Ah, neo-noir… One of my many weaknesses: even when it´s bad it feels good. I really can´t decide which is the case with The Poison Rose but I certainly had a ball laughing at cheesy dialogue lines (not sure if deliberate or not but suspect the former) and spotting cinephile references, more on which below.
The Poison Rose is the 9th feature film directed by George Gallo, who boasts a 30+ year career as director and mostly screenwriter of light comedies and thrillers with a mafia/neo-noir tinge. I don’t think I saw any of the films he previously directed and what I remember of what little I saw of the ones he wrote (Analyze This, 1999, coming to mind) is very mild entertainment.
The Poison Rose does not so much tell as revolve around an inscrutable and I suspect incongruous story involving private investigator Carson Philipps (John Travolta, himself) taking time off LA to cool down the tempers of some gambling creditors by accepting a “case” in Galveston, Texas, as it happens the town where he left the love of his life and now rich oil widow Jayne Hunt (Framke Janssen, wooden) 20 year before, nothing subsequently being what it seems, to the extent it seems like anything, involving police corruption, oil business, drug trafficking, mental asylum malpractice and 11thhour disclosure of parental issue for dramatic effect.
The Poison Rose seems to have come to being just to give me another opportunity to recall Howard Hawks´ (I know, I know) reminiscences on The Big Sleep (1946) to the effect that halfway through the shooting he had lost track of who was doing what to whom and/or why, as bewitched was he by the rollercoaster of dramatic goings-on, these including, in The Poison Rose, beside mandatory off narration by Travolta, an elegant asylum inmate Philipps mistakes for a doctor correcting him with mundane gallantry “oh, no, no, paranoid-schizophrenic…”, Jayne offering a drink to Carson to which he replies “it´s 10.30 AM” to which she reacts turning to the bar with the shadow of a smile and saying “Bourbon, right?”, a (spoiler alert) soon-to-be deceased son-in-law of Jayne´s family-named Chandler, asylum manager Dr Miles Mitchell (Brendan Fraser, having all the fun) indulging in the perhaps only, but nonetheless best, imitation of Peter Lorre in film history and of course the film´s title, supposedly the nickname of a irrelevant secondary character but in case it escaped you a blatant clin d´oeil to The Blue Dahlia (George Marshall, 1946). I could go on but then I´d risk breaking the 5 para tradition of MacMahonian reviews and why would I want to do that?
Beside all of the above and also validating my revolutionarily innovative thesis, first stated in these pages back in January 2015 a propos my seminal review of Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014), to the effect that neo-noir had migrated from the 40´s to the 70s (The Poison Rose Is set in 1978), views on the film akin to that of The MacMahonian ´s are thin on the ground in cyberspace and elsewhere, but I don’t resist quoting, with gratitude if without permission, the pricelessly self-styled “jimmyhatesyou” in Metacritic writing“… dont be an asshat just because you can accept the fact that some films are made to be enjoyed…”