New Jersey Noir Back From the Dead

Film at Lincoln Center closed off the summer by teaming up with Missing Movies, a nonprofit dedicated to the preservation and exhibition of movies that have, for one reason or another, been neglected or lost. Should you be of the mind that everything can be found on the internet, think again. According to the organization’s website “millions of movies have been made but only 25,000 are streaming.”Sure, the human race is being entertained beyond its temporal grasp, but take a moment to wonder if an obscure favorite is readily at hand for your enjoyment. Perhaps not.New Jersey noir was the leitmotif for a double bill last night, “Missing Movies 35 mm Double Feature,” but Stacy Cochran’s “My New Gun” (1992) offers none of the genre’s velvety chiaroscuro. Ms. Cochran and cinematographer Edward Lachman err on the side of suburban bland with an emphasis on prefab architecture, neatly trimmed lawns and anonymous interior decoration. An odd narrative fillip in this wanly lit picture is the moment at which a looping Constructivist sculpture is installed in a generic middle-American living room with nary a comment from its owners. The rigors of high modernism are, it would seem, impervious to the ministrations of mainstream taste.Ms. Cochran’s screenplay treads an uncertain line between homage and parody. The theory of Chekhov’s gun, the notion that an evident prop should be employed in a story or not be used at all, is taken to absurdist effect. Dr. Gerald Bender (Stephen Collins) buys a .38 caliber revolver for his wife, Debbie (Diane Lane), having been convinced by a colleague that her safety is dependent on it. Being a dutiful wife, Debbie agrees to this arrangement, albeit with qualms. When a squirrelly neighbor from across the way, Skippy (James Le Gros), inadvertently learns about the gun, he asks if Debbie will loan it to him. “You don’t have to load it,” he reassures her, “I could get bullets.”If the name “Skippy” doesn’t give the game away on Ms. Cochran’s tongue-in-cheekery, try connecting the dots of the plot as they wander to and fro and back again. Skippy’s mother, Kimmy Hayes (Tess Harper) enters the proceedings, a one-time queen of country music who has since become an adherent of a religious cult. Gerald, in the meantime, is hospitalized because of some bad egg salad, allowing Skippy and Debbie the space to begin an affair. Kimmy’s ex-husband, played by blandly determined Bill Anthony, sidles into town intent on murder. And then there’s a wedding! Somewhere in this shaggy gun story there lies a wiry strain of feminism, but good luck trying to glean its rationale. Maggie Greenwald’s “The Kill Off” (1989) is less noir than murk: Cinematographer Declan Quin engulfs the proceedings with a grubby pitch that does, admittedly, accentuate the picture’s low-rent settings, but ultimately comes off as amateurish. Adapted from a 1957 novel by the curiously esteemed pulp writer, Jim Thompson, Ms. Greenwald’s screenplay offers a kaleidoscopic overview of a down-at-the-heels ocean community. The only game in town is a watering hole dubbed The Pavilion, but its fortunes are on the slide. Owner Pete Pavlov (Jackson Sims) hopes to drum up business by convincing a local streetwalker, Danny (Cathy Haase), to trade-up career-wise and take to the stage as a stripper.At the center of this anonymous township is Luane (Loretta Gross), a bed-ridden harridan who seems to have a preternatural knowledge of everyone’s foibles and shows no hesitation in picking up the phone to strong-arm or blackmail those who are doing her wrong. When news gets out that Luane has a lot of cold hard cash stashed away, a bevy of players in desperate straits go to extreme ends to get their hands on it. Would that Ms. Greenwald had the cinematic wherewithal to recompense for a threadbare budget, halting actors and a clumsy script. “The Kill-Off” leans on the grubbiness of its mise en scene, making for a movie that is singular in its ugliness. The Jersey shore has never been as uninviting.

New Jersey Noir Back From the Dead

New Jersey Noir Back From the Dead

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