Overview: Harry, a drifter (Don Johnson, Miami Vice) rolls into town and talks his way into a job at a car dealership where he becomes caught between two beautiful women: the boss’s conniving wife Dolly (Virginia Madsen, Candyman) and Gloria (Jennifer Connelly, Requiem for a Dream), a naive young accountant whose life is complicated by blackmail. When Harry plans to rob the local bank, he becomes enmeshed in a lethal web of lust, greed and extortion, whose only escape is murder.

Adapted from Hell Hath No Fury by Charles Williams, The Hot Spot is a dusty, sweaty modern noir that updates the pulp formula of twists and turns with an intensity to match director Dennis Hopper’s earlier film roles. Directed by Hopper (Easy Rider, Out of the Blue) with verve, the stellar cast are supported by William Sadler (The Shawshank Redemption), Charles Martin Smith (The Untouchables) and Jack Nance (Eraserhead), accompanied by a brilliant soundtrack featuring Miles Davis, John Lee Hooker, Taj Mahal and original music by Jack Nitzsche.

Blu-ray Verdict: This is film noir and works from a great primary text. In fact, it’s Postman Rings Twice where a man has washed up in a smalltown limbo somewhere in Texas and goes to work for a blonde bombshell’s husband who has a heart condition. It’s viscous in mood, scorching heat as you wait with nothing to do in the empty car dealership. It has a lot of late night snooping around as passion drowns the night and makes the air sticky.

But it also has what I can always count on noir to provide and really sets the genre apart from ordinary crime; realizations about the mechanisms that create a life of suffering, how they begin in the mind and take mirrored form outside in narratives that trap us in chimeras.

A man succumbing to desire - rendered here as a fire that goes off in town and he goes to see - and how that sets in motion a karmic chain of events woven from that desire. It begins with merely being curious to see, ends with inability to escape a narrative. None of that would have come to pass of course if he hadn’t allowed himself to be pulled by desire, thinking that fates are blind and he could go unseen inside the bank.

In other hands that might have been expert notation squandered in a histrionic telling, think Romeo is Bleeding. A lot of modern noir is like this, self-aware cartoons. It works so well here and to my mind it may have something to do with having Hopper at the helm, someone who has made his rounds of reckless life on the edge. Judging from the film, he brings an affinity for all this as life that entwines around you, sticky clothes on a hot night.

My own favorite part is the premonition of possible lives ahead of him anchored in the two women. The sultry femme, with the viscously furnished house of meaningless passion, the late night encounter in the wilds. And as contrast the sweet co-worker who stands as promise for quiet love, swimming with her in the secluded pond, walking her back home in the early morning.

Hopper weaves here again the notion of a wrong perception as the early stage of suffering; a seeing that pried into her one day at the pond, snapped images of her that a redneck lecher is using to keep her trapped in a (false) narrative. His house as another space of meaningless desire that feeds off appearances, with photos of women strewn about but the place is a junk heap, the place of someone who’s let himself go. [C.R.]

BLU-RAY LIMITED EDITION CONTENTS:
4K restoration from the original negative, presented in HDR / Dolby Vision, overseen and approved by cinematographer Ueli Steiger
4K UHD and Blu-ray presentation of the feature
Uncompressed stereo PCM audio
Archival interview with Dennis Hopper, who discusses The Hot Spot and features footage of John Lee Hooker and images from the set (1991, 4 mins) Interviews with stars Virginia Madsen (2021, 7 mins) and William Sadler (2021, 6 mins)
Nick Dawson on Dennis Hopper and The Hot Spot, an interview with the editor of Dennis Hopper: Interviews (2023, 20 mins)
Duane Swierczynski on Charles Williams’ source novel, the crime writer and expert looks at the adaptation and provides a background of the author (2023, 25 mins)
Trailer
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
Reversible sleeve featuring original and new artwork by Time Tomorrow
Limited edition booklet featuring writing by critics Elena Lazic on the film, Leslie Byron Pitt on the erotic thriller genre and the film’s place within it, and an archival piece on the film featuring an interview with Hopper by RJ Smith

The Hot Spot (1990) - Official Trailer [Radiance #13]

Official Purchase Link

www.radiancefilms.co.uk