MOVIE REVIEW : Melodramatic ‘Hours’ Caught Between Eras

“Desperate Hours” (citywide) is a suburban nightmare out of the ‘50s, erupting in strange, garish, elegant fury in the ‘90s.

In Michael Cimino’s sleek but spotty version of Joseph Hayes’ famous melodrama, the plot is an Eisenhower-era nightmare: three escaped convicts hide out in a suburban middle-class home, holding the entire family hostage as they wait for help. The filmmakers fast-forward “Hours” into a world of adultery, high-tech cops and media-savvy criminals, but it’s still in limbo, trapped between eras, top-heavy with its own double psychic and social load.

Cimino, a symbol of Hollywood hubris for “Heaven’s Gate,” may feel more like a hired gun on this project, but he doesn’t behave like one. He pretties the place up, fills the movie with blazing decor and shiny deep-focus images. Compared to this movie, the 1955 version by William Wyler looks drab and moves cautiously.

“Hours” is set in Utah, and the spectacular Western scenery is displayed immediately: as sexpot lawyer Kelly Lynch teeters on spiked heels, with an amazing ice-gray, misty mountain panorama towering all around her.

In these gorgeous, ultra-painterly surfaces, lit by Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” cinematographer, Doug Milsome, cold blues and emerald greens dominate outside, scarlets and browns inside. When the convicts invade the Hilliard home, they bring a whole action movie universe roaring in with them.

The movie’s top crook, Glenn Griffin (Mickey Rourke), is a faintly smirking, brainy psychopath who likes to torment his captives, alternately soothing and bullying them, mocking their impotence against his loaded gun. The script, rather pointlessly, compares him to Norman Mailer’s prison protege, Jack Abbott. His antagonist, head-of-the-house Dan Hilliard (Anthony Hopkins), is a father figure to humiliate.

For Hayes, the core of his drama was the slowly ripening battle of wits between these two. But there was also a class-struggle undertone: the sort of thing that might appeal to Cimino. And, in this script--a mostly conventional update by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal (“Jewel of the Nile”) and, briefly, Hayes himself--the movie’s icons of respectability and family are even more fragile.

Dan Hilliard is no longer a staunch, rock-solid papa; he’s a philanderer with a mistress. The 1955 killers invaded a world close to “Father Knows Best,” but here, the cons crash into something nearer “War of the Roses”--an overdecorated home filled with snotty kids and people who resent each other. The prime spur to Hilliard’s actions lies less in what he’s defending than in Griffin’s obnoxiousness and depravity.

Rourke plays Griffin loose and mean and shaggily seductive. When the young Paul Newman played this part on stage--against Karl Malden as Hilliard--it made him a star. That’s the sexual dynamism Rourke goes for and gets--not the gruff menace of the still brilliant but aging Humphrey Bogart who, opposite Fredric March in Wyler’s movie, looked more tired, more played out.

“Hours” pulses with sexual threat but the movie shies away from any carnal violence. If Cimino’s “Sicilian” was about an outlaw-seducer who kept crashing into mansions, “Desperate Hours” takes the opposite view. It’s about how outlaws can’t dirty up the furniture and insult women without paying dearly.

It’s like a mix of A-thriller and grand opera: full of crazy opulence and arias for both Rourke and Hopkins. But, despite its visual dash and flair, “Desperate Hours” (MPAA rated R for profanity and violence) isn’t really modern. Beyond the slam-bang, courthouse-escape opening and the sex-change of the cop on Griffin’s tail (Lindsay Crouse, radiating machisma ), most of its innovations involve profanity and interior decoration. At the end, Cimino and the writers can’t do anything but close the circle, shut the door. There’s no real lift, not even the phony exaltation of the usual revenge thriller.

Perhaps the writers were afraid of sentimentality. Perhaps Cimino couldn’t give his heart fully to either Griffin or Hilliard, as Wyler gave his to Hilliard. If you ignore the script--a good strategy for most recent major studio movies--there’s a lot of talent here. But Cimino’s “Hours,” instead of getting desperate, gets desperately pretty.

‘DESPERATE HOURS’

An MGM/UA-Dino De Laurentiis presentation of a Dino De Laurentiis Communications production. Producers Dino De Laurentiis, Michael Cimino. Director Cimino. Script Lawrence Konner & Mark Rosenthal and Joseph Hayes. Executive producer Martha Schumacher. Camera Doug Milsome. Music David Mansfield. Supervising editor Peter Hunt. Production design Victoria Paul. Costumes Charles De Caro.

Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

MPAA rating: R (language, violence.).