MOVIE REVIEW : In ‘Bloodhounds,’ Style With No Substance

Heigh ho, if style were all, “Bloodhounds of Broadway” (at the Cineplex Odeon Century City) would be a romp. Instead, this star-crammed exercise in Roaring ‘20s fashion and atmosphere is a handsomely mounted, joyless dead end.

It does have one glimmering moment, when Madonna, one of its clutch of stars, punches right through the screen, singing “I Surrender, Dear,” but it’s not enough to stay awake for.

Meanwhile, Rutger Hauer, Matt Dillon, Jennifer Gray, Randy Quaid, Josef Sommer, Esai Morales, Julie Hagerty and the less-well-known but lovely Madeleine Potter are enmeshed in this complicated adaptation of four Damon Runyon short stories, strung together with a remarkable lack of urgency.

All the patented Runyon Broadway types are here, so many monikers that the mind soon gives up on them. A Walter Winchell-like newspaperman, Waldo Winchester (Josef Sommer), presides over the various problems.

Will friendly, goofus Feet Samuels (Quaid) persuade a dish like Hortense Hathaway (Madonna) to take him seriously? Will inveterate bettor Regret (Dillon) ever make an honest woman of songstress Lovey Lou (Grey)? Will socialite Harriet MacKyle (Hagerty) forswear her pet parrot for the attentions of gangster Basil Valentine (Ethan Phillips), who is less of a gunsel than she thinks he is? And will the Brain (Hauer), the dapper gangland leader knifed in the first scene and trucked around throughout this freezing 1928 New Year’s Eve, finally find some guy or doll to take him in?

The movie itself has been trucked hither and yon. It was begun when Madonna was a brunette, in December of 1987. Reportedly in an effort to clarify its story line, Columbia, its present releasing studio, has re-cut it, adding a narration that was absent in the version by its producer-director-co-adapter, Howard Brookner, a documentary film maker (“Burroughs,” “Robert Wilson and the CIVIL warS”) whose first feature this was. Brookner, 35, died in April from AIDS.

It may not be possible to discern what Brookner’s style was, with so many other hands involved. Certainly he had a beautiful eye for faces and characters: “Stranger Than Paradise’s” flattened-nosed Richard Edson is shown off to great advantage, as is Steve Buscemi (“Parting Glances”), Michael Wincott, who plays the nicely ironic bartender, Soupy Mike, and Potter, in a pivotal role as the flower girl, Mary. (You may remember her debut in “The Bostonians.” She is better here.) And it’s clear that the look of the film was crucial to Brookner, from the witty costuming to the brilliant production design to the careful hair styles, accurate if not always flattering. (The exception is Madonna’s Louise Brooks helmet of hair.) Unfortunately, none of this is proof against this rat’s nest of stories, which unravel with nothing like the audacity needed to sustain anyone’s interest, beyond a passing one in this Art Deco ceiling fixture or that pearl-studded flapper dress.