Film noir, we are reminded, is not about action and victory, but about incompetence and defeat. 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. 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. Fay Anderson is a good person and needs to be protected, and protects her in a way so subtle she may still be wondering if he did what she thinks he did.
What makes the story fascinating is the subterranean way Collie understands everything that is going wrong, understands Mrs. "After Dark, My Sweet" (1990) tells their story as an inevitable progress toward failure and doom. Together, they are a danger, because they are just smart enough to think up plans they're stupid enough to try. Individually, these three people are hopeless loners.
Why else, after Collie beats the bartender senseless, would she follow him down the street in her car and offer him a ride? She does this not because she is drunk, but because widowhood and drinking have put her into the orbit of Uncle Bud, a man whose moneymaking plans require someone like Collie: Needy, vulnerable, presentable, persuadable.
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