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Remember pre-drunken Mel Gibson in Payback? Unlike in Braveheart or The Patriot, in that movie audience members were supposed to root for the bad guy. You may or may not be familiar with the genre, but there is a class of movies that cater to this concept in particular – “film noir.” Old school classics like Double Indemnity (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946), and later films like Chinatown (1974) are excellent examples.
This entire genre, however, has been flooded in more recent years by Quentin Tarantino, Elmore Leonard, and a multiplicity of lesser knockoffs of their work. Unfortunately, the hip cultural references and dialogue of this new grouping most often fall short of the days when William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler scripted for the big screen.
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An example of one of the better attempts to come along in a while, though, is director John Irvin’s (Hamburger Hill) 1997 City of Industry. In fact, it is nice to see a film noir movie that is not infected with slick cynicism or a sense of its own importance (see Two Days in the Valley for an example of this deplorable trend).
The film sports a respectable cast, including Harvey Keitel, Stephen Dorff, Timothy Hutton, Elliot Gould and the always enjoyable Famke Janssen. The plot revolves around an experienced crew of thugs whose plans for a jewel heist go wrong.
The nod to Keitel’s work in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) is most definitely apparent. The heist actually goes off much smoother here than in Reservoir Dogs, but the dissension among the ranks following the theft is a now-familiar theme.
Ultimately, though, the film’s greatest tension results from its two central characters – Roy Egan and Skip Kovich, played by Keitel and Dorff respectively. This is perhaps where City of Industry transcends much of what one might expect from simply another “film noir-esque” action flick.
Keitel’s performance recalls the character he played years ago in Scorcese’s Mean Streets (1973) – a young street punk trying to make his way in the underworld. It is as if that character has grown wiser and more mature, though, with Dorff taking on more of the characteristics of the sociopath played by Robert DeNiro in Mean Streets.
What becomes apparent through this view of the characters’ interaction is the contrast between what Kovich and Egan represent. If Kovich symbolizes the new, hip, amoral and out-of-control component of the post-Tarantino film world, then Egan stands opposing him. Egan represents the older tradition of antiheroes, both here and in Mean Streets – the solitary man who pays his debts and exhibits self-restraint.
There is a depth to this type of character, whose actions involve moral struggle, that makes him infinitely more interesting and capable of eliciting a sympathetic response from an audience than the newer characters in which this substance is wholly absent. The lines are drawn, then, and the question of who survives is left for the viewer to discover.
This is not to say, however, that the film is without its flaws. At times the direction seems sophomoric and the dialogue questionable. Character development is lacking in most of the actors besides Keitel and Dorff.
Furthermore, the thug who dies and leaves Miss Janssen without a husband is nearly as wooden an actor as Nicolas Cage (he’s also freakish enough in appearance to lend validity to the “X-Files” claim of alien-human cross breeding). And finally the ending, justifiably or not, is so lollipops and gumdrops that one is left with the suspicious cynicism evoked by the ending of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). Something just doesn’t ring true. A closure more along the lines of Brian De Palma’s Carlito’s Way (1993) might have been more satisfying or appropriate.
Still, the film is certainly worth a viewing, and a consideration of its implications seems in order. Enjoyable for everyone from the action fan to the film buff, City of Industry pays off.
