A November Noir Double Bill
What if to catch a serial killer, you had to date a serial killer?
The year is 1989. Al Pacino is an alcoholic cop hunting a killer of men out there somewhere in the dark streets of New York City. A Manhattan guy who placed an ad in the lonely hearts section of the local paper is found naked, bound, and shot through the head. A lipstick-stained cigarette sits in an ashtray. An old 45 of Sea of Love, the last song he would ever hear, spins mindlessly.
Then, another victim turns up in Queens. Same bondage, same song, same personals ad. Is someone luring lovesick men through the back pages of the Post and murdering them? Not on Al Pacino’s watch. He and his Queens colleague, a young - and hot? - John Goodman, concoct a plan. They’ll place personals ads in the paper; flowery, rhyming ads just like the victims wrote. Then Pacino will date the ladies and try to draw out the killer. Brilliant. The only thing that could go wrong is if he falls for one of the women, someone who by definition shares the tastes of a psychopathic killer.
The 80s were a tough decade for our boy Al. Outside of Scarface it was filled with flops and, worse, live theater. But he bounced back beautifully with this one. It did fine at the box office and got good reviews but for whatever reason we don’t much talk about it anymore. Shame on us. Sea of Love rocks.
In a just world we would have gotten six sequels to this movie, an extended universe of films where Al Pacino and John Goodman solve sexy crimes. In this world we must settle for one. The movie takes its absurd story completely seriously, and should. I’ll say no more about the plot other than it deftly keeps both Al and the audience guessing as it drops new hints and insinuations.
Also, this isn’t one of those limp films that are named after a song but then play the song only once. Oh no, no, no. This movie plays Sea of Love, like, 10 times, both diagetic and not. I respect that. It might only be beaten by The Wanderers in terms of just cranking the title track.
Character actor appearances include Richard Jenkins, Michael Rooker, and John Spencer. Samuel L. Jackson is credited as “black guy.”
I feel like everyone knows the Cat Power cover but have you heard Tom Waits’s version of Sea of Love? It’s so good.
Black Wings Has My Angel is a bleak crime fiction classic
I recently read Black Wings Has My Angel, a 1953 one hit wonder crime thriller by Louisiana reporter-turned-novelist Elliott Chaze. It might be my favorite noir I’ve ever read.
The elements are typical: a hard-living ex-con, a call girl, a volcanic romance, a scheme. Chaze bought his hard-boiled clichés in bulk but it’s his prose that’s sublime. His first-person storytelling is pulpy, sure, but rather than try to out-crackle a Raymond Chandler novel he mixes in real soulfulness with the blood and grime. Chaze’s narrator is a thug, but he’s got poetry in him.
Here’s a more or less randomly selected passage about our protagonist contemplating a murder:
I turned and walked on down the driveway and out onto the sidewalk without even telling her good-bye. I was going downtown to kill a man who hadn’t done a damned thing to me, to kill an old guy whose only fault as far as I knew was throwing chewing gum wrappers in the street. I was going to kill him because I wanted money more than I wanted him to live and I was going to kill him filthily. Or maybe I wasn’t. Maybe he was going to kill me and go on the rest of his life with the gum wrappers. I know now that I would have probably backed out of it if it hadn’t been for Virginia and the desire to remain a big bad lad in her eyes. Anyway, I didn’t want any mushy farewell business with Virginia, no sentimental sendoff. Not for something like this.
Who can’t relate.
I’d say read this book on a cold, grey day but hell I read it on a beach in Mexico for some reason and its fatalism hits even when you’re surrounded by palm trees. Good luck coming up with a better tagline for your memoir than Chaze’s tragic hero summing up his story as “a bunch of foolish tiny things that don’t add one way or the other, except that they happened and passed the time.”