Anne Archer

  • Narrow Margin (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) I will never fail to mention when a Hollywood film heads to Canada for an extended period of time, and Narrow Margin frankly surprised me by spending nearly all of its running time on a long train journey in the wilds of Western Canada. The thin but effective plot has a Los Angeles district attorney (Gene Hackman) reinventing himself as an action hero to protect a witness who could bring down a mob boss. The wrinkle here is that she’s hiding in a cabin “in Canada” and mob enforcers are doing their best to kill her. One escape from a cabin shoot-out later, the two are aboard a VIA Rail train heading to Vancouver on an overnight trip, with heroes and villains trying their best to best each other in a confined space. A rather more thrillerish version of Silver Bullet, this Peter Hyams film works better than I expected. The simple plot allows for a succession of suspense set-pieces, with a nice twist and some good action sequences. The film feels proud of its Canadian setting, and the confined settings work well in creating suspense. Anne Archer looks quite cute in curly red hair, while Hackman is only slightly ridiculous as an improvised action hero. The cinematography (also from Hyams) takes full advantage of the train rolling through the Canadian wilderness, and I liked the way a 1990 film managed to re-create the romance of classic Hollywood trains of earlier decades. (The film is a remake of a 1952 film, but doesn’t feel too much like it.)  In other words, Narrow Margin is the kind of solid but not overly spectacular thriller that may be forgotten in time but still manages to satisfy upon discovery.

  • Body of Evidence (1992)

    Body of Evidence (1992)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, February 2019) If you were around at the time, 1992 was peak-Madonna year. Sold to the masses as an aggressive sex goddess, 1992 saw the near-simultaneous release of an album called Erotica, a coffee-table book of nudes called Sex and a ridiculously over-the-top film tilted Body of Evidence perhaps only because the two previous titles were already taken. Aiming for a neo-noir but settling for trashy thriller, this film took place in familiar territory by featuring Willem Dafoe as a lawyer asked to take on the case of a woman (guess who?) accused of murdering her husband. Before the first act is even over, erotic scenes grind the action down to a halt, rudely interrupting a few adults cosplaying noir archetypes and making for a much simpler plot given that the movie would barely make it to feature-film length without the nudity. Despite Madonna being Madonna, I’m not complaining: After all, Julianne Moore and Anne Archer are also involved. (Plus Defoe, playing a suitably slimy lawyer in between numerous trysts.) Body of Evidence is about atmosphere rather than narrative and it features one of the least surprising “not guilty” decisions in a while—after all, we’re in a noir and this is what happens in a noir. The incredibly familiar story is perversely meant to be comforting, as we have a sense that this is just a big game updated to early-1990s aesthetics. I still haven’t decided where I stand about it. Candid depictions of lust have their place in cinema and Hollywood could make a few more movies in that subgenre. On the other hand, Body of Evidence may not be the example to follow. At its best, it’s mildly enjoyable as a trashy thriller blessed with far bigger names than it deserves. At its worst, however, it’s not just boring but actively irritating in how it insists that it’s hot despite often missing the mark. But, hey, surely peak-Madonna was a thing because some people liked it, right?