THE BEDROOM WINDOW (1987)

Early full budget film from writer/director Curtis Hanson shows none of the narrative sense, stylish flair or confident execution he’d bring to L.A. CONFIDENTIAL ten years later.  But then, few of his other films do.  (WONDER BOYS and 8 MILE suggest otherwise to many.)  WINDOW does have a certain usefulness in highlighting just how bad standard production defaults were in the late ‘80s: Gil Taylor’s VHS-friendly over-lit lensing; a faux Kenny G. soundtrack; de rigeur naked backsides from our leads so producer Martha De Laurentiis (Dino’s daughter) can make her pre-sales target.  Ugh.  This voyeuristic thriller opens as Steve Guttenberg and boss’s wife Isabelle Huppert have their tryst interrupted by a sexual attack on the street below the bedroom window.  Huppert’s the actual witness, but can’t report it to the police without giving away her affair.  So Steve takes down all the details and fakes the report, even testifies in court.  But since no good deed of perjury goes unpunished, his story breaks down, the case falls apart, the sex fiend/murderer is back on the street, and even victim Elizabeth McGovern doubts his story.  You can see how this could work, but Hanson’s too busy quoting favorite directors (Welles, Hitchcock, Wilder) to build suspense or parse the plot.  He certainly gets no help from his actors: Huppert unintelligible in English; McGovern working those chipmunk cheeks, and Guttenberg’s alternating hang and puppy-dog faces.  While Hanson, like a foreign filmmaker on his first English-language pic, gets all the beats wrong.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Three years before this, Joel & Ethan Coen's BLOOD SIMPLE/'84 made the reimagined Neo-Noir thriller seem easy & inevitable.