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Killing 'Em Softly

1985, Movie, NR, 81 mins

Killing 'Em Softly: Review

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Irene Cara's follow-up to FAME is a Canadian-made starring vehicle that ran out of gas. Shot mostly in 1982, completed in 1985 and released direct-to-video in the U.S. in 1988, its chief distinctions are a wonderfully historic montage of a pre-renovation Times Square and the fact that the film destroyed two companies. Jane (Cara), an aspiring singer, lives in a rundown apartment house on New York City's St. Mark's Place, where most of the film's exteriors were shot. Her neighbors include a widowed former prop-man, Jimmy Skinner (George Segal), who's so piteously down-and-out that when a welfare check is delayed he's forced to eat dog food. One night Jane, her bandmate-boyfriend Michael (Clark Johnson), their sleazy young manager Clifford (the tensely volatile Nicholas Campbell) and Clifford's stoner girlfriend Susan (Barbara Cook) are blasting music and picnicking on a rooftop out their window. Susan feeds cocaine to Jimmy's dog, with fatal results, and the enraged Jimmy confronts Clifford, who's stepped back alone into the apartment. In the ensuing scuffle, Jimmy accidentally kills him with a butcher knife. Seeing a wad of money — proceeds from a shady car sale — the destitute Jimmy impulsively steals it. When the freaked-out Susan discovers Clifford's body, she accuses Michael of murder; though he's innocent, circumstantial evidence lands him in jail. Jane pieces together what really happened, and vows to find the stolen money in Jimmy's apartment and nail him as the killer. The movie then disintegrates into contrivances designed to put young Jane and old Jimmy together romantically — a hideously unconvincing coupling on a multitude of levels, not least for the startling ease with which Jane, despite a passion to free her wrongly jailed boyfriend, suddenly forgets all about him to bathe naked with old Jim. (Though unrated, the film is as tame as a TV movie.) Shot under variants of the titles "The Neighbour" and "The Man in 5A," the movie does offer a strong performance by Segal and some brief meditations on the natures of captor and captive, and youth and old age. But mostly it's meandering and unfocused, and contains not one, but two musical interludes that stop the story dead. The title is even mis-punctuated onscreen ("Killing' em Softly"). Cost overruns led a financing bank to cut off money, bankrupting the producer's company, Les Films du Neighbor, and helping dissolve the movie arm of the TV network, Tele-Metropole, that commissioned it. leave a comment --Frank Lovece
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