Last night’s film was SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME (Ridley Scott, 1987), which I picked up at FILM NOIR UK but hadn’t seen since it first came out; a bomb then but one which has exercised a hold and lingers in the mind. There’s the great Gershwin song the film is named after, and an upper-class Manhattan sumptuously filmed, with Mimi Rogers dressed and made up beautifully, one of the heights of eighties glamour. And Lorraine Bracco, great as an earthy working-class mother, married to a cop (Tom Berenger). The film suffers from a wrong-headed emphasis; the story should really have been about the cop and his family; and how they survive his bewitchment by uber-rich Mimi Rogers, which is what it ultimately returns to, but most of the film focusses on how a working class cop and a super-rich lady fall into an impossible affair when he’s assigned to protect her after witnessing a murder. The characterisation of the killer, out to get her before she can identify him doesn’t make sense either. Why would he insist on chasing after her himself and not just get some lackey to do it? Pauline Kael famously wrote that Ridley Scott has ‘put so much morbid, finicky care into this silly little story that he’s worried the fun out of it,’ but I find the finicky care is the fun. Manhattan is all steam and gleaming lights here, beautiful; the penthouse interiors elegantly arrayed with the too-muchness characteristic of the time, are bliss to see; even Tom Berenger, who seems to walk around with a cloud of depression over his head and never seems like a real person, is strangely magnetic. One of those not-very-good films that I’ll surely watch again, with pleasure.

José Arroyo