Angel Heart

Many a movie exploits the distressing notion of a man out of his depth, but few men find themselves in as deep and distressed as Mickey Rourke’s shabby Private Detective Harry Angel.

A diabolically dark supernatural piece, Alan Parker’s masterful, mysterious thriller is a stunning achievement that successfully blends a number of incredibly difficult themes into a satisfying, cohesive whole.
Significantly, devilish delights such as Satanism, black magic and Voodoo (the stuff of any second-rate horror pitch) are used to service the plot and the characters rather than the other way around; this is horror where the storyline comes first and cheap exploitation thankfully doesn’t figure at all.

The story kicks off almost immediately in bleak downtown New York. The year is 1955 and Harry Angel’s detective work mostly consists of Insurance investigations and messy divorces.
That is until he receives a call from a mysterious client named Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro, creepy and even more understated than usual), who wants Angel to track down a popular singer/crooner called Johnny Favorite.
It appears that Cyphre (if the name isn’t a giveaway then the finger nails are) did Favorite a favour some years back and now its time to collect, dead or alive.

Assuming that this is a straightforward missing persons case, Angel is hired (for an enticing £125 a day) and begins to investigate the whereabouts of Johnny Favorite. After unsuccessfully probing around in New York (namely Harlem and Coney Island), the trail leads to the backwoods bayou of Louisiana where the plot thickens dramatically. Angel encounters incredible hostility from the locals and finds that his major leads are being ritually murdered, leaving him the prime suspect.

As Angel gets closer to the truth, the themes of Voodoo and the occult bubble to the surface, culminating in a stunning, shockingly downbeat narrative twist that will definitely prompt an immediate re-wind and re-watch.

Alan Parker directs Angel Heart with his customary visual flair and creates an atmosphere that is both stark and oppressive. His use of imagery too is genuinely haunting; the cold aerial shot of a vast staircase and the shadowy depictions of whirring fans, revolving tapes and descending elevators are all expertly achieved and suggestively symbolic.
He is ably assisted by his Cinematographer Michael Seresin, whose superbly washed out film stock and colour-desaturated views of New York and New Orleans help ratchet up the noirish feel.
All of this serves to undermine the usually gleaming, shiny view of America in the 1950s.

Parker’s camera is also admirably static, using multiple set-ups and angles for the occasional bursts of action and long, lingering takes for the more talky moments where Angel questions his leads.

The soundtrack by Trevor Jones is also vital in conjuring up atmosphere. Alternating between sinister strings, cool sleazy jazz and hellish rumblings, it is essential in maintaining a sensation of morbidity and dread. Check out the almost unbearable pounding heartbeat that swells on the soundtrack during Angel’s disturbing dreams and visions.

The acting is superb, with Mickey Rourke giving a career best performance as Harry Angel. An interesting actor (of Lee Strasberg’s method school no less) whose choices became progressively more damaging and catastrophic after Angel Heart, it is easy to forget just how effective he can be in the right role. Doubters should check out this, Body Heat, Diner, Rumble Fish and Barfly for proof, not his more self-indulgent work of recent years.
His final mental breakdown (“who was the boy!?!?”) is shattering in the extreme.

Although his role is little more than a cameo, De Niro is utterly mesmerising in his few scenes as Louis Cyphre. Like his Al Capone in The Untouchables, he lends an immediate authority that gives his character complete omnipresence throughout. He has an air of grace and inherent calm that chillingly belies his eventual purpose and motivation.

In other significant roles Charlotte Rampling is appropriately vacant as a strange fortune teller and Lisa Bonet is sensuous and alluring as a young Voodoo girl who catches Angel’s eye. The film is most notorious for their genuinely erotic sex scene which culminates in a slew of disturbing subliminal images and blood cascading from the ceiling and drenching the rutting twosome.
It’s interesting to note that Bonet was one of the Cosby kids at the time and the scene scandalised the show. The saccharine TV dad Bill Cosby called for the scene to be cut but Parker, predictably, refused.

The murders are described in gory detail rather than shown; a man is castrated and has his genitals shoved into his mouth and a girl dies of a gunshot would to her nether regions. Believe me, their graphic verbal descriptions are enough and far more disturbing than the sight of a mutilated heart or a corpse with a messy gunshot wound to the eye.

So all in all Angel Heart is a stunningly macabre and often thrilling mystery that is endlessly rewatchable thanks to terrific, stylish direction, an engrossing plot and two commanding performances. And that twist? Well.....

“They say there’s enough religion in the world for men to hate each other” opines Cyphre. “But not enough to love.”

Both chilling and apt don’t you think?