The Film
Neo-Noir has always been a sweaty genre. Body Heat, which drips with heat, tension and sex, may be the sweatiest of them all, but The Hot Spot isn’t far behind.
One hot day, Harry Maddox (Don Johnson) shows up in a tiny Texas town. He gets a job as a car salesman by simply walking on to the lot and selling one. Set up, he turns his eyes first to the beautiful young receptionist (Jennifer Connelly) at a neighbouring business, then to his boss’ wife (Virginia Madsen) and finally to the local bank, staffed entirely by volunteer firefighters; a detail that gives Harry an idea.
There could have been few films more suited to screening during the heatwave we’re having than this one. During the daytime, director Dennis Hopper’s whole colour scheme is bright and sun-scorched, the heaviness of the heat is palpable, and that’s before Virginia Madsen drives up to her husband’s car dealership, claps eyes on Don Johnson, and turns up the thermostat. Madsen says the anklet she wears as Dolly Harshaw was inspired by Barbara Stanwyck, and I don’t think that’s the only time she’s trying to channel her, or a number of noir’s great femmes fatales. Madsen is all calculated lust as Dolly goes after Harry, ensnaring him with her beauty, but using her intelligence to stop him from following his instincts and leaving it as a one (maybe two) time thing.
Jennifer Connelly doesn’t exactly play a femme fatale here, but her character still manages to ensnare Harry in some dangerous situations involving a sleazy local mechanic played by William Sadler (given which, I could probably have skipped ‘sleazy’ in the description). If this film had been a hit, both Madsen and Connelly would likely have been breakout stars (not that Connelly was an unknown at this point). They each play a very different archetype of the women of noir, and of men’s perception of female sexuality: Madsen voracious and threatening, Connelly demure but tempted. Both are excellent, and while it’s Johnson who is supposedly the focal point, it’s the women who are the most memorable characters. It’s also fair to question whether either of them has ever looked better.
Throughout the film, the sticking point for me is Don Johnson. He’s got the looks for the part, no question, but he feels like a square peg in a round hole. Hopper’s design seems to deliberately fudge the period; the cars are all classics, the colour scheme is hot and bold much of the time, and apparently Edward Hopper was a visual influence, as well as classic noir. Johnson, however, locates the film firmly in 1990. He is a man utterly of that moment (or perhaps just slightly out of it; he’s really an icon of the ’80s), but he throws things off balance for me.
Along with this, ultimately Johnson is just not a great actor. I don’t especially buy Virginia Madsen’s femme fatale fixating on him, perhaps other than that she might have fixated on anyone who rode into town the way Harry did. When she does though, Johnson’s lack of interest in her doesn’t come off as hard-boiled, which is a tool he doesn’t really have, despite the script giving him vintage 50s styled dialogue to chew on more than a few times. Ultimately, he makes for fairly bland fall guy.
This, along with a script that only very belatedly draws itself together, means that the film is never quite the sum of its parts. The softer, more romantic, relationship between Connelly and Johnson isn’t especially convincing. If we’re meant to believe it’s genuine, Johnson never makes us feel that, and if it’s supposed to be him using her, the character isn’t credibly so cold either. That said, there are great parts here. The film looks terrific throughout, and Hopper marshals several outstanding extended sequences, most notably a bank robbery and a pair of fights between Johnson and Sadler. This may be partly down to the fact that, while in the film they are conventionally cut, Sadler says that Hopper liked to do extended takes, perhaps 8 minutes for the fight, capturing whole scenes at once. This gives the individual sequences a flow the film never quite finds.
On the whole, The Hot Spot isn’t a lost classic of neo-noir, but it is well worth seeing for genre fans. Around it are some great performances and sequences, and Hopper lends it an interesting out of time visual style. For me though, there’s a hole at the centre of it.
★★★
The Disc and Extras
Compared to the previous Blu-ray I have (which double bills the film with the terrible Heather Graham/Joseph Fiennes ‘erotic’ ‘thriller’ Killing Me Softly), this new disc has warmer colours, which feel more true to the atmosphere of the film, if perhaps a little heightened, but it also retains more film grain, so it has better detail and clarity. I did notice one brief instance of what appeared to be print damage, but otherwise this is a very good image.
The extras package is fairly small, but covers a decent amount of ground. Dennis Hopper appears, weirdly, in a 4 minute segment from a Belgian TV show which has him talking to camera while walking through the airport. He talks about a book of his photographs, touches on The Hot Spot (with some on set footage of him directing Johnson and Connelly) and Colors, and then the segment ends mid sentence. More conventional are brief interviews with Virginia Madsen and William Sadler, produced for 2021 Kino Lorber disc. Both Madsen and Sadler talk about Hopper’s directorial style with great fondness and reminisce about a few specific moments.
New for this edition is an interview with Hopper biographer Nick Dawson, who mentions earlier attempts to get this film off the ground, with Robert Mitchum starring in the ’70s, or with Mike Figgis directing Sam Shepherd, Anne Archer and Uma Thurman in the late ’80s. From there he delves into Hopper’s take on the film, his history, his stylistic influences and more across 20 minutes. Finally, crime fiction expert Duane Swierczynski talks for just over 20 minutes about Charles Williams, the author of Hell Hath No Fury, the 1953 novel the film is based on. It’s a good primer on an obscure author, and will probably make you want to read some of his work.
