When Dennis Hopper passed away last year, he left behind a litany of kooky characters and broiled off-screen stories. It’s how he’ll most often be remembered, despite a late career perspicuity that cast some invaluable truths on the crazier tales of the 60s and 70s.
Hopper’s work as a director can go missing in the shuffle, and the casual pop-culturalist or filmgoer is often unaware that some of the man’s best work came from behind the camera. The Hot Spot is almost a case in point. Ask someone what he or she most remembers about the film and it’s usually Jennifer Connelly making Mr Skin’s Top 100 Nude Scenes, or Don Johnson actually being sympathetic. Few realise on first glance that this is a Dennis Hopper film.
But catch it at an old drive in double feature (surely the best way to enjoy this languid, libidinous flick) and the Hopperisms come thick and fast. There’s the love of genre, the dick thinking antihero, the dedication to smoked out beltway blues. It’s pop art post noir filmmaking at its best. As such, there are plenty of pleasures to be found in The Hot Spot, even if the final result isn’t quite as compelling as it perhaps could or should be.
Don Johnson plays Harry Madox, an easy living, silver tongued drifter who’s always just left of the law. Johnson works Madox’s back handed charm perfectly, the actor having just come off Miami Vice and looking for all the world like the breezy transient who wanders into a small southern town and almost immediately lands himself a job as a used car salesman. It’s more than a little meta.
But selling cars is a secondary concern for Madox, the town’s understaffed and insecure bank providing a much better source of income. After staging an audacious (read, ridiculous) daylight robbery, he’s kept in the clear by an alibi from Dolly Harshaw (Virginia Madsen), the over ripe and under sexed wife of his dense boss. But an earlier indiscretion with Harshaw threatens to derail Madox’s plans, particularly when he begins to show an interest in the car yard’s winsome young secretary (Jennifer Connelly).
In many ways The Hot Spot is straight-forward filmmaking, operating from a simple script adapted by Charles Williams’s from his own 1953 book, Hell Hath no Fury, in partnership with Nona Tyson. But Hopper and his team riff off the screenplay to create all sorts of memorable movie moments. There’s the pitch perfect production design, lurid costuming, diabolical characters and slowly percolating performances.
Madsen might be having a whale of a time as the film’s steamy bedtime assassin, but she’s not the only one hamming it up for the better. William Sadler is her male counterpart, his villainous Frank Sutton being the kind role Hopper would have once reserved for himself. These two prowl around the outskirts of The Hot Spot, ready to destroy Madox’s best laid plans, no matter how much he offers in sex on the one hand and his fists on the other.
At the centre of the film is the quiet relationship between Johnson and Connelly. It seems unlikely that the lithe, fresh-faced secretary would go for the much older and slightly barrelly Johnson, but the two players work their lines so carefully that it soon becomes believable, and a small town love affair slowly blooms.
But this leads into one of The Hot Spot’s biggest problems: it’s pace. There’s a vital mismatch between the plot and the ultimate style of film. The filmmakers’ choice to slow everything down is admirable, but it means the audience has plenty of time to pick over the many plot holes in the screenplay. It stunts your enjoyment of The Hot Spot, chipping away at the fine technical credits and Hopper’s tasteful exuberance.
Still, it would have been said at the time of The Hot Spot’s release in 1990 and applies even more so now: they don’t make movies like this anymore. Slipping into The Hot Spot is like being transported somewhere else, a heady revival of genre that proves hard to resist.
I say:
A flawed, overlong but enjoyable and self-consciously pulpy flick, perhaps best enjoyed with some tender company.
See it for:
This exchange between Madsen and Johnson. Madsen: ‘Well, there are only two thing to do around here. Have you got a TV?’ Johnson: ‘Nope.’ Madsen: ‘Well, now you’re down to one.’
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