After Dark, My Sweet (1990) YIFY - Download Movie TORRENT

It's a shame that this wasn't very good because I really miss film noir and try my best to see as many of the newer Neo-Noirs as possible. The first thing I noticed about this movie was the poor lead performance from Jason Patric. He looks too scruffy to lead a film like this, and his general lack of enthusiasm doesn't do much to get the audience into the film. The rest of the film pretty much falls apart around him, as the characters aren't consistent and the plot isn't very well worked, and never becomes overly exciting. The acting is all rather downbeat and in trying to put in good performances, none of the cast really manage it. The plot follows a retired boxer who has escaped from a loony bin. He stops at a bar for a drink and soon meets a young widow named Fay. She lets him stay on a caravan on her land, and things start looking up for the ex-mental patient. However, things take a turn towards the wrong side of the law when Fay's uncle Bob turns up and convinces the pair to partake in a kidnapping that he's planning. This leaves the scruffy, lunatic, ex-boxing drifter in a sticky situation, as he to decide where his loyalties lie...I haven't read the book by Jim Thompson upon which this film is based, and given my viewing of this film; I'm not going to bother. After Dark, My Sweet continually tries to instil the same feeling that made the classic noirs of the forties and fifties such a delight, but it always fails as the director has forgotten to give the audience any reason to care for the characters and their plights. Director James Foley also directed the very decent Glengarry Glen Ross, in which he managed to pull very strong performances out of his cast members, which suggests to me that he's a director who needs big stars in order to make his films work. The cinematography is good, but doesn't fit the tone of the film at all. This sort of film got its name for the black and white picture, so it's always going to be difficult to create a noir atmosphere with a crisp and clear colour picture. That being said, the film does look nice and the director captures the locations well. On the whole, I can't recommend this film because it doesn't do what it set out to; but anyone going into the movie expecting only a nineties thriller shouldn't be too disappointed.

In James Foley's After Dark, My Sweet, drawn from Jim Thompson's moody suspense novel, Jason Patric gives a late riff on early Brando. He plays `Kid' Collins, a `retired' boxer who spent some spells in mental institutions after killing an opponent in the ring; now he's frozen into a perpetual fighter's crouch. Now on the road, he drifts into a bar frequented by Rachel Ward and her unexplained Cornish accent (still a juicer, she's not quite the slatternly shrew of the book). She takes him home and stashes him in a trailer out back among the date palms. Next, up pops `Uncle' Bud (Bruce Dern), who suborns Patric into a half-baked scheme for kidnapping a rich kid. As happens with such schemes, things go awry (the kid turns out to be a diabetic, for one thing), and it falls to Patric to put matters right by a supreme act of self-sacrifice.But the somnolent pace and elliptical plotting that worked in Thompson's telling sit uncomfortably on the screen. Even in the 1950s, the novel felt that it belonged to the conventions of a decade (or two) earlier it's a Depression-era, or immediate post-war kind of story. Fast-forwarding it to the 1990s proved more a shock than it could sustain, a disparity exaggerated by misguided fealty to the book. While there's some fussy updating (the anonymous sticks of Thompson's vision become a faintly upscale desert enclave; an airport replaces the bus terminal), elements that need freshening stick out as anachronisms. For instance, the solicitous attraction felt by the 50-year-old bachelor doctor (George Dickerson) toward Patric can only be homoerotic. While Thompson, chafing under the constraints of his time, left that to be distantly inferred, there's no reason to be coy about it more than 30 years later (there's little coy about the lovemaking between Ward and Patric). To his credit, Dickerson gives the game away with his doomed looks of longing; was it Charles Laughton who remarked `They can't censor the gleam in my eye?' And the long fuse between Ward and Patric sputters on and on; the movie could only be improved by losing half an hour of downing drinks and exchanging alternating glances of hatred and lust. The best thing about After Dark, My Sweet is Patric's performance, even if, in keeping with the fads of the 1950s, it gives off too many whiffs of `method.' At least he gives the role his best shot. The movie's flaws, however, can't be ascribed to Thompson. Latter-day filmings of his work, like The Grifters of the same year and (especially) The Kill-Off a year before, show there's plenty of punch left in the old pulpmeister.

After Dark, My Sweet

1990

Action / Crime / Drama / Mystery / Thriller

After Dark, My Sweet

1990

Action / Crime / Drama / Mystery / Thriller

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Disappointing attempt at film noir

In this retelling, Jim Thompson's dark poetry doesn't survive time-travel forward

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