Of Red Herrings, Tough Guys and Treacherous Dames : SOME OF HOLLYWOOD'S HEAVIEST HITTERS CAN'T SAY NO TO A <i> FILM NOIR </i> OPPORTUNITY

By JOE RHODES

Aug. 1, 1993 12 AM PT

Joe Rhodes is a frequent contributor to TV Times and Calendar

They first appear as descending silhouettes, framed by the sunlight at the top of the stairs. She has seams on her stockings, a lit cigarette in her hand and lips painted fire-engine red. He has a shoulder holster under his jacket, dark bags under his eyes, the look of a man too guilty to sleep. They are cops, both of them, moving deeper into shadow with every downward step.

“Johnny Cave,” she says as they walk together to the corner of the Union Station underground garage, to his 1950 forest-green Ford, parked directly under a low-hanging light. “You can find him every afternoon except Monday behind the bar at The Inferno.

“What he likes,” she says, leaning into the driver’s-side window, “is a certain practice involving a length of knotted rope.”

He knew how she knew. This was their racket. They’d been doing it for years. She’d pick up the streetwalkers and bring them to the station for some close-quarter interrogations, the kind that occasionally left bruises. A few well-placed questions and they’d give up the names of their johns, not to mention a list of their preferences. She’d pass it on to her partner, who’d visit the gentlemen, drop a few hints and come back with an armload of cash.

“You get rich,” she says, reminding him why they’d gone into business in the first place. “I get 50% rich.”

He gives her a look. “It’s jake with me,” he says.

From 20 feet away director Steven Soderbergh watches the scene play out on a video monitor, listening to the dialogue through a headset because he isn’t close enough to hear the whispered words firsthand. He watches as the actors--Bonnie Bedelia and Joe Mantegna--exchange world-weary glances and then he sends them back up the stairs to begin another take. A remote-control Steadicam, suspended from the end of a teal-blue retractable crane, follows them once more from the daylight into the darkness, from the top of the stairs to the car.

It is, in some ways, the perfect film noir shot, all mood and shadows and streetwise talk, the kind of shot Soderbergh used to imagine himself directing when he was a kid, when pulp-fiction paperbacks were his literature of choice and the movies he loved most were full of tough guys, treacherous dames and murders behind back-alley doors. He used to watch them on television, late at night, resurrected classics from the ‘40s and ‘50s: “Double Indemnity,” “The Maltese Falcon,” “Kiss Me Deadly” and “D.O.A.”

But they don’t make movies like that in Hollywood anymore, at least not for theaters, which is why a half-dozen big-name feature film types (including Soderbergh, Phil Joanou, Jonathan Kaplan, Tom Hanks and first-time director Tom Cruise) jumped at the chance to spend part of their summer directing half-hour episodes of “Fallen Angels,” a film noir anthology series on the Showtime cable channel.

“What’s always fascinated me about the film noir genre is that it’s about the primal aspects of everyone’s dark side,” Soderbergh says later, preparing for a morgue scene that will involve, among other things, a Santa Claus corpse, a snub-nosed revolver and somebody’s blood running out onto a cold tile floor. “You’re dealing with people who have desires that completely override any sense of morality or ethics. They desperately want something, usually money or a woman or power. And invariably they have an Achilles’ heel that brings them down. The stories are almost Greek in that sense. So when I got an opportunity to do something like this, I grabbed it.”

The dark vignettes of “Fallen Angels” also have attracted a number of actors who normally wouldn’t go anywhere near television. Besides Mantegna and Bedelia, the series features performances by Gary Oldman, Isabella Rossellini, Gary Busey, Laura Dern, Alan Rickman, Peter Gallagher, James Woods and Diane Lane.

“I don’t know, for me, it’s the look, the language, the strong sense of visual style,” Mantegna says when asked why so many actors seem drawn to the shadowy film noir world, even though as a genre it’s had limited commercial appeal. “And I think we all like to look at that little bit of evil we have within us.

“It’s like in Japan, where they have those special blowfish restaurants where the fish has to be prepared just right or it’ll kill you, because it’s poison,” Mantegna says. “All of us like a little taste of the poison.”

This is exactly what producer William Horberg had counted on when he came up with the idea several years ago to option little-known short stories by the best-known pulp fiction writers--such authors as Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich and James Ellroy--and turn them into a film noir series.

“The stories are the reasons that everybody is here,” says Horberg, who spent months combing through back issues of Black Mask and Manhunter magazines looking for stories that would work in a half-hour format. “We were worried at first whether we’d be able to find stories that could work in this form, considering that you need red herrings and plot twists. But what we found in adapting them is a lot of these stories got better and tighter as you boiled them down. The leaner we made them, the more powerful they became.”

Although the source material comes from stories written during several decades (Cornell Woolrich’s “Murder, Obliquely” was written in 1937, James Ellroy’s “Since I Don’t Have You’ in 1988) it was decided to place all the episodes in post-World War II Los Angeles, a time and place that marked the height of the original film noir explosion.

“It was an era we liked design-wise,” Horberg says, “and as a matter of budget we couldn’t afford to ping-pong back and forth from one era to another. This way we could use the same cars, the same kind of wardrobe and have a commonality between the episodes. The shows each have their own personality and very different styles, but they all exist in the same universe. We’d like to think that maybe the bartender from one story could have been arrested for killing a guy in another.”

Except for the limitations of time and budget (approximately five days shooting time and a $700,000 budget per episode) each director had a free hand in the look he wanted for his story. Joanou, for instance, used slow motion and MTV-era film techniques: quick edits and lots of camera movement. Jonathan Kaplan, on the other hand, chose to shoot his episode in black and white, trying as much as possible to make the film look as if it had been made in 1950.

“To do this as a feature, it would have to be in color,” Kaplan said, “and you’d also have to put it through the sympathy machine. Doing it for cable means we don’t have to worry about any of that. We can just have fun.”

Every episode, stylistic differences aside, is filled with film noir trademarks--flashbacks and voice-overs, backlit hallways and shadows cast by Venetian blinds. Guys in bars order “a shot of rye” and every room, it seems, is cooled by an electric fan. The stories are populated with double-crossers and crooked cops, people with trench coats, fedoras and damaged souls. And most of all, there’s delicious wordplay.

“Sometimes that’s all the trace you leave behind in the world, a little cigarette smoke, quickly blown away,” Laura Dern’s character says in the adaptation of “Murder, Obliquely.”

And there is this line, delivered by Peter Gallagher to describe the con woman played by Isabella Rossellini in “The Frightening Frammis,” based on the Jim Thompson story and directed by Cruise: “She was 110 pounds of pure rat poison. I didn’t want to be the rat.”

“Some of this eat nickels and spit dimes dialogue is too good to resist,” says Howard Rodman, who adapted “The Quiet Room,” Soderbergh’s episode, and helped rework “The Frightening Frammis” for Cruise. Rodman, who admits to a “misspent youth” devouring this stuff, thinks he understands why noir, for some people, has had such lasting appeal.

“One of the things that pulp fiction has always done best is be able to show people as they are rather than as they should be,” Rodman says. “Murders are committed for dumb or stupid reasons. Film noir at its best, which can be everything from ‘The Big Sleep’ to ‘Blue Velvet,’ is just a little more honest about how disturbing and terrifying life can be. And that honesty can be very seductive.”

THE PULP PIT

“Dead End for Delia”

Director: Phil Joanou

Cast: Gabrielle Anwar, Gary Oldman, Meg Tilly, Dan Hedaya

Airs: Sunday at 10 p.m., Tuesday at 11 p.m., Aug. 14 at 11:30 p.m.

“I’ll Be Waiting”

Director: Tom Hanks

Cast: Marg Helgenberger, Bruce Kirby

Airs: Aug. 15 at 10 p.m., Aug. 18 at 10 p.m., Aug. 28 at 11:35 p.m.

“The Quiet Room”

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Cast: Joe Mantegna, Bonnie Bedelia