Hell Is These People

By RICHARD CORLISS

SHOW: THE WRONG MAN

THE BOTTOM LINE: A Mexican setting for some sleazy, stinging film noir.

FILM NOIR, THAT '40S HOLLYWOOD style of bitter men, treacherous women and slicing shadows, is making spectral appearances on cable TV this summer. But noir is easier to evoke than it is to revive. Fallen Angels, Showtime's series of short films, errs in thinking the genre is all venetian blinds and overhead fans. For a sharper rear view, check out The Wrong Man. Director Jim McBride (The Big Easy) and writers Roy Carlson and Michael Thoma have the inside word on noir. It isn't a look but a vision -- a bleak take on life and its evil twin, death.

This is seriously rancid noir, with an archetypal plot: a loser on the run, hooking up with strangers who are very good at being bad. In Mexico, Alex (Kevin Anderson), a fugitive sailor, falls in with Missy (Rosanna Arquette) and Mills (John Lithgow), a married couple linked like felons on a chain gang. There is a slim mystery, with the federales in pursuit, but this is at heart a study of the cages three people have made of their lives. Mills says what they all feel: "I just can't get out of this goddam life!"

Mills' convertible lurches into the punishing sun, and Missy wraps her mesmerizing body around Alex, who isn't strong enough to stand the light or the heat. When she goes scavenging for sex, either Alex or Mills is always the wrong man. Like Sartre's No Exit, this is a story of a trio in hell. In No Exit, "hell is other people"; here, hell is being stranded with this couple playing out their sad games. She smacks him around, dances in the nude, spits back his verbal abuse, rides him like an old horse. The two must have Alex as an audience for their displays of hatred, bent lust and mutual need. When he's gone they seem dead, spent, like marionettes after the show.

Arquette, in great shape these days, radiates the strain of a desperate coquette. Anderson, with all the charisma of the guys you knew back in shop class, is an ideal stud-schlemiel. But this is Lithgow's spotlight. His shambling gait and open shirt give him the look of Disney's Brer Bear. But Mills is a slyer oaf, muttering obscenities and worn wisdom, capable of evil . and love; Lithgow's dilapidated face tells you both are curses. He knows that noir is a chase with death at the end, and he makes it a hell of a ride.