After Dark, My Sweet
Collie is off in some way, though it’s hard to say exactly how. He tells the bartender he pours a good beer and the bartender wants to throw him out. He looks like a bum with that package wrapped in brown paper, but he’s young and good-looking and will tell you he’s an ex-serviceman who has done a year and a half of community college. He staggers out of the desert’s blinding sunlight into a run-down suburb of Palm Springs where his fate waits for him in the same bar, smoking a cigarette.
Her name is Mrs. Fay Anderson. She is obviously an alcoholic. Why else would she follow Collie down the street in her car after he beats up the bartender? This she does not because she is drunk but because widowhood and drinking have put her into contact with Uncle Bud who needs someone like Collie for one of his money-making schemes: Needy, vulnerable, presentable, persuadable. Individually these three people are hopeless loners; together they are dangerous because they are just smart enough to think up plans they’re dumb enough to try.
The story tells theirs as an inevitable move toward failure and doom, but what makes it interesting is that Col lit understands all along that everything is going wrong lit sees that Mrs. Fay Anderson is a good person who needs protection and protects her so subtly she may still be wondering if he did what she thinks he did.
The movie “After Dark My Sweet” (based on Thompson’s 1955 novel) has the stubborn sullen truth of circa 1950 pulp noir as it focuses on its handful of characters during the course of a particularly bungled kidnapping; it holds itself down close between these few people, depending entirely on their performances for effect: Jason Patric Rachel Ward Bruce Dern George Dickerson (the overlooked character actor), all bring to it a grim poetic sadness. Film noir, we must remember, isn’t about action and victory but incompetence and defeat; if it has a happy ending something was bungled.
After Fay (Ward) picks up Collie (Patric), she gives him a house trailer at the end of her dying palm plantation, a kiss on the doorstep, and a lot of drinking buddies. Through her he meets Uncle Bud (Dern), who claims he’s an ex-police detective with “connections on the force,” and who seems to have no life apart from sitting in Fay’s living room recruiting them for his scheme to kidnap the son of a rich local man. Fay tells Collie to get away, get out of town: “His scheme’s been cooking for months, and if you go away, it will keep right on boiling until it boils away.”
Flashbacks tell us that Collie is an ex-fighter who was in one fight too many both for his own mental sharpness, and for the life of the fighter he beat to death. In an all night diner, he runs into Doc Goldman (Dickerson), who takes one look at him and correctly guesses he’s AWOL from an insane asylum. The Doc has a caring manner which conceals sexual desire; he takes Collie home with him, offers to let him stay, gives him work. But Collie cannot take that form of confinement, and returns one morning to Fay’s door.
Now Uncle Bud kicks into high gear. He briefs them on his kidnap plan as if it were one of those complicated strategies in a caper movie, not merely sending Collie to pick up a rich kid at school. Could they maybe get the money without making the snatch? Like maybe Uncle Bud could foil it himself and collect a reward? The problem with that is that plan doesn’t look right unless the hero produces the kidnapper. That would be Collie. At the same time Bud declines the plan, Collie senses that he sees an angle in it. Get rid of Collie, and there’s only two ways to split the money.
It may seem I’ve given away too much of the plot, but “After Dark, My Sweet” is not about the plot but about the personal and moral choices that Collie and Fay make in response to what happens. The last 20 minutes of this movie are skillful storytelling, with decisions arriving silently, by implication. The last 60 seconds are brilliantly convoluted, as Collie steps a few feet away into the desert to think things through, and does, and improvises a chain of events that is inevitable, heroic, sad and flawless.
The movie was directed by James Foley (born 1953), a graduate of USC film school who is one of the most underrated directors of his generation. His “At Close Range” (1986) had career-defining performances by Sean Penn and Christopher Walken; his “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1992) was the strong adaptation of David Mamet’s play about real estate salesmen, with its electric performances by Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino and Alec Baldwin; his “Confidence” (2003) had Dustin Hoffman as an unforgettable hyperactive strip-club operator.
The movie “After Dark, My Sweet” is one that got away; it made less than $3 million at the box office, has been largely forgotten and stands as one of the purest and most uncompromising examples of modern noir. Most of all, it captures the lonely exhaustion at the heart of its characters’ lives.
Faye’s suburban house looks half-furnished, like she’s moving in or out. The pool water is thick with leaves. People drink a lot here but never seem to eat. When did Uncle Bud come into her life? We gather he drifts into people’s lives as a way of living. What does she think about his kidnapping scheme? It gave them something vaguely to plan before Collie came along. She thinks Bud is an idiot but her life lacks focus for resistance. When she finally has sex with Collie, there are fades to black within the sequence, as if they’re seeking oblivion more than pleasure.
Collie is the still center character, the one who retains enough agency to decide what he will and should do next. Jason Patric’s performance is pitched perfectly between showing us a man who can function in the world if he tries but has lost any belief that such effort will pay off for him now; he gives us narration from the Thompson novel that lets us get inside his mind some which I’m glad for because although he tells people over and over again that he hates being thought stupid his narration proves that thinking trumps speaking every time where this guy is concerned; plus also Doc Goldman subplot within a subplot tragedy to power about poor little
Jason Patric was in movies like this one and “Rush” (1991), “Your Friends & Neighbors” (1998), “Narc” (2002) and “The Alamo” (2004), where tough complexity subverted his good looks or turned them to darker dramatic advantage OK, yes, and “Speed 2: Cruise Control” (1997), but as I was the only critic who liked that movie, I can hardly complain. Rachel Ward does anyone remember her for anything besides “The Thorn Birds”?
Here she creates a wounded drift of a Faye; a woman without hope or purpose, her beautiful face rising brave to those too tired to be moved by it. But the fine grained evolution of her feelings over the final scene should be noted too, and in this regard I’d also like to mention the tenderheartedness she shows in earlier scenes; there is something about playing kind women who have been dumped into ugly situations by alcoholism’s inertia and despair that really seems to suit Ms. Ward’s talents.
And then there’s Bruce Dern not allowed a life outside the immediate plot here with any calculation at all on the part of movie makers! Yes we get glimpses of associates seen from long way off but basically what we have in terms of relation between Dern’s Uncle Bud and anybody else is this: He works for Collie & Faye because he needs them for some reason or other.
Nobody actually calls him Uncle Bud; probably nobody calls him Bud either. The nameless man projects an air patient intelligence which allows others’ beliefs to become his own through convincing them they were theirs in first place.
That mixture of feelings is what Thompson’s novel and Foley’s movie are about. It starts with fatigue and hopelessness, moves on to
being bad without much conviction, and then in an act of sheer desperation musters just enough courage to stop itself once more.
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