That’s not to say I would have preferred an X-rated porno flick like The Life and Times of Xaviera Hollander, which opened here during the summer to little or no acclaim. No, I like the R rating for The Happy Hooker. It gives the movie a certain restraining charm. What was the last bordello epic you saw in which all the most interesting scenes were set in the parlor? The movie at times makes Miss Hollander’s enterprise seem so wholesome, so much of a spirit with such other moneymakers as commodity futures and the franchising game, that it’s a wonder the postal service hasn’t commemorated the industry by now.
That’s largely due to the charm of Lynn Redgrave, in the title role. Miss Redgrave is the distinguished British actress, daughter of Sir Michael, sister of Vanessa, who vowed when The Happy Hooker started filming that it would be a tasteful comedy and wouldn’t embarrass the family. By and large, she’s right. The movie’s got a sort of innocence to it, and when Xaviera pedals between clients on her ten-speed bike she seems to be hooking just for the fresh air.
She’s lured to New York in the first place by a marriage proposal, but the would-be suitor turns out to be a twerp, and she gets a job as a secretary and translator. In walks a Frenchman with a charming stutter (Jean-Pierre Aumont), and she falls for him. They indulge in unspecified offscreen bliss long enough for her to meet the Frenchman’s friends, who include New York’s top madam, and then the Frenchman exits after giving her a large envelope filled with currency.
He has, she announces tearfully, made her feel like a whore—but she counts the money and her tears dry. And from then until the final calamitous police raid (which is only revenge by a cop who tried and failed to rape her, you understand), Xaviera services a growing clientele of New York’s top businessmen, opens her own brothel, and learns such profundities as that “all men are really little boys.” The movie has a happy ending—she and her girls get out on bail—and all that’s left for next time is a sequel showing her writing her magazine advice column. Maybe it could be called “Miss Lonelytarts.”
Hard Rain
(Directed by Mikael Salomon; starring Morgan Freeman, Christian Slater; 1998)
Hard Rain is one of those movies that never convince you their stories are really happening. From beginning to end, I was acutely aware of actors being paid to stand in cold water. Suspension of my disbelief in this case would have required psychotropic medications.
Oh, the film is well made from a technical viewpoint. The opening shot is a humdinger, starting out with a vast floodplain, zooming above houses surrounded by water, and then ending with a close-up of a cop’s narrowing eyes. But even then, I was trying to spot the effects—to catch how they created the flood effect, and how they got from the flood to the eyes.
Funny, how some movies will seduce you into their stories while others remain at arm’s length. Titanic was just as artificial and effects driven as Hard Rain, and yet I was spellbound. Maybe it was because the people on the doomed ship had no choice: The Titanic was sinking, and that was that.
In Hard Rain, there is a bad guy (Morgan Freeman) who has a choice. He wants to steal some money, but all during the film I kept wondering why he didn’t just give up and head for dry ground. How much of this ordeal was he foolish enough to put up with? Water, cold, rain, electrocutions, murders, shotguns, jet-ski attacks, drownings, betrayals, collisions, leaky boats, stupid and incompetent partners, and your fingertips shrivel up: Is it worth it?
The film opens in a town being evacuated because of rising floodwaters. There’s a sequence involving a bank. At first we think we’re witnessing a robbery, and then we realize we are witnessing a pickup by an armored car. What’s the point? Since the bankers don’t think they’re being robbed and the armored-truck drivers don’t think they’re robbing them, the sequence means only that the director has gone to great difficulty to fool us. Why? So we can slap our palms against our brows and admit we were big stupes?
By the time we finally arrived at the story, I was essentially watching a documentary about wet actors at work. Christian Slater stars, as one of the armored-truck crew. Randy Quaid is the ambiguous sheriff. Morgan Freeman is the leader of the would-be thieves, who have commandeered a powerboat. Ah, but I hear you asking, why was it so important for the armored car to move the cash out of the bank before the flood? So Freeman’s gang could steal it, of course. Otherwise, if it got wet, hey, what’s the Federal Reserve for?
Minnie Driver plays a local woman who teams up with Slater, so that they can fall in love while saving each other from drowning. First Slater is in a jail cell that’s about to flood, and then Driver is handcuffed to a staircase that’s about to flood, and both times I was thinking what rotten luck it was that Hard Rain came so soon after the scene in Titanic where Kate Winslet saved Leonardo Di Caprio from drowning after he was handcuffed on the sinking ship. It’s bad news when a big action scene plays like a demonstration of recent generic techniques.
Meanwhile, Morgan Freeman’s character is too darned nice. He keeps trying to avoid violence while still trying to steal the money. This plot requires a mad dog like Dennis Hopper. Freeman’s character specializes in popping up suddenly from the edge of the screen and scaring the other characters, even though it is probably pretty hard to sneak up on somebody in a powerboat. Freeman is good at looking wise and insightful, but the wiser and more insightful he looks, the more I wanted him to check into a motel and order himself some hot chocolate.
Hard Rain must have been awesomely difficult to make. Water is hard to film around, and here were whole city streets awash, at night and in the rain. The director is Mikael Salomon, a former cameraman, who along with cinematographer Peter Menzies, Jr., does a good job of making everything look convincingly wet. And they stage a jet-ski chase through school corridors that’s an impressive action sequence, unlikely though it may be.
I was in Los Angeles the weekend Hard Rain had its preview, and went to talk to the cast. I found myself asking: Wasn’t there a danger of electrocution when you were standing for weeks in all that water with electrical cables everywhere? That’s not the sort of question you even think about if the story is working. Hey, how about this for a story idea? An actor signs up for a movie about a flood, little realizing that a celebrity stalker, who hates him, has been hired as an electrician on the same picture.
Hav Plenty
(Directed by Christopher Scott Cherot; starring Christopher Scott Cherot, Chenoa Maxwell; 1998)
I’ve grown immune to the information that a movie is “a true story,” but when a movie begins with that promise and a quote from the Bible, I get an uneasy feeling. And when it starts with a “true story,” a Bible quote, and clips from home movies, and photos of several main characters, I wonder if I’m watching a movie or a research project. Amateur writers love to precede their own prose with quotations. I don’t know whether they think it’s a warm-up or a good luck charm.