochrome (posh word for 'in black and white').
Don't watch it for the plot, watch it for the acting, the interaction between three losers – Jason Patric, always worth the price of admission, Bruce Dern (ditto) and Rachel Ward – and the utterly convoluted, at times quite hard to follow, storyline.It has its flaws but will keep you watching if this is your bag.
Three losers, a dirty ex-cop (Bruce Dern), an alcoholic seductress (Rachel Ward), and a punchy boxer (Jason Patric) become entwined in a botched kidnapping caper.
Nevertheless, a better than average noir film, with competent character development and acting, nice photography, and interesting musical score.
Jason Patric did the his best with a boring and mediocre script, and if I heard one more word of Rachel Ward's stupid snivelling accent I was going to slam my fist rather violently into the TV screen.
Great modern film noir.
Jason Patric delivered a fantastic performance as "Kid" Collins in this wonderful adaptation of the Jim Thompson novel.
Far superior to "The Grifters", which was a good movie, this film really stayed true to the pulp fiction/film noir roots from which the story came.
I recommend this movie to all film noir fans..
Jason Patric never ever was so sexy and powerful (the man gives a true performance), and Rachel Ward is all but sexy.The sexual tension, the pshycological heat, the footsteps of the past...
An excellent interpretation of Jim Thompson's novel, this neo-noir thriller has all the requisite elements--deranged ex-boxer turned drifter, alcoholic widow with sinister desires, ex-cop turned small-time crook, and a kidnap plot destined for doom.
Film-Noir Scholars (and that includes the evolutionary sub-genre Neo-Noir) seem to Love this Jim Thompson Adaptation Directed by James Foley.
Jason Patric Fares much Better and Bruce Dern is Expectedly Eccentric and Scary.But the Plot is Muddled, the Kidnapping Never is Convincing and the follow-up Third-Act is All Over the Place.
I think I've expanded on it a great deal, taken it further than any other American novelist." - James Ellroy "After Dark, My Sweet" is an atmospheric neo-noir in which a mentally handicapped man is suckered into kidnapping a child.
This may sound like a familiar noir plot – and it is - but the film nevertheless does several interesting things.Firstly, instead of a femme fatale seducing our noir hero into committing a crime, we have an elderly man played by Bruce Dern.
Because Bruce is a sort of surrogate femme fatale figure who seduces the girl into seducing our protagonist, we're never quite sure how involved in the criminal scheme the film's female character is.
Here, the unreliability extends 4 ways: the three characters and the camera.8/10 – This is an archetypal story which, though it betters similar neo-noir fare ("Body Heat", "Kill Me Again", "Red Rock West", "Blood Simple", "Memento", "Bound", "The Last Seduction", "Jade" etc), still suffers from the problem which James Ellroy tries to articulate above.Made in the 1980s and 90s, these films emulate noir narratives of the 1940s and 50s, a framework which was put to rest in "Blast of Silence", arguably the last of the classical noirs.
Uncle Bud and Collie are intriguing - never allowing the audience to know what really makes them tick - and Patric and Dern (I love Bruce Dern, by the way) are pitch perfect, Dern especially (see previous comment).
She's not bad, per se, but she's not Angelica Huston or Anette benning (see the adaptation of Jim Thompson's The Grifters if you don't know what I'm talking about - besides it's a better movie and you should start there for contemporary noir - it's the best of the 1990s and challenges Blood Simple for the title of best since Chinatown).
The ending explains why the Jason Patric character has been acting so strangely but the last 5 minutes could not change my opinion that the film is a waste of time.
Director James Foley's movie version of Jim Thompson's 1955 pulp novel "After Dark, My Sweet" provides an intriguing insight into the lives of three characters who've all seen better times.
Its story however, with its themes of betrayal, treachery and hopelessness is classic film noir material.Kevin "Collie" Collins (Jason Patric), an ex-boxer who's escaped from a mental institution meets Fay Anderson (Rachel Ward) an alcoholic widow, in a bar in the southern Californian desert.
George Dickerson is also excellent in a minor role as the very creepy Doctor Goldman who befriends Collie, ostensibly to help him, but also for his own dubious motives.The setting for "After Dark, My Sweet" contributes strongly to the atmosphere of the movie and mirrors very powerfully, the desolation which is such a strong feature of the lives of its characters..
In a roundabout way, these films (especially Lynch) give us the genesis of noir inside the head of the author, the creation myth behind the world where the hapless shmuck is foiled by the fates.The intelligent design of this is greatly hampered by a last minute twist, a simple cruelty as we often find in Jim Thompson.
That's an established convention by now, shocking though it may have been in 1950's "Sunset Boulevard." The story has Jason Patric, who doesn't seem to know how to spell his last name, as a washed-up ex boxer, working from place to place as a handyman, until he winds up at the desert spread of widow Rachel Ward, who welcomes him with open arms except that they don't quite open.
Through her, he meets a dodgy old character, Bruce Dern.Ward and Dern have cooked up a kidnapping scheme.
Rachel Ward gives a highly animated performance that contrasts nicely with Patric's reticence.
I saw this film a few years ago and I got to say that I really love it.Jason Patric was perfect for this weird role that he played.The director?I don't too many things about him...and I don't care.The screenplay is good,that's for sure.In just a few words I have to say about this movie that is weird,strange,even dark,but it's a good one.I saw it a few years ago and never saw it since then.I want to see it again and again.I know that I'm not gonna get sick of watching it.The scenes,the atmosphere,the actors,the story...everything is good.The movie should have lasted longer.I think 120 minutes should have been perfect.I was hoping for a part 2 for this movie.Too bad it din't happened.Jason Patric:you're the man !