Word: stakeouts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...been a strange year for American movies. The most popular films of 1987 have a dark hue: violent policiers (Beverly Hills Cop II, The Untouchables, Lethal Weapon, Stakeout), corrosive Viet Nam memorials (Platoon and Full Metal Jacket), thrillers about sexual anxiety (Fatal Attraction). Steven Spielberg has flown to the dark side of E.T.: in Empire of the Sun a boy goes to war, and nearly goes mad. Even the comedies are cynical. The Secret of My Success got Michael J. Fox into bed with his uncle's wife to help advance his career. The Witches of Eastwick sent Satan...
That is exactly the response proposed by the Miami Herald's Tom Fiedler, who was the lead reporter in the stakeout that broke the Gary Hart-Donna Rice story. Last week Fiedler wrote in a column that the "character issue" was now being carried to "absurd" lengths. David Broder of the Washington Post, the paper that delivered the final blow to Hart, also fretted. "It's time to slow down and take another look at what we're doing," Broder wrote, "before more damage is done...
...Stakeout, Writer Jim Kauf devised a plausible, original and engaging premise. Detectives Lecce and Reimers (Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez) are a pair of laughing policemen assigned to keep watch on the home of Maria McGuire (the delicious Madeleine Stowe), former girlfriend of a psychopathic criminal (Aidan Quinn) who has lately, bloodily escaped from jail. Somehow Lecce is snookered into love with the lady he is snarking on. Disguised as a telephone repairman, he insinuates himself into her pad, her bed, her heart. Dreyfuss is terrific in the role, abrupt and vulnerable; Estevez is adroit as a man comically appalled...
...often determined by the opening weekend's box-office take. And the feeling is that nothing brings the kids in like rumors of big action along a plot line full of hairpin curves. A lot of movies with bliss-out potential are blitzed out by loud, dumb conclusions. Like Stakeout. Like...
...waste a word, and De Palma does not waste a shot. The result is a densely layered work moving with confident, compulsive energy. One sequence is set in Chicago's Union Station, where Ness and Stone must take a key witness from the Mob's protective custody. Into their stakeout blunders a mother maneuvering a baby carriage up a staircase. What delirious conflict between Ness the lawman and Ness the family man, as he tries to protect the infant and simultaneously conduct a shoot-out. What wild comedy in this conflict between duty and humanity. And De Palma ices...