The Screengrab : paths of glory

Set Your DVR: The World’s Greatest Sinner

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:30:00 GMT

We interrupt your regularly scheduled Screengrab to bring you a special bonus edition of Set Your DVR. Unless you’re a night owl, you’ll want to do just that, because this bad boy doesn’t start until 2:15 in the blessed a.m. (1:15 Central) on Turner Classic Movies. But it’s a real rarity: the one and only motion picture directed by one of the great madmen of cinema, Timothy Carey. You’ve seen him in movies by Stanley Kubrick (The Killing, Paths of Glory) and John Cassavettes (Minnie and Moskowitz,, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie)…and if you still can’t picture him, I direct your attention to his frenzied shirtless hillbilly boogie from Poor White Trash:

So…that guy. Of The World’s Greatest Sinner, Jerry Renshaw of the Austin Chronicle writes: “Words like ‘offbeat’ are far too mild for this disconcertingly sleazy and base idiot-savant oddity that I cannot recommend highly enough for fans of the bizarre.” Personally, I’ve been waiting years to see this one and my DVR is already set. Again, it’s early tomorrow morning, Saturday, April 18th at 2:15 a.m. (1:15 a.m. Central) on TCM.

Set Your DVR!: December 15 - 22, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

What a great week for movies on cable! Here’s what’s coming up that’s worth your time. In the spirit of the holidays, I’ve even gotten a little expansive. But this week brings another embarrassment of riches.

The times are, as always, in Central/Eastern format. Also, as always, please let me know in comments if you see something coming up that I’ve missed. I’ll try to add it to the regular column if I can, but my time will be tight in the next few weeks, so please don’t be too disappointed if I don’t get to your recommendation.

Monday, December 15:
2:45/3:45 pm: Mystery Train on IFC. Jim Jarmusch’s triptych about the strange charms of Memphis, TN.
6:25/7:25 pm: George Washington on IFC.

Tuesday, December 16:
3:25/4:25 am: Mystery Train on IFC.
6:50/7:50 am: George Washington on IFC.
7/8 am: Decision at Sundown on TCM. A Randolph Scott & Budd Boetticher Western, and that means good.
7:30/8:30 am: Batman on AMC. This is the 1966 Batman, the very definition of campy.
10:25/11:25 am: Howl’s Moving Castle on IFC. Miyazaki’s great animated film about war and magic and love and identity, presented here in the original Japanese with subtitles.
12:30/1:30 pm: George Washington on IFC.
4:05/5:05 pm: The Thin Red LIne on IFC. Malick’s unconventional anti-war drama is a force of nature.
5/6 pm: The Cincinnati Kid on TCM. What could be more exciting than Steve McQueen playing high-stakes poker?
7/8 pm: Shadow of a Doubt on TCM. Great little second-tier Hitchcock film that ought to be in the first tier.
11 pm/12 am: The Third Man on TCM. If you like movies and haven’t seen this, you MUST rectify your oversight immediately.

Wednesday, December 17:
8:30/9:30 pm: Death on the Nile on TCM. A Hercule Poirot mystery that was a favorite of mine when I was a kid. The nonstop excitement practically screams “heavyset Belgian detective!”
8/9 pm: The Thin Red Line on IFC.
11 pm/12 am: The New World on IFC. That's a lot of Malick for one sitting!

Thursday, December 18:
1:30/2:30 am: The Thin Red Line on IFC.
4:25/5:25 am: The New World on IFC.
9:15/10:15 am: The Naked City on TCM. One of the greatest film noirs.
10:30/11:30 pm: Blade Runner on SCIFI. Always worth a viewing.
11 pm/12 am: Vanishing Point on FMC. As the Zen koan says, -There is no why. There is only Kowalski driving through the desert.

Friday, December 19:
12/1 am: Before Sunset on WE. I try not to mention movies that will be broken by commercials, but this one, a sequel to 1995’s Before Sunrise, has a certain charm in its older, wiser take on young love.
1:30/2:30 am: Elephant on IFC. Dreamy Van Sant flick about high school snipers.
3/4 am: Vanishing Point on FMC.
8:45/9:45 am: Paths of Glory on TCM.
5:30/6:30 pm: The Others on OXYGEN. Pleasantly creepy ghost story starring Nicole Kidman.
6:15/7:15 pm: The Player on IFC. Altman’s tour de force “conventional Hollywood” film, which starts with an extended homage to Touch of Evil and proceeds to tear down the walls of Old Hollywood.
8:30/9:30 pm: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou on IFC. Many Wes Anderson fans felt that this was the moment when his whimsy and prop fetish finally overwhelmed his ability to tell a story. I think there’s a beating heart in this story, but The Darjeeling Limited was an unpleasant stillborn mess.
11 pm/12 am: The Face of Another on IFC. Brilliant and creepy Japanese horror film about the slippery nature of identity.

Saturday, December 20:
2/3 am: The Face of Another on IFC.
5:30/6:30 am: The Ox-Bow Incident on AMC.
7/8 am: The Hidden Fortress on IFC. Akira Kurosawa’s tale of a princess in peril, swept away by war, protected by her loyal general, and kept constantly on the verge of trouble by a couple of bumbling peasants. Reportedly one of the major inspirations for Star Wars.
7/8 am: The Others on OXYGEN.
7:15/8:15 am: My Darling Clementine on AMC. Iconic John Ford Western about the shootout at the OK Corral.
2:30/3:30 pm: 8 Women on LOGO.
5:35/6:35 pm: Gosford Park on IFC. Robert Altman’s brilliant upstairs/downstairs Edwardian murder mystery.
8:30/9:30 pm: Mulholland Dr. on LOGO. One of David Lynch’s best films, propelled by dream-logic and horror.

Sunday, December 21:
8:45/9:45 am: Kiss of Death on FMC. Top-notch film noir. Unfortunately, it’s playing at the same time as...
8:45/9:45 am: The Testament of Dr. Mabuse on IFC. Fritz Lang’s 1933 thriller that didn’t just invent the procedural, but built it on a parable about a crime boss able to mesmerize his subordinates with his words and imagery. Lang fled the Nazis for America almost immediately after its release. The ability of many of the scenes to retain their shock value today is a testament to this movie's sheer brilliance.
12:15/1:15 pm: Gosford Park on IFC.

Monday, December 22:
2:45/3:45 am: The 400 Blows on TCM. Francois Truffaut’s incredibly powerful ode to child neglect and juvenile delinquency.
7/8 am: Au Revoir, Les Enfants on IFC. Fantastic Louis Malle flick about a boarding school in France during the Nazi occupation that’s hiding a young Jew.
11 am/12 pm: Bringing Up Baby on TCM. A screwball comedy classic that everyone should see at least once in this all-too-short life.
12:30/1:30 pm: Au Revoir, Les Enfants on IFC.

Set Your DVR!: November 10 - 17, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Mon, Nov 10:

2:45/3:45 pm: Becket on TCM. As I wrote last week, decent Oscar bait from 1964.

3/4 pm: The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years on IFC. Awwright! Hello, Cleveland.

Tues, Nov 11:

6:55/7:55 am: Solaris on IFC (repeat at 2:40/3:40 pm). As I mentioned in our utopia/dystopia list from last week, Tarkovsky's Solaris is a stunning, somber look at alienation. This is a slow one, but it pays off in spades.

11 pm/12 am: The Thin Red Line on IFC (repeat on 11/12 at 4/5 am). Also a little slow. Also pays off in spades. Terrence Malick's take on the war movie falls somewhere between nature film and meditation on the soul.

Wed, Nov 12:

8/9 pm: Wild at Heart on IFC (repeat on 11/13 at 12:30/1:30 am). My least favorite Lynch. I don't even know why I'm recommending this.

Thurs, Nov 13:

12:30/1:30 am: Blow-Up on TCM. Antonioni's meditation the lens and the horror of other people, all in Swinging London. Not my favorite of his movies, but it's essential for movie geeks.

1/2 am: Vanishing Point on FMC. Cool cars & existential crises!

2:30/3:30 am: Quartet on TCM. Four stories by W. Somerset Maugham, as introduced by the man himself.

5/6 am: Isle of the Dead on CHILLER (repeat on 11/14 at 2/3 am). I'm tired of recommending Val Lewton-produced horror flicks. But this is a good one.

8:45/9:45 am: Amarcord on IFC (repeat at 2:20/3:20 pm and on 11/14 at 4:50/5:50 am). Fellini making the most Felliniesque movie of his career.

11:45 am/12:45 pm: The Shop Around The Corner on TCM. Date movies don't get better than this. True, the execrable You've Got Mail is based on this, but Lubitsch's movie has a wildly beating heart, which neither Meg Ryan nor AOL can claim.

Fri, Nov 14:

3/4 pm: Rear Window on TCM. Everybody loves Hitchcock. I've been avoiding recommending his movies, because a) there's always a Hitchcock movie playing on TV somewhere and b) even the bad ones are good, so why bother recommending them? But Rear Window is so great that I just wanted to mention that it's going to be on.

5/6 pm: The Thomas Crown Affair on TCM. Q: Would I enjoy watching Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway doing mostly nothing for 2 hours? A: The Thomas Crown Affair.

Sat, Nov 15:

1/2 am: Suspiria on TCM. Dario Argento's greatest movie.

2:45/3:45 am: The Haunting on TCM. As always, the Robert Wise movie, not the terrible remake.

7/8 am: Three Outlaw Samurai on IFC. Pretty good samurai movie.

7/8 pm: Paths of Glory on TCM. Kubrick's classic anti-war movie, starring Kirk Douglas as a man who is OUTRAGED that the military might be run by incompetent boobs. The actors who aren't chewing scenery might just tear your heart out.

Sun, Nov 16:

7/8 am: The Seventh Seal on IFC. The source of the famous Swedish aphorism "Never play chess with Death unless you are Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, DFA."

10:15/11:15 am: Bright Young Things on IFC (repeat at 4:15/5:15 pm and on 11/17 at 3:55/4:55 am). Stephen Fry's adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's "Vile Bodies." Funny AND bitter!

Mon, Nov 17:

1/2 am: Diabolique on TCM. One of my favorite suspense movies. The dread that permeates it never lets up until the heart-stopping finale.

6/7 pm: Restoration on IFC. Honestly, I can barely remember this movie, but I seem to recall that Robert Downey, Jr. killed in it.

8:30/9:30 pm: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) on TCM. The Charles Laughton version.

10:15/11:15 pm: The New World on IFC (repeat on 11/18 at 2:45/3:45 am). Just recently wrote about this one, too. Over-wrote, you might even say. Still, this is one of the best films of the last decade.

Thursday Morning Poll for October 2, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Last week, Screengrab’s intrepid writing staff unveiled its list of the greatest war movies ever made, and topping our list was Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion. But when we asked the readers to pick their favorite, they settled upon something a little more American. So cue up the Wagner and break out your surfboard, because according to our readership, the greatest war movie of all is none other than Francis Ford Coppola’s incendiary Apocalypse Now, which outpaced Renoir’s film 33% to 25%. Tying for #3 were Robert Altman’s MASH and Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory with 17% apiece, and bringing up the rear was Casablanca, a fine movie but undoubtedly the least war movie-ish of the bunch.

This week, we remember the late Paul Newman. Earlier today, we ran our picks of Newman’s greatest performances, and now we’ll let you choose your favorites from our top five choices. Which of these films represented Newman’s finest hours?

Favorite Paul Newman performance? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. See you next week!

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:00:00 GMT

5. PATHS OF GLORY (1957)

One of Stanley Kubrick’s earlier films, Paths of Glory stands as both a link to his later style and a curious anomaly. While it contains many of the technical hallmarks of his later work, often in embryonic form, it also bears – at least partly thanks to notorious pulp novelist Jim Thompson, who Kubrick recruited to whip the screenplay into shape – an incredibly powerful emotional resonance that belies his later reputation as a cool, bloodless artisan. Paths of Glory is set during the grimmest stretches of the First World War, at a time when the French army was said to practice a variant of decimation in order to prevent desertion and insubordination as the troops increasingly perceived the war to be a pointless and horrid waste of lives. Colonel Dax, played with uncharacteristic depth by Kirk Douglas, is ordered to lead his men on a charge that goes disastrously awry; following a battle scene legendary for its grim, ugly, almost sightless realism, his commanding officer, to save face, orders a quartet of men – chosen for no other reason than that they are largely friendless and undesirable – executed for cowardice. More than Kubrick’s first great film, Paths of Glory also marks a turning point in the way modern cinema treats war, and the movie’s unforgettable final scene provides an emotionally troubling catharsis, as doomed men are serenaded by a captured German woman (played by an actress, Susanne Christian, whom Kubrick would later marry), that is one of the most devastating punches in war cinema.

4. M*A*S*H (1970)

Ask someone – ask anyone – to name the greatest film about the Korean War, and they’ll tell you it’s Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H. The only problem is, M*A*S*H isn’t about Korea at all. Robert Altman clearly intended it to refer, in all its blackly funny glory, to the then-raging war in Vietnam. However, 20th Century Fox, already nervous about how the film would be received, understandably panicked at the thought that this hilariously subversive treatment of the madness of war and the use of near-nihilistic dark comedy as the only reasonable response to it. Altman, who by his own lights “had practice working for people who don’t care about quality, and I learned to sneak it in”, had utterly failed to mention Korea at all, so the studio stuck in a title card in post-production and added some clumsy radio announcements that made it clear to Mr. & Mrs. America that no, this was a different Asian anti-communist crusade. Their minds eased, Mr. & Mrs. A took the movie to heart – or at least didn’t demand the public immolation of its director; the next thing you know, the movie was turned into a beloved ‘70s sitcom that maintained the formal structure of the movie, if none of its deeply antisocial content. If M*A*S*H has been superseded as an anti-war film, or as even an uplifted middle finger to authority, it’s still the funniest war movie ever made.

3. CASABLANCA (1942)

If Casablanca is no longer the consensus pick as the greatest movie of all time – and there are plenty of people who will make a damn convincing case that it is – it’s at least one of the very few films that almost everyone agrees is great. And that’s especially surprising, because it’s not only a war film, but one made during wartime – hardly an environment conducive to greatness. But while it’s never particularly subtle (even people who have never seen it know within the first hour that the self-centered Rick is eventually going to stick his neck out and do what’s right), it’s simply so jam-packed with greatness that its power cannot be denied. Skillfully directed, beautifully filmed, and crammed with so many iconic performances that it’s practically a primer on what good acting looked like in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Casablanca is also, amazingly, a fiercely patriotic picture that manages, through sheer force of its goodwill and beauty, to not come across as jingoistic. Roger Ebert once wrote, in his review of Paths of Glory, that the folk song performed by the German woman at that film’s end was the ultimate condemnation of patriotism, just as the triumphant singing of “Le Marseillaise” at Rick’s Café is the ultimate celebration of it. Unlike many of the greatest war films, Casablanca never makes you wonder if it’s all worth it or which side you should be on; but unlike many of the worst war films, it also doesn’t make you feel dirty for cheering on the good guys, or cheat you into a false sense of smugness. It’s the purest expression of the notion of a good war, and sometimes, that’s not so bad.

2. APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

"My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. My film is Vietnam." That sounds like a crazy person talking, and it must have been a crazy person who made Apocalypse Now, surely the greatest "war as acid trip" movie ever made. Who among us is not intimately familiar with all the Stations of the Cross by now, from "Saigon. Shit." to "Charlie don't surf" to "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" and finally, "The horror. The horror"? There's no point trying to defend Coppola's greatest folly in terms of coherent narrative or classical Hollywood structure -- you're either aboard for the ride with Willard, Chief, Clean and the rest, or you're reaching for your new set of Godfather DVDs. Even among those of us for whom Apocalypse was a formative experience in mind-expanding cinema, it's clear that the finished product teeters on the brink between genius and nonsense, and you need only spend an evening with the misguided Apocalypse Now Redux to see how thin the line between the two actually is. But the ambition, spectacle, weirdness, and pure guts of the original version is more than enough to secure it a place of honor on my list of desert island discs.

1. GRAND ILLUSION (1937)

Jean Renoir's masterpiece uses a pair of actors with grand theatrical styles, Erich von Stroheim and Pierre Fresnay, and France's leading exponent of the unadorned, working-class style, Jean Gabin, and by putting them together in a prison camp during World War I, means to convey a powerful anti-war message of universal brotherhood. In this it was so successful that the Nazis ordered all the prints be seized after they marched into France. For years the film was thought to be lost, and Renoir, who really had hoped to have some detrimental impact on the coming of World War II, felt that he had as much solid proof that he had failed as any filmmaker had ever had. Instead of bringing us world peace, he had to settle for having made one of the four of five greatest movies in history, the poor sap.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Six & Part Seven

Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

No, But I've Read the Movie: THE KILLER INSIDE ME

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 16 May 2008 19:45:00 GMT

Jim Thompson was tailor-made for Hollywood success. He worked there for some time, and found early success with no less august a personage than Stanley Kubrick; he worked on the screenplay for Kubrick's terrific late-period noir The Killing and wrote the stunning war movie Paths of Glory in its entirety. Later on, a number of very fine films would be made from his novels, including two different versions of The Getaway of differing success, as well as The Grifters, After Dark My Sweet, and Coup de Torchon, Bertrand Tavernier's masterful adaptation of his Pop. 1280. Thompson's books carried a bleak criminal sensibility that was perfect for the noir era, and he wrote terrific, snappy dialogue that sounds great coming out of actors who have a feel for his work. Due to a combination of bad luck (many of his projects were prematurely scuttled by studio interference or money problems), politics (he was blacklisted in the McCarthy era due to his leftist leanings), and his own personal demons (he was plagued by alcoholism and innumerable other issues), Thompson never became the motion picture legend he could have been. Though critics have rediscovered his work, previously relegated to pulp status, and he's undergoing a similar reassessment to Raymond Chandler, many of his best books remain unadopted for the big screen. That's a shame, but not as bad as the fact that what's arguably his greatest accomplishment -- the nasty but near-perfect noir novel The Killer Inside Me -- actually did get made into a movie, but a movie that's been almost entirely forgotten, and with good reason.

With The Killer Inside Me, Jim Thompson created one of the most chilling portraits of pure psychotic evil ever committed to paper, but it's not just a bloody thrill-ride trash novel the way that serial killer novels developed in later years. Lou Ford, the novel's main character, is a man of surprising depth, and Thompson's unfolding of the character is a psychological portrait that transcends its pulp origins and becomes something worthy of Dostoevsky. Ford is the sheriff in a small mining town in Montana, trusted by everyone; he's such a folksy character, straight out of cowboy art, that even his fellow townsfolk, hearing the endless cliches and banal observations he spouts, think of him as somewhat simple-minded. But Lou Ford has a secret: a twisted mind and a history of dark childhood abuses by his physician father have turned him into a monster. He's far more intelligent than he lets on, putting up his stupidity as a show to allay suspicion from his grim hobbies. As he puts it, "When things get a little rough, I go out and kill a fewpeople, that's all." In fact, part of his downfall is that he assumes everyone else is as stupid as they think he is. Ford is under no illusions about his future: he describes himself as "waiting to be split down the middle", the inevitable result of the double life he's committed to lead. But in the meantime, a lot of people are going to get hurt by the man Lou Ford is, and the man people think he is. In 1976, Western veteran Burt Kennedy (Welcome to Hard Times, Support Your Local Sheriff) brought Thompson's greatest novel to the screen.

WHAT IT HAD: Any adaptation of The Killer Inside Me lives and dies by the man who plays Lou Ford, and the movie version at least succeeded on that point. As Ford, Stacy Keach is terrific; he presents a clear understanding of the character and plays him well at every turn. When Lou Ford is called upon to be folksy and corny, Keach plays it well without ever hamming it up; and when Lou Ford's dark side needs to come out, Keach is fantastic, displaying his character's psychotic tendencies in an understated, subtle, almost tender way that perfectly suits the role. A few of the supporting cast stand out as well, particularly Keenan Wynn and Don Stroud; they're not up to Keach's level, but they provide a nice veteran anchor to the cast. While the script (by Robert Chamblee and Hollywood gadabout Edward Mann) isn't stellar, it at least does its best to preserve some of Thompson's best dialogue.

WHAT IT LACKED: The Killer Inside Me is, to be perfectly honest, a grade-Z production. It's not an exploitation flick -- in fact, a little more gore and sex probably would have pepped it up a bit -- but just from looking at it, you can tell it was made on the cheap. Its production values are substandard and at times the whole thing plays like a bad TV movie. Few of the supporting roles, most especially Susan Tyrell as Keach's foil and romantic interest, are up to snuff, and the plethora of half-assed acting diminishes his performance. It's not clear whether it was just timidity or a eye towards the ratings that kept the writers and director from fully embracing the brutal violence of the book, but it leads to some crucial scenes being left out or soft-pedaled. And while Kennedy's direction is competent, it's never any more than that, and it's sometimes less. Overall, the entire film has a lackluster, patched-together quality; it never coheres into the elegant and vicious thing that is the book.

DID IT SUCCEED?: Nope. It's a testament to how unsuccessful the movie is that it's most widely available in DVD format on a double-feature disc with another forgotten thriller from the '70s. As a resume item, it didn't do much for anyone's career, and while it's not a terrible film, its pleasures -- largely, Keach's performance and some choice bits of Thompson's dialogue -- are few and far between. Even if a remastered edition were available that sheds the crappy digital transfer and overall poor visual quality, it's not as if there's much to watch. It's a project worth revisiting; in the hands of a skilled director with a feel for noir and an affinity for Thompson's gorgeous, nihilistic prose, this book could make a great movie, especially today when an antihero like Lou Ford could really resonate with Tarantino-hardened moviegoers. There's a fine film waiting to be made out of The Killer Inside Me, but unfortunately, this isn't it.

Forgotten Films: "This World, Then the Fireworks" (1997)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:00:00 GMT

This past week marked the thirty-first anniversary of the death of Jim Thompson, the cult-object writer who worked on the scripts of Stanley Kubrick's The Killing and Paths of Glory, but whose real gift to film history was a shelf's worth of pulp novels (The Killer Inside Me, The Getaway, The Grifters) so intense and obsessive in their seaminess that they amount to a double-dog-dare to the movies: You think you're the repository of forbidden daydreams? Put this on the big screen! Two versions of The Getaway, including one with Sam Peckinpah's name in the credits, softened the relationship between the husband and wife bank robbers on the lam (the star of the Peckipah version, Steve McQueen, having objected to the less cheerful elements of a screenplay treatment turned in by Thompson himself); Coup de Torchon, directed by Bertrand Tavernier and based on Pop. 1280, is in motherfucking French! Even the best of all Thompson adaptations, Stephen Frears's The Grifters, is handsomely mounted and has a good vicious streak but keeps it distance from the vortex of Thompson's deeply felt hatefulness; it maps the dragon's lair down to the last molted scale but resists the urge to fling you in there by your feet and nail the door shut behind you.

To see what Thompson's special, sweaty brand of nihilistic dementia looks like uncensored, flashy but not polished, your best bet might be the 1997 This World, Then the Fireworks, based on a posthumously published Thompson fever dream. Directed by a music-video veteran named Michael Oblowitz, the movie lets you know right from its opening moments that it's not going to play coy and try to impress you with its subtle touch. The antihero and narrator, Marty, has a twin sister, Carol, and the movie opens with a little backstory interlude set on their fifth birthday. Entertainment at the party includes a shootout between their father and the wife of a woman dad's been screwing. "The man on the floor didn't have any head, hardly any head at all," Marty says, by way of explaining why he and sis got such a kick out of the festivities. Oblowitz shoots this bloody-trauma sequence in over-the-top funhouse mode, breaking out the fish-eye lenses and dousing the screen with surreally bright colors and contorted faces leaning into the camera. He doesn't pull back much when the action shifts to the "present"--which is supposed to be 1956 but looks more like some perpetual Noirville, U.S.A.--and Marty and his sister, who's become his fuck buddy, are played by Billy Zane and Gina Gershon, both looking as if they'd immigrated to our world from the covers of old paperback thrillers.

It might be a stretch to call This World a good movie, but it's true to its overheated vision in a way that's amazing to watch, partly because it makes you aware of how watered-down down pulp movies really are. Zane and Gershon thrive in this atmosphere. She's never been as eerily adorable as when she describes having suckered a couple of thugs who thought they could threaten her into staying out of their territory ("I do believe they'd never heard of chloral nitrate!"), and he looks unusually at home whether he's resigning from his job as a newspaper reporter by physically assaulting his editor (because the man has said nice things about his work, which bothers him because it makes him worry that the man might have the capacity to understand him) or romancing a masochistic woman cop (Sheryl Lee) by asking, "Are you blonde all over, or just where it shows?" If there's any real art mixed in with the cheap thrills and dazzling hype of This World, it comes from Sheryl Lee; as in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, she demonstrates a rare, brave talent for acting her character's sexual degradation that sensitizes you to the pain inside the pulp fantasy. She conveys the unhealthy attractions of Jim Thompson's cruel fantasy life even as she transcends the mindset that it grew out of.