Barbet Schroeder's remake and update of Henry Hathaway's same-named film of 1947 is a serviceable crime melodrama. It should come as no surprise, but perhaps as some continuing source of pain, that a mature European of culture and taste can be trusted to show more respect for the genre than can new-generation Hollywooders. The scale of the action is sensibly judged; the atmosphere, while thick enough for cutting with a knife, is free of artificial lights and fogs; and Luciano Tovoli's photography is almost as beautifully shaded as his work in Schroeder's Single White Female. But please let's try to contain our enthusiasm. This is awfully shopworn stuff. The plotting follows closely, if somewhat dawdlingly, that of the original. And although the new version mops up the overt sentimentality of the old one -- pretty much confined to the Colleen Gray character, and especially her voice-over narration -- there is nevertheless a subtler kind of sentimentality in the elaboration of plot points that the original left laconically understated. And the old ending (notwithstanding the unswallowable "happy" postscript from our narrator) is far the more forceful of the two: the more resignedly suicidal. Finally, there's no new equivalent to the original's raison d'être, the breakaway from the studio backlot into authentic locales. That's long since taken for granted. But it needed its pioneers. And Hathaway, in "semi-documentaries" like The House on 92nd Street and Call Northside 777, was frontmost. Schroeder is simply tooling down the asphalt with a Triple-A Triptik. David Caruso, Nicolas Cage, Samuel L. Jackson, Stanley Tucci. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
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