Ridley Scott followed the disappointment of Legend with the more grounded thrillers Someone To Watch Over Me and Black Rain. Although seldom discussed today, they marked an evolution for the director.
By the mid-1980s, Ridley Scott was known as a filmmaker who, to paraphrase Weyland-Yutani, the ‘Company’ in the background of Alien, “built better worlds.” Legend was the culmination of a desire to marry artistry and showmanship on a broad scale.
Audiences, however, failed to react as positively to his brand of high adventure than they had his future noir Blade Runner or haunted house science-fiction horror (much as he didn’t like the description), Alien. It paved the way for a significant course correction for his next two films, 1987’s Someone to Watch Over Me and 1989’s Black Rain, both of which bring the director not only back to earth, but for the first time telling stories in the present day.
While significantly different in tone and style, both also focus on somewhat compromised police officers who are thrown into a clash of cultures which, in different ways, challenge their perceptions. Both films see Scott exploring divides exacerbated by capitalism, and the neoliberal American drive for individualist gain, popular during the era of Wall Street and the yuppie. Casting Michael Douglas as one of these flawed men feels like no coincidence.
They both rank, with time and distance, among Scott’s least remembered films, drowned out by the crowd-pleasing grandeur of both his earlier and later efforts, yet each of these films deserves revisiting. Both, especially Someone To Watch Over Me, could seem beneath a technical artisan like Scott, and drag him close to well-worn detective or action genres policed often by lesser filmmakers. Yet each of these films works because of his input, providing a visual flourish that adds substance to what could have been throwaway material.
The genesis of Someone To Watch Over Me came during a dinner party Scott attended in 1982 with screenwriter Howard Franklin, who later wrote the Umberto Eco adaptation The Name Of The Rose in 1986 (starring Sean Connery as a medieval sleuth). Franklin pitched the concept of a blue-collar detective, Michael Keegan (played here by Tom Berenger), assigned to protect Claire Gregory, a wealthy New York socialite (Mimi Rogers) who witnesses a murder, only to fall for her as the killer puts his own wife and son in danger. It was a concept just shy of the 80s and 90s erotic thriller, but one Scott remained drawn to.
The commercial failure of Legend no doubt drew him to a more adult concept, one that he engaged Franklin in writing (before bringing on two other screenwriters to do a polish). His producing colleague as far back as The Duellists, David Puttnam, helped secure the necessary financing for Columbia Pictures, and the film entered production, with Berenger cast on the strength of his performance in Oliver Stone’s 1986 war film Platoon.
Rogers at the time was best known for TV roles before being cast as Claire, fighting off Sharon Stone for the role. In a twist of fate, Stone would later beat her to the lead in Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct, a much more successful thriller on similar lines.
The film also serves as Lorraine Bracco’s debut, soon to hit the big time thanks to Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, and later make an impact in David Chase’s television series The Sopranos, though she would never become the household name she perhaps deserved to be.
The film’s title was based on the famous George Gershwin ballad of the same name, which appears three times across the film, with unusually three different renditions – the first by Sting to open the film, later by Roberta Flack and finally by Gene Simmons of Kiss fame, taken from a 1961 version. Flack and Sting recorded new versions for the movie, the latter including it as the B-side to his successful An Englishman In New York record, though Flack’s rendition was never commercially released outside of the film.
It’s a decidedly romantic song for a movie which operates as a cop thriller, with the plot mechanics of such a story, but is mostly interested in Keegan’s temptation. He has a nice life – an attractive, fun wife with whom he has great rapport, a good son, a job in which he’s respected. Yet he gets a taste of an exotic, wealthier New York, represented in Claire’s elegance. She sees in him a protective element, a kindness, perhaps even a simpler nature at odds with the upper-class men she previously dates. The match is anthropological. It would never last, but appeals to both of them.
Scott’s film never makes either Keegan or Claire hateful, or Ellie shrewish, even when it strays into melodrama or a rather traditional thriller ending, as murderer Joey Venza (played by Andreas Katsulas, who will play a similar, more memorable role in 1993’s The Fugitive) threatens Ellie and their son. It ultimately resolves to make the family unit strong again, with Scott perhaps interested in this story as the child of an absent father, raised by a strong and independent mother. That could be why Keegan gets a second chance with his family despite his indiscretion – this is what Scott would have wanted.
Black Rain
We see a similar, compromised family man working as a police officer in Scott’s next film, 1989’s Black Rain, even if Michael Douglas’ Nick Conklin is an entirely different beast.
Written by Craig Bolotin and Warren Lewis, the spec script for Black Rain ended up at producer Douglas’ door, he taking it to Paramount chiefs Stanley R Jaffe and Sherry Lansing, with whom he had a good relationship after 1987’s successful Fatal Attraction. Mentioned earlier, Verhoeven was attached to the project, but in part due to the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike which significantly delayed production, he elected to make what became Total Recall in 1990 instead (later working memorably with Douglas on Basic Instinct).
In truth, Black Rain feels more of a Tony rather than Ridley Scott film, creating a slick, particularly 1980s cop in Conklin; a motorbike riding maverick who plays by his own rules, thumbs his nose at authority, and ultimately has to learn the way of another culture with a great deal of difficulty when sent to escort a captured Yakuza gangster, Sato, back to Osaka. Douglas is full of swagger, less damaged than Mel Gibson’s Lethal Weapon contemporary Martin Riggs, but certainly dysfunctional – husband in a failed marriage, attempting to parent a son he rarely sees. He throws out caustic lines such as “I usually get kissed before I get fucked” with delightful gusto.
Black Rain works as a precursor to the better known Rush Hour trilogy from Brett Ratner roughly a decade later, starring Jackie Chan (who turned down the villain role here). Scott’s film scales down the martial arts and overt comedy, however, for a darker, more stylistic approach. As he shot New York with a smoky grandeur, Scott vibrantly gives us a Japan at once familiar and alien, one haunted by the echoes of a very dark 20th century past. The title, ‘black rain’, is an allusion to the Hiroshima bombing by an American adversary whose cultural hegemony, Scott points out, has infected Japanese and global society, particularly at the end of the glossy rush of capitalism that was the 1980s.
Inspector Masahiro (Ken Takakura), the honest Osaka cop who reluctantly partners with Conklin in fighting the Yakuza, spells this out: “Perhaps you should think less of yourself and more of your group, try to work like in Japanese. I grew up with your soldiers; you were wise then. Now – music and movies are all America is good for. We make the machines, we build the future, we won the peace.”
This is quite the indictment against a society who, just two years away from the fall of the Soviet Union, had claimed the 20th century as its own. Black Rain very much underlines the Japanese philosophy of individualism (reflected in Conklin) vs collectivisation (Masahiro and his people). Scott’s message is clear – we have to meet somewhere in the middle to be a better cop and a better human.
The script even goes as far as to say that the villain, Sato (played with menacing brio by Yusaku Matsuda, who sadly died of cancer before the film was released), is a direct result of American influence over Japanese life and culture, as stated by crime boss Sugai (Tomisaburō Wakayama): “I was 10 when the B-29 came. My family lived underground for three days. When we came up the city was gone. Then the heat brought rain. Black rain. You made the rain black, and shoved your values down our throat. We forgot who we were. You created Sato and thousands like him.”
Black Rain might have the trappings of a slick action thriller, building to a traditional mano-a-mano climax between hero and villain (albeit one set in the stark, post-Hiroshima mud of a ruined field), but it speaks to a deeper historical legacy and geopolitical commentary than it might be given credit for.
It has greater heft than Someone To Watch Over Me, but it was a more arduous process to make for Scott. Aside from the Writers Strike delay, shooting in Japan proved to be exhausting and problematic. Oriental influences streaked through the future noir of Blade Runner, making an Eastern setting logical for Scott’s tastes, but Japanese labour laws operated stringently, the use of firearms was heavily prohibited (a fact that bleeds into the film to Conklin’s frustration), and they faced a general unease among Japanese authorities while filming, as Scott once explained:
We couldn’t control the elements in Tokyo. It was never anything specific, but – reading between the lines – the police didn’t want us there. The reaction from the governor of Osaka was the absolute antithesis. They didn’t mean to be awkward. I think it was fear. The police attitude was that we were going to create social disorder on the streets.
Nonetheless, despite these challenges, Black Rain – unlike Someone To Watch Over Me, which faltered commercially as Legend had – was better received at the box office. It received mixed critical reviews but Japanese commentators saw the portrayal of Japanese characters in a positive light. Black Rain might be largely forgotten today, much like Someone To Watch Over Me, but both films arguably re-orient Scott and launch him into the 1990s, an unsteadier decade, but also a period that would deliver him his biggest hit since Alien. The process had already begun here, given his first collaboration with composer Hans Zimmer on Black Rain.
Next, as the 1990s arrives, Scott takes the plunge into a female-driven story unlike any he had given audiences before. It would prove to be a road trip that paid off.
