Following the Long, Strange Trip of ‘Red Rock’ : Movies: The ‘cowboy noir’ film, which has roamed from European theaters to film fest to HBO to film fest to video, finally gets a U.S. release.

If “Red Rock West” once was a tough sell, it ain’t any more.

The celebrated movie, dubbed a “cowboy noir” by its distributors and a wicked black comedy by many critics, was headed to a quick fade-out on the movie-channel horizon until a San Francisco distribution company came to the rescue.

Roxie Releasing has resuscitated the theatrical life of “Red Rock West,” which has gone a strange if not unprecedented course from European movie houses to film festival to HBO to film festival to video and now selected theaters in major U.S. cities, including Los Angeles’ Laemmle Sunset-5.

And no one is more relieved than director John Dahl, who publicly bemoaned the fate of his $7.5-million picture starring Nicolas Cage at the first Hamptons International Film Festival last year, saying U.S. distributors ignored the film’s good notices and healthy overseas box-office take. The picture, produced by Polygram through its subsidiary Propaganda Films, was a critical and popular hit in East Hampton, and earlier at the Toronto Film Festival, yet struck out with the usual distributors of art-house films like Miramax, Goldwyn and others.

In the film, Cage plays a drifter who is wrongly mistaken for a hit-man while getting tangled up in a web of larceny, deception and murder that also involves the intended victim, played by Lara Flynn Boyle, whom Cage falls in love with. The Times’ Kevin Thomas, as with many other reviewers, has favorably compared “Red Rock’s” tone and style to the Coen Bros.’ “Blood Simple.”

When reached at the Los Angeles production offices of his current film, “Meltdown,” Dahl said: “It’s satisfying that people walk away from a movie and then come back and see it has a second life.”

Roxie Releasing C.E.O. Bill Banning said that in mid-January, when he wanted to book the picture into his Roxie Theater in San Francisco, he couldn’t believe it didn’t have a distributor, since “Red Rock West” had been one of his top-five favorites at the Toronto Film Festival in September.

*

He also learned that Columbia TriStar Home Video, which had put up $3.5 million of the movie’s production costs, had already made a deal with HBO to recoup some of its money. (Dahl, in fact, recalls when making the rounds of the film festival circuit--the movie also was shown at World Festival Charleston (S.C.) and the Virginia Film Festival--how some people commented to him that they remembered “Red Rock West” from their cable television listings.) What might have further put Banning off, at about this same time Columbia was releasing the home-video version on a limited basis.

But, as Banning said he discovered, “It almost didn’t matter, because this movie was an extreme crowd-pleaser,” noting that “Red Rock West” broke the Roxie’s house record in its fourth week, helped by raves in the local press, and its L.A. and N.Y. grosses aren’t far behind.

With a relatively meager promotional and advertising budget of $100,000, Roxie said critics’ notices and good word-of-mouth has to sell the picture. Still, with 20 prints struck and plans to expand to Washington, Boston, Chicago and elsewhere soon, he expects to break even.

“ ‘Cowboy noir’ isn’t a big hook, but it’s a great hook to certain people. You really have to see it to get it,” he said.

Or, as Dahl put it: “It’s not ‘Schindler’s List,’ but it’s a good little movie. . . . As far as I’m concerned, this is just terrific.”