"Nice night for a big hot plate of spaghetti and meatballs. I stopped a nazi bullet in '45."

Basically from the moment I heard a character deliver those lines, in an uninterrupted deadpan drawl, I knew I was going to love this movie...

I should probably mention that this is a postmodern neo-noir about Debbie Harry's domineering husband going insane because someone is stealing their milk bottles. Also Debbie Harry might be having an affair with their landlord, and there's an interlude where saxophone music plays and she inexplicably sticks flowers in her lingerie. So, in other words, it's pretty much like a better version of Lost Highway...

Oh, speaking of Lynch, the landlord who Debbie Harry is having an…

Under the pseudonym, “Marcus Reichert” David Lynch, after having to extensively cut most of this movie for its PG rating (oh the scenes we have missed) and because this film fell under the radar with Elephant Man releasing the same year — Lynch let this one fall to its death, so to speak. That’s my theory anyway.

A man who is upset over, “Nobody puts their ugly lips around my bottle of milk and gets away with it” (yes, I know what you’re thinking) as a nugatory metaphor for his failing marriage (thanks to his constant abuse and misogyny). It’s basically a less than Lynch meets Telltale Heart. The most outstanding piece is the cast of strange, Twin Peaks apartment neighbors…

"Before Twin Peaks there was Union City."
-Everett "Big Ed Hurley" McGill

Mark Reichert's first (and last) feature is a strange duck of a movie. Often cited as neo-noir (keynote film at the 1997 American Museum of the Moving Image Neo-Noir Film Festival according to IMDb trivia!), which it kind of is. It harkens back to the original noir style as a period piece taking place in 1951 more than a neo-noir you might expect (I was expecting!) from the 1980s before settling in as a sort of one-room melodrama about an uninteresting married couple living in squalor played by Debbie Harry and Dennis Lipscomb that has you asking yourself, "Was this a terrible fucking play first?" It reminded me…

This seldom seen obscurity is a gem. A vividly photographed and bleakly comical late entry film noir on suburban discontent and sexual ennui that alludes to such hardboiled authors as James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich, highly influential in shaping the shadowy stylization known as film noir. It's a true find.

However, its the casting of Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry in her first starring role (if you discount her cameo in Alan Rudolph's contemporaneous Roadie) which gives the film an added novelty. This works both for and against the film. While Harry acquits herself admirably, the film is sufficiently intriguing on its own to recommend itself without the casting gimmick. Nevertheless, Harry essays a sexual frustration and longing that…

I've always been a sucker for Deborah Harry, and I managed to track down this rather neglected oddity on VHS many years ago (I've still got it, and the cover image is misleading; a pouting portrait of Harry from her 'Rockbird' album cover.)

It's a succinct slab of period, oddball noir based on a Cornell Woolrich short but with a whiff of David Lynch (much exacerbated by the skewed, claustrophobic interiors and the presence of Everett McGill). The slight story has Harlan (Dennis Lipscomb in an impressive debut), a hugely repressed accountant with a neglected wife, Lilian, (Harry, underplaying nicely) becoming crazily obsessive in his quest to find the thief who is stealing his milk bottles every morning.

Unfortunately, killjoy…

The 1970s saw a revival in one of the more critically revered of classic American movie genres, film noir. This time, however, many of the films, beginning in essence with the self-conscious homage of Farewell, My Lovely and the deliberate iconoclasm of the revisionist The Long Goodbye, were in part experiments in a kind of film noir in color, with an important consideration thus whether or not to evoke the genre’s 1940 period origins. Union City is perhaps the most obscure of these latter noirs to employ a period setting and is today noted mainly as the debut starring role for Blondie lead singer Deborah Harry. However, its literary pedigree makes it a most unusual hybrid of black comedy and…

"Before Twin Peaks there was Union City."
-Everett "Big Ed Hurley" McGill

Mark Reichert's first (and last) feature is a strange duck of a movie. Often cited as neo-noir (keynote film at the 1997 American Museum of the Moving Image Neo-Noir Film Festival according to IMDb trivia!), which it kind of is. It harkens back to the original noir style as a period piece taking place in 1951 more than a neo-noir you might expect (I was expecting!) from the 1980s before settling in as a sort of one-room melodrama about an uninteresting married couple living in squalor played by Debbie Harry and Dennis Lipscomb that has you asking yourself, "Was this a terrible fucking play first?" It reminded me…

I've always been a sucker for Deborah Harry, and I managed to track down this rather neglected oddity on VHS many years ago (I've still got it, and the cover image is misleading; a pouting portrait of Harry from her 'Rockbird' album cover.)

It's a succinct slab of period, oddball noir based on a Cornell Woolrich short but with a whiff of David Lynch (much exacerbated by the skewed, claustrophobic interiors and the presence of Everett McGill). The slight story has Harlan (Dennis Lipscomb in an impressive debut), a hugely repressed accountant with a neglected wife, Lilian, (Harry, underplaying nicely) becoming crazily obsessive in his quest to find the thief who is stealing his milk bottles every morning.

Unfortunately, killjoy…

Under the pseudonym, “Marcus Reichert” David Lynch, after having to extensively cut most of this movie for its PG rating (oh the scenes we have missed) and because this film fell under the radar with Elephant Man releasing the same year — Lynch let this one fall to its death, so to speak. That’s my theory anyway.

A man who is upset over, “Nobody puts their ugly lips around my bottle of milk and gets away with it” (yes, I know what you’re thinking) as a nugatory metaphor for his failing marriage (thanks to his constant abuse and misogyny). It’s basically a less than Lynch meets Telltale Heart. The most outstanding piece is the cast of strange, Twin Peaks apartment neighbors…