The 1990 Neo-Noir The Hot Spot Makes Me Feel Funny, Like When I Used to Climb the Rope in Gym Class
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Jennifer Connelly was trending on Twitter recently because young people had apparently just discovered that the classily beautiful female lead of Top Gun: Maverick was a total sex bomb in her youth.
As a forty-six year old, the idea that people are just now discovering that Jennifer Connelly is, in fact, extremely attractive and always has been, struck me as comic because it would be hard to overstate the role the actress played in my own sexual development.
When I was fourteen years old and then throughout the rest of my teenage years Jennifer Connelly was my crush. As a movie-mad teenaged loner all I did was fall desperately in love with beautiful actresses but I did not fall for anyone harder than Connelly.
Connelly was a classy crush. It was a crush you could feel good about. She went to Stanford and Yale. She would go on to win an Academy Award and she never stopped being ravishingly beautiful and talented and dignified.
So it seemed fortuitous that just as “OMG, Jennifer Connelly was/is so hot” discourse was taking over social media, I was professionally obligated to re-watch and write about The Hot Spot.
Dennis Hopper’s atmospheric adaptation of Charles Williams’ hardboiled novel is a seminal work in the Church of Jennifer Connelly Hotness, of which I am a distinguished elder.
It’s a movie that I have seen several times in its entirety but I have watched selected excerpts several hundred times. If you’ve seen the movie and/or were once a horny teenaged boy or girl you know exactly which scenes I’m talking about: the ones involving boobs, nudity and sex.
That describes about half the film. The darkly comic Neo-noir runs a perversely slack and shapeless one hundred and twenty nine minutes. That’s at least a half hour too long but it needs all that time for all that sex.
An appropriately sleazy Don Johnson stars as Harry Madox, an archetypal hardboiled anti-hero. He’s a cagy drifter who saunters into a small Texas town with nothing but bad habits and ominous intentions and secures a job as a car salesman for George Harshaw (Jerry Hardin) through a combination of cockiness, guile and old-fashioned salesmanship.
The cynical opportunist with a penchant for larceny is less interested in a go-nowhere gig than in the dealership’s impossibly beautiful eighteen year old accountant Gloria Harper (Jennifer Connelly).
The single most attractive numbers cruncher in the history of American film is a vision of innocence and purity in a corrupt and ugly town. She’s a breath of Eden in a fallen world.
Even a piece of shit scumbag like our protagonist cannot resist a woman like that. She is his salvation, his redemption, his ticket to a happy domestic life but because The Hot Spot is a Noir he’s doomed both by the cruelty of fate and the ugliness of his own inner nature.
When Harry looks into the bedroom eyes of his boss’ hot to trot trophy wife Dolly (Virginia Madsen, my crush of the moment) he sees that inner rot and spiritual corruption reflected back at him in even purer form.
In an utterly fearless and funny performance, Madsen plays Dolly as sex and danger incarnate, a figure of Satanic evil with a murderous libido that can never be satiated.
Dolly and Gloria are a study in contrasts. Gloria is the wholesome, All-American girl next door you bring home to mother, marry and start a family with. Dolly is instead the town harlot you screw in the back of her oblivious husband’s car in the parking lot of your kid’s little league game.
Like the best contemporary Noirs, there is very little that is contemporary about The Hot Spot. When a computer appears in Gloria’s office late in the film it feels like an anachronism, if not a downright goof.
The only other indication that The Hot Spot takes place in the late 1980s instead of the late 1950s is a strip club where the exotic dancers wear decidedly modern thongs and dance to post-Eisenhower-era songs like Billy Squire’s “The Stroke.”
Seemingly everyone in the hick town where Harry sets up shop is an idiot, an asshole or a combination of the two. This is particularly true of Julian Ward (David Lynch staple Jack Nance), the boob who runs a local bank that has such sloppy security that he stops just short of handing bags of hundred dollar bills to anyone even thinking about robbing the place.
In no small part because it’s just so goddamn easy, Harry robs the bank. Because it’s even easier, Harry falls instantly into a sordid sexual affair with his boss’ wife, who is both hot to trot and played by the star of Hot to Trot.
Dolly’s life revolves around sex. She lives in a big house seemingly designed to look like a high-end bordello. She is forever shaving her legs, readying herself for all-out war in the battle of the sexes.
Madsen gets the best lines, like when she enthuses that sex is “more fun than eating cotton candy barefoot” or tells her new lover that there are only two things to do in town and when he tells her he does not have a television, she informs him he’s down to one, and one that she clearly has been enjoying with everyone and anyone she encounters.
In a boldly brazen performance, Madsen plays Dolly as a shameless harlot, a black widow much savvier and more dangerous than the fools in her web.
She’s a smiling sociopath who seems turned on by being strangled nearly to death and purposefully inducing a miscarriage for an unwanted pregnancy.
Dolly is ferociously unlikable, a sexy monster without an honest bone in her body. Harry wants to resist her and the deadly danger she represents but just isn’t strong enough.
William Sadler costars as the town sleaze ball Frank Sutton, who has been blackmailing Gloria after catching her in what appears to be a compromising situation.
To its credit and its detriment The Hot Spot really takes its time. It’s boldly unhurried, a movie content to simply soak in the abundant local color rather than hurrying to a finish.
In true Noir/hardboiled tradition, hell is other people in The Hot Spot but it’s also a geographic location, specifically the town where it all goes down.
I am far too much of a married father to be publicly, ostentatiously horny but The Hot Spot took me back to where I was the first time I saw it. It reconnected me with girl-crazy fourteen year old I once was.
The Hot Spot is a moody, atmospheric and darkly funny Neo-noir that really holds up, in part because it is so deliberately timeless. More importantly, it is super fucking hot.
To all of you young people who have just discovered Jennifer Connelly’s hotness, boy have I got a movie for you! It’s this one. It’s a solid Neo-noir but as a showcase for Jennifer Connelly and Virginia Madsen’s extraordinary beauty it is a goddam triumph.
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