Leslie Anne Warren has a strange sort of beauty, what with her high cheek bones and thin lips. And her eyes are startling. Their pupils are dark and the eyes themselves are set back deep into the orbital sockets so that they always seem to be in shadow. They lend her the air of a hunted animal, but one that's liable to strike back when cornered. She's also sexy and neatly enacts the role of a woman in oestrus. She does so here in a scene with Peter Weller. I wish she'd gotten rid of this nervous laugh, uttered through a half smile, issuing almost under her breath as "heh!" Natalie Wood had the same tendency.
I have to envy Peter Weller. Not just because he gets to do a nude scene involving copulation with Warren but because he's managed two careers successfully. By now he's probably completed his PhD in Italian Renaissance Art at UCLA and has been an adjunct professor at Syracuse University. He takes his academic work seriously.
As an actor he's generally laid back in a Kevin-Costner kind of way but capable of nuttier outbursts. He has some amusing lines in this movie, as when he first knocks on Warren's door and identifies himself as a detective. He asks, "Do you mind if I come in?" "Yes, I think I do." "I have a warrant." "Let's see it." "I can GET a warrant." But he lets it all flow out naturally, without emphasis, as if his lie were so trivial as to deserve no more than immediate dismissal.
The first two thirds of the film are interesting, exploring the contrasting worlds of modern art and police routine in New York City -- actually Toronto.
Warren has begun some kind of artistic enterprise involving recorded apologies from anonymous callers. Of course, this was before the virulent outbreak of public confessions from celebrities and ordinary folk on Oprah, Geraldo At Large, and Sally Jesse Raphael, whom I'd always thought was three people. (I'm still not sure.) One of the callers, "Claude", identifies himself as a serial murderer of gay guys, although the homosexual aspect is dropped at once and Claude begins to slaughter somebody every time the script calls for another killing. Well, he slits of a homeless man played by Harvey Fierstein but I don't know if that counts. I'm not going to count the demise of John Glover because he just falls from a roof.
The movie more or less collapses in on itself when Claude begins to stalk Warren. He kidnaps her little girl, or threatens to -- I got a little confused. Anyway Warren sets herself out as bait, Claude appears with a knife in the deserted art gallery, and is beaned by a falling steel structure, burned to death in a long plastic tube, and finally shot by Detective Weller. This is all according to custom. The creep is always harder to kill than Rasputin, the Mad Monk.
Nice performances, especially by Weller, Warren, and Glover, almost make up for the routine plot and unexceptional score by Maurice Jarre, he who wrote the score for "Lawrence of Arabia."
I have to envy Peter Weller. Not just because he gets to do a nude scene involving copulation with Warren but because he's managed two careers successfully. By now he's probably completed his PhD in Italian Renaissance Art at UCLA and has been an adjunct professor at Syracuse University. He takes his academic work seriously.
As an actor he's generally laid back in a Kevin-Costner kind of way but capable of nuttier outbursts. He has some amusing lines in this movie, as when he first knocks on Warren's door and identifies himself as a detective. He asks, "Do you mind if I come in?" "Yes, I think I do." "I have a warrant." "Let's see it." "I can GET a warrant." But he lets it all flow out naturally, without emphasis, as if his lie were so trivial as to deserve no more than immediate dismissal.
The first two thirds of the film are interesting, exploring the contrasting worlds of modern art and police routine in New York City -- actually Toronto.
Warren has begun some kind of artistic enterprise involving recorded apologies from anonymous callers. Of course, this was before the virulent outbreak of public confessions from celebrities and ordinary folk on Oprah, Geraldo At Large, and Sally Jesse Raphael, whom I'd always thought was three people. (I'm still not sure.) One of the callers, "Claude", identifies himself as a serial murderer of gay guys, although the homosexual aspect is dropped at once and Claude begins to slaughter somebody every time the script calls for another killing. Well, he slits of a homeless man played by Harvey Fierstein but I don't know if that counts. I'm not going to count the demise of John Glover because he just falls from a roof.
The movie more or less collapses in on itself when Claude begins to stalk Warren. He kidnaps her little girl, or threatens to -- I got a little confused. Anyway Warren sets herself out as bait, Claude appears with a knife in the deserted art gallery, and is beaned by a falling steel structure, burned to death in a long plastic tube, and finally shot by Detective Weller. This is all according to custom. The creep is always harder to kill than Rasputin, the Mad Monk.
Nice performances, especially by Weller, Warren, and Glover, almost make up for the routine plot and unexceptional score by Maurice Jarre, he who wrote the score for "Lawrence of Arabia."