Night School

The late 1970s and for much of the 1980s saw the rise of the slasher horror movie. Capitalizing on the phenomenal success of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), every studio in Hollywood and beyond wanted in on the action and began cranking out countless imitations – some good (My Bloody Valentine) and many bad ones. Lost among this glut of movies was the little-seen Night School (1981), a modest slasher featuring the big screen debut of a young actress by the name of Rachel Ward and a clever twist on the Final Girl template back when it was still novel.

The opening credits play over an atmospheric montage of the Boston streets at night. College coeds are being decapitated by a mysterious killer dressed all in black, donning a motorcycle helmet and armed with a kukri knife. The first one sets the tone as a teacher’s aide is trapped on a spinning playground carousel until she literally loses her head.

Judd Austin (Leonard Mann) and his partner Taj (Joseph R. Sicari) are police detectives investigating the murders. They have little to go on: no motive, no suspects and no witnesses. There’s a refreshing no-nonsense methodical investigation technique courtesy of the Harvard University-educated Judd who is determined to the catch the killer.

His investigation leads to a girls’ college where the carousel victim attended night school, in particular, an anthropology class taught by Professor Millett (Drew Snyder). Judd meets him and his beautiful research assistant Eleanor Adjai (Ward), an exchange student and his lover. Night School keeps us guessing as to the killer’s identity. Is it the creepy bus boy obsessed with Eleanor at the local restaurant? Is it Millett, the charismatic teacher that has affairs with some of his students and whose latest conquest is Eleanor? They even partake in a kinky primitive ritual in the shower together. He also doesn’t seem particularly upset that his students are getting murdered.

Leonard Mann is excellent as the intelligent detective. It doesn’t take him long to connect the dots and the actor does a fantastic job of portraying someone who is always thinking and figuring things out. He also plays well off of Joseph R. Sicari, Judd’s partner, who doesn’t take the job serious and what he lacks in intelligence he makes up for with street smarts.

For what was her first feature film, Rachel Ward is wonderful as an emotionally fragile woman with a dark secret. The actress cuts an enigmatic presence throughout the movie, obfuscating Eleanor’s true motives. Is she merely a helpless victim at the mercy of men obsessed with her, interested in only one thing, or is there something else going on? Right from her first appearance on-screen it’s obvious that the camera loves Ward, showcasing her stunning natural beauty.

Frequent David Cronenberg collaborator Mark Irwin utilizes a soft focus look that was popular in the early ‘80s. His excellent cinematography gives Night School some class and helps it avoid looking like just another generic slasher movie. He gives the murder sequences a Giallo feel and the detective work scenes a police procedural vibe.

After the success of Halloween, stage director turned film producer Ruth Avergon and her partner and husband Larry Babb shopped ideas for their own version of Carpenter’s film around to various distributors. Babb came up with “the idea of a guy running around Boston decapitating people,” according to Avergon. She did some research into the headhunters of Papua New Guinea and married it with her husband’s idea, turning it into a screenplay. They managed to raise the $1.2 million through private investors. Lorimar acquired the movie in a negative pickup deal with Paramount Pictures releasing it domestically.

The director of Alice Sweet Alice (1976) Alfred Sole was originally hired but left early on over “major creative differences.” The original lead actress – D.D. Winters (a.k.a. Vanity), his lead on Tanya’s Island (1980) – left with him and Rachel Ward was cast in her place. Avergon discovered her at a New York City casting call despite the fact that she didn’t resembling what was originally envisioned for the character.

Sole was replaced by veteran British director Kenneth Hughes (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) who, along with cinematographer Mark Irwin, gave the movie a stylish look. They also did a fair amount of location scouting ahead of time in order to achieve what Avergon wanted: “to juxtapose this elegant, gorgeous Old World look with this horrible thing that was going on.”

Night School is a fascinating study in gender politics under the guise of a slasher movie. The gender of the killer colors the motivation for the murders in a way that wasn’t seen in a lot of movies at that time. The method of killing that the murderer employs – steeped in primitive practices and rituals – is also novel and separates it from many of its contemporaries. Night School deserves to be rediscovered and recognized as being a cut above many other movies of its ilk.

SOURCES

“Interview: Cinematographer Mark Irwin on Filming Night School (1981).” Man is the Warmest Place to Hide. April 14, 2013.

Rockoff, Adam. Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978-1986. McFarland and Company. 2002.

After Dark, My Sweet

After classic film noir ended with Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil in 1958, what became known as neo-noir emerged in the mid-1960s and continues to be made to this day. There is some debate as to when it became a full-fledged genre with some arguing that this didn’t happen until the 1980s with films like Against All Odds (1984), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) and Blood Simple (1984). The genre really took off in the 1990s with Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) and numerous Elmore Leonard adaptations.

That being said, 1990 might have been the best year for neo-noirs with The Grifters, The Hot Spot, After Dark, My Sweet, and The Two Jakes all coming out to varying degrees of success, both critically and commercially. Perhaps the most underrated film from the class of ’90 is After Dark, My Sweet, an adaptation of Jim Thompson’s 1955 novel of the same name by James Foley, no stranger himself to the crime genre with his critically-acclaimed film At Close Range (1986). Cast in the three pivotal roles were Bruce Dern (The Driver), Rachel Ward (Against All Odds) and Jason Patric (The Lost Boys). The end result was a bleak but absorbing crime drama that was well-received critically, but flopped at the box office, failing to make back its modest $6 million budget. It’s too bad, really, as After Dark, My Sweet is one of the very best neo-noirs of the ‘90s.

“I wonder where I’ll be tomorrow. I’ll wonder why I didn’t stay where I was a week ago and a thousand miles from here.” So muses Kevin “Kid” Collins (Jason Patric) in his world-weary voiceover narration. He is a traditional noir protagonist who lives on the margins of society. He’s a former boxer that took one too many shots to the head. It left him unstable and hospitalized, but he managed to escape and spends his days hitchhiking from one desolate small town to the next, “walking away from things for a long time,” as he puts it.

With his rumpled, disheveled look and shuffling gait, Kid is an unassuming punch-drunk guy that most people figure is kind of dumb by the way he talks. One day, he wanders into a bar and tries a down-on-his-luck story on a beautiful woman named Fay (Rachel Ward). He catches her attention after cold-cocking the pushy bartender and she takes him home. Like Kid, we immediately wonder what Fay’s angle is as she takes in a guy she initially rebuffed at the bar, but hey, with Rachel Ward’s looks, he doesn’t wonder too hard. She puts him to work reviving her expansive yard littered with weeds and a swimming pool that looks like a science experiment gone awry.

Fay introduces Kid to the smooth-talking Uncle Bud (Bruce Dern), a guy who knows people – “I know what they’ll do and I know what they won’t do.” In a few minutes, Bud expertly tap dances around pulling off a scam and warns Kid to stay away from Fay – it’s an impressive bit of verbal acrobatics that Bruce Dern pulls off effortlessly. Kid tries to cut loose of Fay and Uncle Bud. He even stays with a kind doctor (George Dickerson) who recognizes the young man’s unstable mental state. However, Kid is drawn back to Fay, unable to resist her allure, and is roped into Uncle Bud’s kidnapping scheme. After Dark, My Sweet plays out in typical noir fashion as the scheme becomes complicated the more Fay, Kid and Uncle Bud distrust one another and it is only a matter of time before someone gets double-crossed. It’s a guessing game for the audience as we try to figure out who’s conning whom and why.

Done early in his career, Jason Patric was desperate to shake free of the heart-throb image that he was tagged with after making The Lost Boys (1987). He saw an independent film like After Dark, My Sweet as a way to show he had some real acting chops by playing a deeply conflicted character. He offsets his matinee idol good looks by adopting body language that suggests a damaged person and speaking in such a way – slow with pregnant pauses – that only enhances Kid’s flaws. However, as the film progresses, Patric shows us that there is more to Kid than meets the eye. There’s a moving scene where the drifter, lying alone in bed, breaks down, still haunted by the memory of killing a man in the boxing ring. In a diverse career, After Dark, My Sweet is still his best performance.

In the ‘80s, Rachel Ward played a quintessential femme fatale in Against All Odds and a parody of one in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), but her character in After Dark, My Sweet is a bit more layered. Fay is something of an enigma. She refers to a deceased husband on several occasions, but we’re never sure what exactly her relationship is to Uncle Bud – are they related? Lovers? Partners in crime? Ward is the film’s suntanned femme fatale who catches Kid’s eye with a pair of cut-off jeans shorts that leaves little to the imagination. She doesn’t wear the typical fatale garb – she’s more casual with outfits like a red bathrobe, a flower print dress, and so on, but Ward has the figure that makes it all work and it’s easy to see why Kid is unable to resist Fay’s allure for long. The sexual chemistry, especially as the film goes on, is almost tangible.

The great Bruce Dern adds another fascinating character to an already impressive roster. Right from the get-go we know that the glad-handing Uncle Bud can’t be trusted, but the veteran character actor disarms us with his charm, much as he does with the understandably wary Kid. But as with many of Dern’s characters, the charm is a façade for something darker and volatile underneath.

James Foley is an interesting director who has made some very memorable crime films, including the aforementioned At Close Range and Confidence (2003) as well as an excellent adaptation of the David Mamet play Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). However, Foley remains largely underappreciated by cineastes. In After Dark, My Sweet, he makes good use of the widescreen aspect ratio, especially in the outdoor scenes as he captures the desolate California desert landscapes. Foley doesn’t get too fancy with the camerawork, allowing the actors to do their thing, which is crucial to a film like this where the relationships between the main characters are what drive the story.

After Dark, My Sweet received mixed to positive reviews from critics. Roger Ebert ranks it as one of his “Great Movies” on his website and called it, “one of the purest and most uncompromising of modern films noir. It captures above all the lonely, exhausted lives of its characters.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby felt that the film “ought to push Mr. Patric's career into the big time. It's not often that a young actor as conventionally handsome as he is has a chance to demonstrate his talents in a role as rich, colorful and complex as that of Collie. The role is pivotal to the film's success, as is Mr. Patric's performance.” Newsweek’s David Ansen praised Foley’s direction: “Here he resists the temptation to overstylize Thompson's blunt, black style: he keeps action taut but gives his actors breathing space to work out their feint-and-jab rhythms.” In his review for the Globe and Mail, Jay Scott called it, “a miniature classic, a pulp tragedy.”

However, Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “C+” rating and Owen Gleiberman felt that it was “cool and compelling for about 45 minutes, but it has a clinical, hothouse garishness that grows oppressive.” USA Today gave it one-and-a-half out of four stars and Mike Clark wrote, “Nothing works, though, in this over-elaborate let's-kidnap-a-kid melodrama. Jason Patric (Lost Boys) plays the drifter, and is in some ways an apt choice; even at the end, we're never certain how smart, stupid or calculating this chump really is. But ultimately, Patric degenerates into a one-note whose studied deliveries help expand the running time.” Finally, the Washington Post’s Hal Hinson wrote, “Everything in the picture is sanitized. Because there's no stink of the back alley in it, its fatalism becomes a kind of chic affectation. It's designer cynicism. When his characters sweat, it's as if they're sweating Dom Perignon.”

There is a melancholic vibe that hangs over the entire film as Kid, Fay and Uncle Bud are all headed nowhere. Fay seems resigned to this fate while Kid is indifferent and Uncle Bud is in denial, still planning the score that he hopes will set him up for life. Of course, Bud thinks he has all the angles figured out, including Kid by having Fay keep him in check, but they all make the classic mistake of underestimating the young man. With After Dark, My Sweet, Foley has created a character-driven crime film that wouldn’t look out of place in the 1970s, like something Bob Rafelson might’ve done (and did with Blood and Wine in 1996). At the beginning of the film, Kid wonders where he’ll be tomorrow and by the end, he sees things clearly – “When a man stops caring what happens all the strain is lifted from him.” – and knows what he must do. Like most noirs, it ends tragically for most involved, but there’s an element of self-sacrifice that provides one last, intriguing twist to Fay and Kid’s relationship.

Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid

In the early 1980s it must’ve seemed like a crazy idea to mix several contemporary actors with clips from classic films into something resembling a coherent story. Even now it seems like a pretty wild idea and one with few antecedents (Kung Pow! Enter the Fist is the only one that comes immediately to mind). But director Carl Reiner and comedian Steve Martin had the chutzpah to give it a try with Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), a comedy that simultaneously pays tribute to and affectionately parodies film noirs from the 1940s and 1950s. Only a few years earlier, Reiner and Martin hit comedic pay dirt with The Jerk (1979) and so anticipation was high for this new collaboration. The result was a rare cinematic experiment that was viewed by some as lazy filmmaking and a clever homage by others.

Reiner sets the proper tone right from the get-go by featuring the Universal Pictures logo from the ‘40s. The opening credits play over a rainy city skyline at night (does it get any more noir than that?). The buildings are obviously an illustrated backdrop signifying that we are dealing with a fantasy world drenched in noir, anticipating Sin City’s (2005) own artificial world by many years. Private investigator Rigby Reardon (Steve Martin) is hired by the beautiful Juliet Forrest (Rachel Ward) to investigate the mysterious death of her father John Hay Forrest (George Gaynes), a highly regarded scientist and cheesemaker. The authorities have ruled it an accident but she suspects murder, her father the victim of a giant conspiracy.

Reardon’s hard-boiled voiceover narration plays around with the pulpy dialogue common in the film noir genre for comedic effect. For example, after his first meeting with Juliet, he thinks to himself, “I hadn’t seen a body put together like that since I solved the case of the murdered girl with the big tits.” His voiceovers also complement visual gags like when Reardon arrives at Dr. Forrest’s cheese lab and he observes, “I had no trouble finding Dr. Forrest’s cheese lab. It smelled like the number on the door.” Cut to a shot of a door with a “2” on it. In another scene, Juliet can actually hear Reardon’s voiceover narration, much to his surprise. There are a few gags that would be repeated in the short-lived Police Squad television show, which was also a parody of the crime thriller genre, but Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid’s focus is predominantly film noir.

Reardon is not your typical gumshoe. For example, he goes into a hysterical murderous rampage whenever he hears the words, “cleaning woman.” Steve Martin wisely knows when to play it straight, like when it comes to saying the hard-boiled dialogue that often authentically evokes film noirs while also poking fun at them as well. He also picks his moments to cut loose and act zany, most notably whenever the “cleaning woman” phrase is invoked. Martin has a lot of fun interacting with various screen legends, like the phone conversation he has with a hysterical Barbara Stanwyck from Sorry, Wrong Number (1948). His poker-faced delivery of most of his dialogue is what makes it so funny, as is some of the physical bits of business he does, like when Reardon makes a cup of his famous java for Burt Lancaster from The Killers (1946), which evidently involves an entire bag of coffee grounds and two eggs (including the shells).

Juliet is not a typical femme fatale. For starters, whenever Reardon is shot she removes the bullet with her teeth, a procedure she learned at camp. Rachel Ward looks absolutely gorgeous all dolled up and looking like she walked right out of a film from the ‘40s, which is obviously the look they were going for. Ward has the perfect sultry voice of a noir fatale and watching this film again serves as a vivid reminder of what a sexy presence she was in the 1980s with films like Against All Odds (1984), which really put her on the map and into the mainstream consciousness. Ward seemed to gravitate towards crime films, also appearing in the underrated neo-noir After Dark, My Sweet (1990). Martin and Ward play well off each other and have several funny exchanges of dialogue, like when she tells him at one point, “You’re a very smart man,” to which he replies, “So was Abraham Lincoln. Look what happened to him.”

In the summer of 1980, Martin was having lunch with Reiner and screenwriter George Gipe. They were discussing a screenplay Martin had written when the comedian suggested that they use a clip from an old film somewhere in his project. From this suggestion came the idea of using all sorts of clips from classic films throughout the entire feature. The three men left the lunch thinking about how they could incorporate all of these old clips into a story. Reiner figured that they could work Martin into the old footage via tricks like over-the-shoulder shots so that it looked like he was talking to these famous actors.

Reiner and Gipe spent countless hours viewing classic films looking for specific shots and “listening for a line that was ambiguous enough but had enough meat in it to contribute a line opposite,” Reiner said at the time. He and Gipe took lines of dialogue from the clips they wanted to use and juxtaposed them while also trying to write a story based on them. They finally worked out a story and then met with Martin who contributed some funny material of his own. In preparation for the film, he purposely chose not to watch any classic film noirs because he “didn’t want to act like Humphrey Bogart ... I didn’t want to be influenced.”

In order to accurately recreate the look of film noir, Reiner recruited some of the people that helped define several classic films from the genre. Costume designer Edith Head, responsible for memorable outfits in films like Double Indemnity (1944), Notorious (1946) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), created over 20 suits for Martin in similar fashion to those worn by Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart back in the day. Production designer John De Cuir, a veteran with 40 years of experience on films like Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948) designed 85 sets over the ten-week shooting schedule. Rounding out these cinematic legends was composer Miklos Rozsa, who created the atmospheric soundtracks for Double Indemnity, Spellbound (1945) and The Asphalt Jungle (1950), and he helped give the film an authentic noir sound. Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid looks and sounds as good as it does because of the work of these talented people. Sadly, it would be the last film for both Head and Rozsa.

Reiner and director of photography Michael Chapman do a pretty good job blending the vintage footage with their own. Nowadays you would just use CGI but back then they didn’t have that luxury and had to pay careful attention to the cinematography so that their shots would match up, making the seamless blend that much more impressive. Chapman studied the angles and lighting popular among ‘40s film noir, conducting six months of research with Technicolor to try and match the old film clips with his new footage. Principal photography began on July 7, 1981 with the bulk of it done on the soundstages of Laird International Studios in Culver City and three exterior locations shot in and around Los Angeles.

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid actually received a pretty decent response from critics. In his review for Newsweek magazine, David Ansen wrote, "A one joke movie? Perhaps, but it's such an engaging joke that anyone who loves old movies will find it irresistible. And anyone who loves Steve Martin will be fascinated by his sly performance, which is pitched exactly between the low comedy of The Jerk and the highbrow Brechtianisms of Pennies from Heaven." The New York Times’ Vincent Canby praised Martin's performance: "the film has an actor who's one of America's best sketch artists, a man blessed with a great sense of timing, who is also self-effacing enough to meet the most cockeyed demands of the material." However, Time magazine's Richard Corliss wrote, "The gag works for a while, as Martin weaves his own plot-web into the 18 old movies, but pretty soon he's traveling on old good will and flop sweat".

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is quite possibly my favorite Steve Martin comedy, even over beloved classics like The Jerk and L.A. Story (1991), because of its film noir trappings and its very funny script chock full of all kinds of gags, both verbal and physical. It is a film noir lover’s dream as we get to see Martin “interact” with the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Burt Lancaster, Veronica Lake, Ingrid Bergman and countless others. There is also a lot of fun to be had identifying which films are used in the various clips seen throughout but this is also one of its criticisms – that the film is nothing more than a stylish parlor game of spot the reference. Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is some kind of crazed, ambitious experiment that has rarely been duplicated – clearance rights for all of these clips would be a legal nightmare in today’s ultra-litigious climate. In retrospect, the film had limited commercial appeal which may explain why it didn’t exactly set the box office on fire, disappointing mainstream audiences expecting Reiner and Martin to rehash The Jerk. Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is not talked about much anymore making it prime for rediscovery as a cult film oddity.

Some of the stills used in this article came from the Precious Bodily Fluids blog and this excellent post on the film (featuring more stills). Here is a pretty snazzy fan site.

SOURCES

Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid Production Notes. Universal Pictures. 1982.