After Dark, My Sweet

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After Dark, My Sweet

The get-rich-quick-scheme of a sexy widow and a con man needs a perfect pawn to set it in motion. Their choice has a few skeletons in his closet, however, and he gets involved only to be close to the seductress. If he finds out she's manipulating him, the stakes could turn deadly.

"The movie, based on a novel by Jim Thompson, the poet of circa-1950 pulp noir, has a stubborn, sullen truth to it, focusing on its handful of characters during the course of a particularly incompetent kidnapping. The story is so intimate that everything depends on the performances, and Jason Patric, Rachel Ward and Bruce Dern, and a character actor named George Dickerson, bring a grim, poetic sadness to the story. Film noir, we are reminded, is not about action and victory, but about incompetence and defeat. If it has a happy ending, something went wrong."

"'After Dark, My Sweet'is the movie that eluded audiences; it grossed less than $3 million, has been almost forgotten, and remains one of the purest and most uncompromising of modern films noir. It captures above all the lonely, exhausted lives of its characters." ---- Roger Ebert

Curator's Comments:
Read Roger Ebert's essay on this DVD Classic.

Director: James Foley
Color
114 minutes
Released: 1990
Rated: R

Country: U.S.A.
Language: English
Genre: Crime, Drama, Film Noir, Mystery

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