Cinema: In the Kingdom of Chic and Sleaze into the Night

Bor-ing. That’s life for Ed Okin (Jeff Goldblum), a Los Angeles aerospace engineer who is so tired of his lot that he can’t go to sleep. Something keeps him from closing his eyes. Is he hooked on banality? For its first 15 minutes, this movie certainly is. It falls in with Ed’s somnolent gait, trudging through tapioca as Ed aimlessly drives to the airport after spying his wife making sex with her boss. By the time Ed nods over his steering wheel, you are getting very . . . sleepy . . .

And then: BANG! Dazzling Diana (Michelle Pfeiffer) splays onto the hood of Ed’s Toyota, cries, “Get me out of here!” and leads him into the night. Once the movie wakes up, it never lets up, in pace or plot invention. Seems Diana / has smuggled past Customs six priceless emeralds “from the scepter of an ancient Persian king” and concealed them (we won’t say where) for delivery to one of those hotshot sheiks who in the past decade have turned parts of L.A. into a Little Araby. As for ordinary Ed, he will risk death, betrayal and another 24 hours of sleeplessness because he is drawn to this diamond-hard Circe who confides, “I’m one of the bad guys.”

The themes of flight and pursuit, of innocence shading into culpability, are Hitchcockian. But John Landis’ film is not a genre genuflection; it is a thoroughly modern, satanically entertaining night flight into the Zeitgeist city of the 1980s. This Los Angeles is a kingdom of chic sleaze, where every black soul gleams like Bakelite. In the Rodeo Drive boutiques, Iranian thugs and their bimbos are served champagne and caviar. Diana’s brother (Bruce McGill) dresses himself and his apartment in Elvis memorabilia and drives a white Caddy bearing the legend THE KING LIVES. A shabby-genteel Brit (David Bowie) eases his gun into Ed’s mouth–in front of Tiffany–and purrs, “I like you, Ed.” A rancid TV producer (Paul Mazursky) asks his girlfriend (Kathryn Harrold) to play kinky games with him: “Oblige me. I’m gonna put this on video.”

On first viewing, Landis films like Animal House and Trading Places–shaggy, canny, missing broad targets and then dancing on pinheads–seem not nearly as good as they should be. Second time around, they look better than they have any right to. No master of mise-en-scene, no Mr. Meticulous, Landis propels his pictures on attitude. If you buy the mood, you buy the movie. Into the Night is irresistible because Landis’ have-fun-with-it mood allows for crazy- acute characterizations that spin the spectator off balance and give him a giggle in the process. The whole oddball cast, which includes a movie buff’s dream clutch of 17 Hollywood directors,* plays the moments of pathos as easily as the streaks of melodrama and farce.

At the center are two of the movies’ most engaging young actors: Goldblum, with his stolid, vulpine charm, and Pfeiffer. Trim, smart and drop-dead gorgeous, Pfeiffer has been nibbling at stardom since her stints in Grease II and Scarface. Now, by animating this sparkling thriller-satire with her seen- it-all elegance, she has every right to feast on it.

FOOTNOTE: *Count ’em (in order of appearance): Andrew Marton, David Cronenberg, Richard Franklin, Landis, Colin Higgins, Daniel Petrie, Jonathan Kaufer, Mazursky, Paul Bartel, Don Siegel, Jim Henson, Jack Arnold, Amy Heckerling, Roger Vadim, Lawrence Kasdan, Jonathan Demme, Carl Gottlieb.