If, as Philip Larkin famously wrote, “sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three”, then film noir does not stand as one of the beneficiaries. The classic noir cycle had burned itself out five years earlier with Touch of Evil and Kiss Me Deadly, both of which took the genre’s usual overheated tone and amped it up to the level of an atomic blast. By the early ’80s, there would be enough revivalist noirs to coin the term “neo-noir”, but they still hadn’t come to terms with the invention of sex. The core male-female relationship in a film like The Big Sleep or Double Indemnity is defined by an almost unbearable level of barely repressed sexual tension. Now the characters can just hop into bed during Act One, what’s driving these films?
By the early 1990s, neo-noirs like Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct had incorporated sex so fully into their plots that they created a new subgenre, the erotic thriller. Another way forward is shown by 1990’s The Hot Spot, reissued on Blu-Ray by Radiance Films. It can be considered an erotic thriller, and the booklet accompanying this disc features an essay by Leslie Byron Pitt contextualising it in the history of this genre. But it’s also based on a novel by Charles Williams, perhaps the most acclaimed 1950s pulp crime author not to have been adapted during the canonical noir cycle. It received little attention at the time of release, perhaps because 1990 was an unusually well-stocked year for crime movies; with Goodfellas, Miller’s Crossing and The Godfather Part III on release, it’s inevitable that smaller movies in a similar vein were crowded out. In terms of blending modern sexual explicitness with an authentic noir vibe, though, it’s worthy of being mentioned alongside Body Heat and Bound.
One asset the film has is its director Dennis Hopper, who’d acted in surely the most unique American crime film of the 1980s, Blue Velvet. The Hot Spot is not an overtly surreal film, yet Hopper’s relationship with Lynch leaves a palpable mark on it. Like Lynch’s Wild at Heart – another 1990 crime film – it ramps up the sleaziness until it becomes almost nihilistic, the kind of movie so oversexed that even Jennifer Connelly’s dog is called Spunky. In the process, it achieves something close to the relentless fatalism of vintage noir. You may think a man having simultaneous affairs with Connelly and Virginia Madsen would be the luckiest man in the world. As soon as Don Johnson, as drifter Harry Madox, meets Connelly’s Gloria and Madsen’s Dolly, however, you just know this is going to end as badly as it possibly can.
Everything Dolly does is sexualised – she spends more time shaving her legs than any other movie character, past or present – yet the actual sex scenes, with their deep shadows and teasing framing, leave you constantly aware that we could be seeing more. It’s the lure of the forbidden, which is exactly what Harry’s chasing.
Nothing in The Hot Spot is surprising, exactly, but this isn’t a genre which relies on surprises. When Harry decides to marry Gloria and run away with him to the Caribbean, you will be awarded absolutely no points for guessing the end credits do not roll over them on a beach in Jamaica – not least because these lovebirds’ meet-cute involves her trying to get him to kill her husband. The inevitability that any dream will be crushed is one of the things that differentiates a noir from an ordinary crime movie, and The Hot Spot manages to conjure up surprising, uncomfortable ways for Harry’s plans to go wrong. It’s also got a sense of place and atmosphere, which is always an asset in this kind of film. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a film that evokes baking midsummer heat as well as The Hot Spot does, to the extent where the opening montage of desert landscapes appears to be set on Arrakis.
It’s not a flawless film. I have yet to read a single review that doesn’t complain it’s too long, and yet it’s hard to know how to cut it down without damaging its strangely appealing, languid pace. This is a film about absolute scumbags in a miserable dead-end town which is paced like a gentle hang-out movie, and somehow it works. It has a superb cast, including Jerry Hardin as Dolly’s sap of a husband and Lynch regular Jack Nance at his Jack Nanciest. Yet the success of the film can be attributed largely to Madsen, who controls the whole movie’s tone perfectly. She remains just an inch away from parody, even when calling Harry a “bad bad boy” or describing sex as “more fun th’n eatin’ cotton candy barefoot”. Moreover, her decision to veto some of Dolly’s planned nude scenes sheds light on how this film, above all others, manages to blend classic noir with the erotic thriller so successfully. Everything Dolly does is sexualised – she spends more time shaving her legs than any other movie character, past or present – yet the actual sex scenes, with their deep shadows and teasing framing, leave you constantly aware that we could be seeing more. It’s the lure of the forbidden, which is exactly what Harry’s chasing.
As well as the aforementioned booklet, Radiance’s extra features include short but revealing archival interviews with Hopper, Madsen and co-star William Sadler, as well as a brand-new interview with Hopper’s biographer Nick Dawson and a similarly new piece by crime author Dwayne Swierczynski about Charles Williams’s source novel. The 2K restoration is exactly what such a visually lush film deserves; Dolly’s Cadillac has never been so pink.
The Hot Spot (1990) is out now on Radiance Films Blu-Ray (LE)
