The Travolta/Cage Project #35 Red Rock West (1993)

And the award for ugliest DVD box goes too….

Both John Travolta and Nicolas Cage fell into a pit during the George H.W Bush era when their increasingly cheap and tawdry vehicles stopped being released theatrically in the States. For Travolta, this extended professional nadir entailed such dodgy projects as Basements, The Experts, Eyes of Angel and Chains of Gold. 

Cage experienced his share of stinkers during this period in his life and career as well, more or less completely forgotten obscurities like 1989’s Time To Kill, 1990’s Zandalee and 1993’s Deadfall. The Southern-fried Neo-Noir Red Rock West was supposed to join these duds in skipping the theaters altogether in favor of a discreet direct-to-video burial or quasi-release in a handful of American theaters. 

Red Rock West even played HBO before something very curious happened. The universe would not let Red Rock West die a quiet death as a movie that played on pay cable a couple of times, then was released on home video en route to being quickly forgotten. The director of the Toronto International Film Festival saw Red Rock West during a theatrical run in Europe and booked it for the festival. 

The owner of a prominent theater in turn saw Red Rock West at the Toronto International Film Festival and even though it was scheduled to come out on home video in February of 1994, he gave the plucky hardboiled gem a theatrical run that was followed by runs in Los Angeles and New York city. 

I vividly remember encountering Red Rock West on HBO and experiencing the wonderful sense of discovery that comes with encountering something wonderful that the world does not yet know about. Truth be told, I was probably drawn to Red Rock West because it seemed like the kind of thing that might have female nudity. But I was so blown away by writer-director John Dahl’s breakthrough film that I wondered how such a terrific little yarn could end up debuting on HBO with nothing in the way of buzz or acclaim. 

So you can imagine how happy I was to see Red Rock West become the rare film that escapes the unnervingly silent prison of cable/direct-to-video to score a bona fide theatrical release, complete with rave reviews from some of the biggest, most respected critics in the country and a strong showing on year-end top ten lists. 

In an unexpectedly under-stated performance, Cage stars as Michael Williams, a good man with a conscience who invariably tries to be honest and do the right thing and is forever being punished by a cruel and random universe for his upstanding sense of morality. Once upon a time the amiable drifter was stationed as a soldier in Lebanon but all he got out of the gig was a war wound that keeps him from being able to land the kind of grueling physical labor-intensive jobs he’s interested in. 

The affable drifter in the jean jacket’s luck changes when he stops into a bar for a drink and is mistaken for hitman “Lyle from Dallas” by its owner Wayne (J.T Walsh). The hard-luck veteran is desperate for any kind of work so when he’s asked if he’s there for the job he says that he is and is informed that he will be paid the first five thousand dollars to kill Wayne’s wife before the act is to take place and the rest of the payment afterwards. 

Being an overgrown Boy Scout, Michael does what he thinks is the right thing by telling Wayne’s coolly pragmatic, calculating femme fatale of a much younger wife Suzanne (Lara Flynn Boyle) of her husband’s plans for her imminent demise and writes a letter to the sheriff’s office warning that Wayne is in the market for a hitman to murder his wife and his wife is looking for a trigger man to “take care” of her husband permanently. 

He seems nice!

Michael’s attempts to get out of town without killing anybody or getting killed in the process are complicated by the drifter getting framed for the shooting of Suzanne’s hunky lover and his discovery that Wayne is the town sheriff in addition to owning the town bar.

Michael manages to escape Wayne’s sinister clutches and the long arm of the law at its most recklessly lawless but he’s brought back to Wayne’s bar when he makes the mistake of getting a ride with a talkative fellow former Marine played by Dennis Hopper who turns out to be the real Lyle from Texas arriving in town a little late to take care of business. 

Michael keeps trying to escape Red Rock and its viper’s den of malevolent schemers but no matter how desperately he tries to leave, fate has a sadistic way of bringing him right back. The town has a magnet-like pull on him that keeps Michael from ever being able to definitively escape. 

The protagonist of Red Rock West is a profoundly decent, principled human being who suddenly finds himself dropped into a tank full of piranhas and predators who want to destroy and devour each other with his help. Michael’s fundamental goodness and honesty sets him apart from Film Noir tradition, where men are generally led astray because there is something grubby and desperate and dark at the core of their being that is just waiting to be exploited and manipulated by a woman with nothing but evil thoughts in her pretty little head. The weak-willed men of Film Noir and by extension Neo-Noir are undone by lust and greed and an insatiable need to escape the banality of their humdrum lives for something sexier and more exciting but also riskier and more dangerous. 

Michael has his moment of weakness where he pretends to Lyle for the sake of possible employment he does not realize will involve murder for hire and is not able to resist Suzanne’s amorous overtures but otherwise he is a stand-up guy in a lowdown town who tries to extricate himself from an impossible situation, only to discover that his furious exertions just serve to make everything harder and more impossible. 

The filmmakers reportedly wanted Hopper for the role of Wayne, thinking that Lyle was too similar to Hopper’s iconic turn in Blue Velvet but Hopper campaigned successfully for Lyle. I’m glad he did, because the role perfectly suits the Easy Rider director’s signature brand of jovial, theatrical menace. 

In the end, Lyle’s resemblance to Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth turned out to be a tremendous asset rather than a weakness. Hopper is clearly having an absolute blast playing a man who is an evil bastard even by the exceedingly lenient standards of Noir. Cage has the wisdom and humility to not try to out-over-act or out-crazy Dennis Hopper. They’re a fascinating, weirdly complementary pair: the fake Lyle and the real deal, a pair of jarheads who took a wrong turn somewhere back and just kept on going. 

A huge upside to Hopper playing Lyle rather than Wayne is that it freed up the great J.T Walsh to play the role. Walsh is quietly terrifying in his ice-cold calculation. Though they don’t have much screen-time together, Walsh and Boyle’s characters have a wonderfully lived-in relationship. It’s very easy to believe them as a couple who reached the “trying to kill each other” phase of their relationship long ago. 

When we think about Nicolas Cage as an actor we tend to think of lunacy and excess and crazed over-acting but there’s none of that in Cage’s performance here. Cage delivers a beautifully modulated performance as a down on his luck everyman just trying to survive. Cage’s performance serves the story rather than the story serving his actorly ego. 

We once again see a new side of Cage here. He disappears into character rather than recreating Michael in his own image. 

Yes, Red Rock West ultimately proved too good for the modest release planned but its quality and integrity would not have come as a surprise to anyone following Cage’s glorious and eclectic career up to that point. 

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