Detour

Writer-director John Dahl started his filmmaking career as a sharp-eyed revivalist, fixated for a span of three movies on summoning the hard-boiled textures of 1940s and ‘50s film noir. His feature-directing debut, 1989’s Kill Me Again, was an efficient riff on the femme fatale-driven convolutions of movies like Double Indemnity (1944) and Decoy (1946); dangerous women redolent of archetypes cast by the likes of Lauren Bacall, Rita Hayworth, and Lizabeth Scott proved a characterological preoccupation for Dahl across his next few movies, too. The difference, particularly with his magnum opus, The Last Seduction (1994), was how much more celebratory he was of women behaving badly than his forebears, whose obligatory loyalty to the production code always bolstered 11th-hour reminders that we ought to condemn rather than revel in their glamorous amorality. 

Dahl’s era-evoking movies work as well as they do in part because their reverence had clearly defined limits, affectionate toward what could make films noirs fun while happily pushing the boundaries that could sometimes undermine what made them great. They spiked time-tested recipes; familiar flavors were newly ringed with acrid edges.

Red Rock West (1993), sandwiched between Kill Me Again and The Last Seduction, suffered a fate similar to the latter. Both were immediately beloved by critics and the few members of the public who saw them but were saddled with distribution woes that have made them inconsistently easy to access. It’s a logical nexus point between its predecessor and successor, sharpening what made the former work but less ambitious — and lead performance-driven — than the latter. (The Last Seduction features who’s maybe the best-realized, and most indelibly played, character in a Dahl movie: Bridget Gregory, a ruthless schemer portrayed with unforgettably alluring snakiness by a never-better Linda Fiorentino.)  

Nicolas Cage and Dennis Hopper in Red Rock West.

Red Rock West is tighter and more claustrophobic, set almost entirely in the titular town of barely more than 1,500 people. Its star is a not-yet-30 Nicolas Cage, though everyone in the cast, in harmony with the power-playing ambitions of the characters that they play, is so constantly stealing scenes from each other that there arguably isn’t one particular person to whom the movie most obviously belongs. (It reminds me of 1941’s The Maltese Falcon that way.) Cage plays a drifter named Michael who’s spurred to go to Red Rock after the construction job for which he’d traveled 1,200 miles falls through upon the discovery of a war-caused leg injury he hadn’t disclosed ahead of time. (Another thing Red Rock West has in common with its ancestors: a story imbued with post-war struggle to professionally and socially reacclimate.)

A stop by a bar seems, at first, like it could be a boon. The owner, Wayne (J.T. Walsh), mistakes Michael for a guy from Texas named Lyle whom he assumes is here, if a little late, for a high-paying job he recently agreed to. Michael is cash-desperate, and reasonably figures that whatever request Wayne has couldn’t be so bad. He goes on with the charade. But Wayne’s request actually is bad. He wants Michael-as-Lyle to kill his wife, Suzanne (Lara Flynn Boyle), for a high price to be paid in halves. Michael isn’t the killing type, so he decides to do the right thing. (That doesn’t include not absconding with the huge sum of money he’s just been handed.) 

Nicolas Cage and Dwight Yoakam in Red Rock West.

He tells Suzanne what’s going on, which prompts her to cooly offer double what Wayne was for Lyle to do the reverse on her husband. Michael takes that money, too, then writes an anonymous tip to the sheriff describing, without incriminating himself, what’s just gone on. Wayne, though, turns out to also be the sheriff, and Michael doesn’t feel like he can continue with his plans to skip town after nearly fatally running over a guy he couldn’t see well in the road during a rainstorm.

When we learn that the man hit is actually the muscly guy Suzanne is having an affair with, we’re surprised, but not totally. By then we’ve gotten used to Red Rock West being pleasantly complicated, eager to pile on new twists. Dahl, co-writing with his brother, Rick, keeps things sufficiently soap operatic — Michael and Suzanne will start to have an affair, the real Lyle from Texas (played by Dennis Hopper in snazzy cowboy garb) will show up — without getting carried away. They keep you on your toes without wearing out the welcome unpredictability. 

Walsh and Ava Gardner-esque Boyle embody their archetypes with aplomb. Hopper and Cage, though mostly suppressing the wild-card acting choices for which they’re associated, can’t help themselves from an occasional hyperbolic line reading that can be enough to further tip Red Rock West into black-comedy territory, buttressed by the almost comically constant back-stabbing and grinning appearances from the likes of Dwight Yoakam as a trucker. It’s all barely longer than an hour and a half. Red Rock West so masterfully typifies the virtues of being lean and mean that its perfection of a formula makes it feel as close to a classic as the sorts of movies that inspired it.