RISKY BUSINESS (1983)
Sex sells...especially here on hooksexup.com, which is why I included the HOT!!!! train sex clip above rather than, say, a clip of Bronson Pinchot counting money in the suburban bordello launched by Tom Cruise’s home-alone upper-middle-class teen wanker Joel and Rebecca De Mornay’s hooker with a heart of coal, Lana, the better to separate Joel’s horny friends from their virginity (not to mention their trust funds). But, in the same way Deadwood’s Machiavellian barkeep Al Swearengen realized the best way to get rich quick during the South Dakota gold rush was simply to bilk the prospectors, Joe Pantoliano -- in his breakthrough role as Guido the Killer Pimp -- is the movie's real schemer, winding up with all the money from Joel’s Young Enterpriser start-up. In a similar way, Tom Cruise wound up reaping most of the benefits from Risky Business, which launched his career into the A-list stratosphere while writer/director Paul Brickman somehow didn’t get to direct another movie until 1990’s Men Don’t Leave, by which point his once seemingly promising career had gone in the drink like Joel’s Porsche (along with the A-list dreams of Mornay and my own personal rooting interest, Curtis “Booger” Armstrong). But that’s capitalism, for ya! (AO)
LE CERCLE ROUGE (1970)
Jean-Pierre Melville’s second-to-last film finds the auteur reuniting with his Le Samouraï star Alain Delon for another romantically fatalistic, existential crime saga. The expansive plot involves Delon’s thief, who’s released from prison, promptly rips off his mob employer, and then enlists the aid of a fugitive murderer (Gian Maria Volonte) and a boozehound ex-cop (Yves Montand) for a jewelry heist. Melville’s orchestration of the robbery boasts his trademark efficiency and lucidity, though what resonates more forcefully is his loving portrait of male camaraderie, as well as his tough-guys’ adherence to male codes of honor and conduct. As in most of the director’s neo-noirs, Delon and company are defined by their professional rituals, by the scrupulousness with which they carry out their tasks. As such, they’re ideal stand-ins for Melville himself, a master of the cinematic form who – as ably illustrated by the prolonged, taut central swindle – blended formal rigorousness with off-the-cuff jazziness to create an entrancing movie’s-movie vision of hoods, dames and doom. (NS)
THE PRODUCERS (1968)
Broadway producer Max Bialystock used to live the good life. Champagne, limousines, and girls, girls, girls! But now he’s reduced to wearing a cardboard belt, avoiding his landlord, and hustling old ladies to get money to pay his bills. He’d become used to high living, and it’s an addiction he can’t shake. What’s more, he’s no spring chicken; he’s only about 20 years behind his elderly clients like “Hold Me Touch Me”. He’s the very definition of someone who needs to get rich, and quick. Lucky for him, into his life – and his office – walks nervous accountant Leo Bloom, whose nebbishy temperament and genius with figures are just what Max needs to hatch his plan: to produce a play so awful that it will close on the first night – thus allowing him to pocket all the money he intends to bilk his little old ladies into overpaying. Like most great get-rich schemes, its elegant simplicity is its appeal – and likewise its downfall. Max picks a play, a cast, and a crew so profoundly awful that there’s no way they can possibly succeed, which, naturally, they do, and watching how it all plays out is one of the great joys of 1960s comedy. (LP)
THE KILLING (1956)
Those of us who were introduced to the cinema of Stanley Kubrick through his later Baroque Period and worked our way backward may have initially felt like this tight, twisty crime picture was the work of another filmmaker entirely. Kubrick’s bleak view of humanity is already fully formed, however, in this case ably assisted by noir novelist Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me), and his technical proficiency – notably as it relates to the movie’s innovative and influential time-shifting structure – is unmistakable. The granddaddy of all “one last heist” movies, The Killing boasts a rock-solid cast of retro roughnecks (including Sterling Hayden, Ted de Corsia and the inimitable Timothy Carey), a well-oiled racetrack robbery that can’t possibly go wrong, and a vicious, noose-tightening sense of impending doom when it inevitably does go wrong. The final image is the essence of noir fatalism boiled down to a bitter punchline – a peerless visual representation of the get-rich-quick scheme gone awry. (SVD)
THE LAVENDER HILL MOB (1951)
Henry Holland, the London bank clerk played by Alec Guinness in this dry British heist comedy, has spent twenty years working on the slow part of his "get rich quick" scheme -- i.e., building up a supremely boring image so that his employers will trust him implicitly with the gold bullion whose transportation he regularly supervises. Holland decides that he's waited long enough when he meets Stanley Holloway, the owner of a foundry that manufactures cheap souvenirs and the last piece of his plan clicks into place: how to smuggle the gold out of the country once it's been stolen. The two melt down their swag and use it to make little Eiffel tower-shaped paperweights, then race to Paris to intersect them before they're sold in the gift shops to lucky tourists. In the end, they must pay for their dastardly deed, but at least Holland gets to meet Audrey Hepburn. (PN)
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Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent