The Hot Spot

As an actor Dennis Hopper is no stranger to the world of pulp crime fiction and his helming of this Texan-set neo-noir shows that he is well-familiar with the style. Style there is plenty of here, particularly in capturing the lassitude of small-town dog-days but on the downside Hooper over-indulges his sexual fantasies with the result that the film loses it way in a table-sagging smorgasbord of bondage, lesbianism, topless dancers and gratuitous female nudity (largely supplied by Virginia Madsen playing a trashy nymphomaniac).  

Don Johnson plays Harry Madox, a handsome loser who drifts into a dusty Texan town, gets a job as a used car salesman and, as only happens in the movies, before long is involved with two hot dishes: his boss’s floozie of a wife, Dolly (Madsen), and the former's sweet-as-pie 19-year old secretary, Gloria (Jennifer Connelly).  Also before long, in true noir style, Harry is up to his eyeballs in adultery, bank robbery, blackmail, double crosses and murder.

Perhaps the plot of Charles Williams' 1952 novel "Hell Hath No Fury", the source for the script by Nona Tyson (Williams also gets a scriptwriting credit although he died in 1975), worked on the printed page and there are a lot of good elements in the film, not least of which is a soundtrack with John Lee Hooker, Taj Mahal and Miles Davis playing live, but it needed considerable tightening up for the screen, especially in its latter stages. Hopper doesn’t seem to be able to distinguish between what is necessary to the story and what is not and all the pace goes out of the film as the plot twists itself into a pastiche..  

Even when it comes to the sex, when one compares Johnson and Madsen’s supposedly steamy affair to that of Nicholson and Lange in The Postman Always Rings Twice  (1981) one can see in general how wide of the mark this film falls.  For all its initial promise the final outcome is a skilfully-knowing assemblage of genre elements without any real dramatic impact.

 

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