MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Hot Spot’ Raises Cain in Stylish Pulp Melodrama

The plot of “The Hot Spot” may remind you of every James M. Cain novel you’ve ever read, or every Cain-style film you’ve ever seen, but the movie’s look is one-of-a-kind. Dennis Hopper, who directed, has an extraordinary eye for laid-back menace. By the time the film is over, you feel like you know every crevice and patch of pavement in the small, sleepy Texas town where the action uncoils.

Hopper has a painter’s feeling for composition and color and an extremely fluid, supple technique. Too good a technique, it turns out, for the material he is working on. Hopper’s style is all resonance and allusion, but the meanings in the story are nailed down. This dissonance between technique and subject matter is kicky at first, but essentially the clash between the laconic and the dynamic doesn’t go anywhere. We’re grounded by the film’s catalogue of Cainisms.

To the extent that “The Hot Spot” (throughout San Diego County) is an homage, the echo-chamber effect of its plot has a sly irony. Hopper, working from a script by the late Charles Williams and Nona Tyson based on Williams’ 1952 novel “Hell Hath No Fury,” uses our awareness of films like “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “Double Indemnity.”

There is even the suggestion in the film, as there also was in Lawrence Kasdan’s “Body Heat,” that the characters are aware of those films too. They’re consciously acting out in their own lives the luridness of pulp fiction.

Most of the time, though, the pulpiness is less homage than rip-off. There are no tricks up this film’s frayed sleeve.

Don Johnson plays Harry Madox, a hunk misfit who drifts into town with a trunk full of pressed shirts, and precious little else, and takes a job as a used-car salesman for a cranky boss (Jerry Hardin) with a bad heart and a red-hot wife (Virginia Madsen). It’s clear from the moment Madsen’s Dolly claps eyes on Harry that they are fated to mate. It’s also clear that we’re going to be served up a steaming helping of those we’re-a-lot-alike-you-and-me speeches that film noir women are so fond of delivering to their captive men. Dolly and Harry know each other’s hot spots.

Johnson has a relaxed and easy presence in the film (rated R for nudity, sexual situations and profanity). He holds the screen effortlessly, and he gives Harry a slightly blighted look that suggests he’s ashamed of his own worst impulses. As long as Johnson is playing above the action he’s effective, but his lightweight style doesn’t work in his big scenes with Dolly. We don’t see how her enraged seductions might make this stud smoothie blow his cool, and it doesn’t help that Madsen’s idea of a femme fatale’s fury is a snit fit.

It’s still possible to enjoy the Harry and Dolly Show without really believing in it for a minute. When Dolly, hot and bothered, rings up Harry and purrs to him as she is shaving her legs, or when she holds a gun to his temple as foreplay, it’s easy to get caught up in the ga-ga shenanigans. It’s as if the Texas heat had fried their scruples; they’re all sex drive. The romantic subplot between Harry and a dewey-eyed sweet young thing (Jennifer Connelly) can’t hold a candle to this flame. In film noir , virtuousness is always a drag on the action.

The musky pulp of “The Hot Spot” will probably connect with audiences starved for highfalutin film noir in the same way that the doomy flamboyance of the Jim Thompson-derived “After Dark, My Sweet” did. Neither of these retrograde passion-pit movies are very good, but in a movie year starved for romantic ardor they at least offer up their tooth-and-claw sexual gambits in high style. Fatalism plus a lot of heavy breathing, and a flash of skin--it’s a winning formula, all right. These movies are like Harlequin Romances for slumming highbrows.

‘THE HOT SPOT’

An Orion Pictures release. Executive producers Bill Gavin, Derek Power, Stephen Ujlaki. Producer Paul Lewis. Director Dennis Hopper. Screenplay Nona Tyson & Charles Williams, based on Williams’ novel “Hell Hath No Fury.” Cinematography Ueli Steiger. Music Jack Nitzsche. Production designer Cary White. Costumes Mary Kay Stolz. Film editor Wende Phifer Mate. With Don Johnson, Virginia Madsen, Jennifer Connelly, Charles Martin Smith, William Sadler.

Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes.

MPAA-rated: R (strong language, nudity, sexual situations).