The hardboiled 1940s private-eye movie tradition goes south in director Alan Parker’s outlandish thriller, slipping its metropolitan moorings amid a world of sin, superstition and voodoo.
It’s 1955, and Mickey Rourke is two-bit Brooklyn private dick Harry Angel, the seediest of gumshoes, whose commission from the mysterious sharp-dressed businessman Louis Cyphre (a long-fingernailed Robert De Niro) takes him down to New Orleans in search of a once famous crooner, Johnny Favorite who’s gone missing in suspicious, occult-tinged circumstances.
It seems Cyphre had a contract with Johnny, but the bum disappeared before he could collect.
As one gruesome murder follows another, Parker piles on the atmospherics, relishing the heady heat haze and shabby exoticism of the American subtropics as the backdrop for the story’s Faustian powerplay.
Between being attacked by a pit bull, sliced with a straight razor, and marked as a murder suspect, Angel’s only break is catching the fancy of a young voodoo priestess named Epiphany (Lisa Bonet).
This movie was the reason Bonet was booted off her Cosby Show spin-off, A Different World. The executives (including Bill Cosby) thought her actions on screen were unbecoming of a Huxtable. Oh, the irony!
Parker’s intense, nightmarish style is used to the hilt in this combination of private eye and occult horror film. Ceiling fans whirr wheezily, an elevator descends with endless, portentous menace, locals writhe with berserk abandon during a black mass, and a bedroom pours with blood in the course of a (highly controversial) sex scene.
A superb production design enhances the exotic story. And anyone who says they saw the twist in this movie coming is bullshitting.
Harry Angel
Mickey Rourke Louis Cyphre
Robert De Niro Epiphany Proudfoot
Lisa Bonet Margaret Krusemark
Charlotte Rampling Ethan Krusemark
Stocker Fontelieu Toots Sweet
Brownie McGhee Doctor Fowler
Michael Higgins Connie
Elizabeth Whitcraft Sterne
Eliott Keener Spider Simpson
Charles Gordone Winesap
Dann Florek Izzy
George Buck Izzy’s wife
Judith Drake Pastor John
Gerald Orange Mammy Carter
Peggy Severe Deimos
Pruitt Taylor Vince Mike
Loys T. Bergeron Toothless
Joshua Frank Ellie
Nicole Burdette
Director Alan Parker
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As one gruesome murder follows another, Parker piles on the atmospherics, relishing the heady heat haze and shabby exoticism of the American subtropics as the backdrop for the story’s Faustian powerplay.
