True Confessions

True Confessions (1981) is a story about rot and how it taints institutions like the Church. It's also loosely based on the grisly Black Dahlia murder case. The film is set in Los Angeles in 1948, and the focus is on two brothers: one a priest (Robert De Niro) who schmoozes with wealthy laymen in order to get funding for church buildings, and the other a hardboiled detective (Robert Duvall), who's a cynic. He's seen the corruption of religious institutions first hand, and it's no different from the corruption of law enforcement or any other supposedly pure organization.

When Duvall's character confronts a big-time construction magnate (Charles Durning) who's been helping out the Church, he unflinchingly mocks the man's moral character, and he gets something of a kick out of doing it. He's overly pleased with calling people out, but then he has a right to be infuriated when the Church celebrates a man who frequents prostitutes. But he's a hypocrite, too. Near the beginning of the film, he does the Church a favor by removing the corpse of a priest who suffered a fatal heart attack while visiting a house of ill fame. It would be a nasty scandal for the Catholic Church and in particular his brother, so he takes care of things for them.

True Confessions, which was based on John Gregory Dunne's 1977 novel and adapted by Dunne and Joan Didion, seems to be reaching for profundity when it exposes the rot with which it is so consumed. But when the police are investigating the brutal murder of a young woman found in a vacant lot (she was cut in half and eviscerated), they treat the murder as though it were a routine, unremarkable event. There's no feeling for her or for the particularly horrifying circumstances of her death.

It's only later that Duvall's character develops a kind of sympathy for the murdered girl, as well as a compulsive desire for justice, which he finds is just as elusive as the mysterious girl herself. It's hard to buy his sudden transition from callousness to compassion, because Duvall's character is a grim, pasty, unfeeling cardboard cutout out of a detective character from the 1940s. He's Humphrey Bogart without the charm and fast-talking wit. He has a sense of humor, to be sure, but he doesn't talk in all the lovely double entendres Bogart did in The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep.

De Niro too seems embalmed in True Confessions, and he appears as though he had no idea of how to play the priest any other way. It's probably a fault of the writing, which vacillates clumsily from murder mystery to morality tale to family drama, never successfully getting across any concrete ideas about any of them. Instead it just pounds us over the head with its one crystallized theme: Rot. By the end of the movie, you certainly feel it spreading, and it makes you wish the whole experience were over sooner. (And, there's a wedding scene near the beginning that has echoes of The Godfather, as though they were trying to make a film about the Catholic Church on that level; it's merely a reminder of how pale a comparison True Confessions is.)

Directed by Ulu Grosbard. With Ed Flanders, Burgess Meredith, Kenneth McMillan, Cyril Cusack, Dan Hedaya, Jeanette Nolan, and Rose Gregario. 108 mins. ★★

Foul Play

For most of my childhood, Foul Play (1978) was my favorite comedy (or at the very least, tied with Nine to Five--which, incidentally, was directed by the same man, Colin Higgins). It's about a shy but sexy librarian (Goldie Hawn) who becomes mixed up in a murder plot involving an odd assortment of criminals who are planning to assassinate the pope when he visits San Francisco. The movie is basically a remake of Charade, where Audrey Hepburn plays the chic widow pursued by a trio of cads in Paris and a mysterious stranger, played by Cary Grant. It evens mimics Charade in at least one scene where Goldie is running from one of her attackers. The camera zooms in on her legs and her black high heels as she runs for her life.

Goldie Hawn seems to have access to a neverending current of charm, and she's consistently engaging in almost every movie I've seen her in. While Foul Play may be one of the fluffier entries into her career, it's nonetheless a fun movie, provided you don't put too much thought into it. The comedy is best when Goldie is resourceful but wide-eyed, and her co-star, Chevy Chase, doesn't have to fake Cary Grant-ish charm. Chevy's strength is in his bumbling inability to be serious, and as long as he doesn't have to be a legitimate romantic lead, you can enjoy his being ostensibly paired off with Hawn. He plays a cop who Goldie meets at a party, and then becomes involved with her after responding to her frantic call to the police during an attack by a creepy thug (Don Calfa).

Several comic set pieces are utterly contrived. A scene with Billy Barty is a complete waste, manufactured by the confusion of the head criminal's nickname, "The Dwarf." There's a whole sequence involving Dudley Moore that doesn't fit into the movie at all. Moore is funny regardless, playing a kinky swinger who gets the wrong idea when Goldie asks him to take her home. She's running from a killer, but somehow convinces Moore that she's looking for a one-night-stand.

Hawn's character seems anachronistic to San Francisco. She's apparently the first modern American woman to be de-liberated by a divorce: it's turned her into a mousy loner who has shut herself off to the prospect of romance. It's hard to accept, because Goldie Hawn exudes an effulgent likableness that is anything but shy or unappealing.

And San Francisco isn't exactly portrayed in a good light: it's shown as a city of psychos and sex perverts. Another movie from 1978, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, turns the Bay city into a haven for an alien invasion where humans are being harvested. Granted, this was the city of the Zodiac killer, so perhaps there was good reason to paint it as a locus of dangerous activity. In the process, however, the filmmakers lose a lot of the capital they could have gotten out of their setting. The city's cultural opulence is dulled, with the exception of a sequence in a retrospective movie house and the denouement, which occurs during a performance of The Mikado (both sequences turn their settings into places of destruction). It's as if art itself is merely a breeding ground for violent criminal behavior. Or maybe it exacerbates the behavior.

The whole assassination plot is a bit half-cocked, but you don't go to this kind of movie for brilliant storytelling. The sequence where Goldie and Chevy race across San Francisco, wrecking several cars in the process, is a clunky way to liven things up. Burgess Meredith offers liveliness of a natural kind. He plays Hawn's landlord, a kindly retired anthropologist with a Black Belt in Karate that comes in handy during a scuffle with the radiantly evil-looking Rachel Roberts.

With Eugene Roche, Brian Dennehy, and Marilyn Sokol.