This is a good movie. The New Orleans French Quarter helps bring a Film Noir feel to the movie despite its modern setting and boxy, insubstantial looking eighties cars. The French Quarter almost attained the status of another character in the film giving the audience the feeling that it could not have taken place anywhere else. Ironically those physical aspects of New Orleans that made it so vulnerable to Hurricane Katrina (the sense that it is surrounded by water, severely limiting escape), also contributed to the feeling that Raven the assassin was hemmed in, with little chance for escape.
Robert Wagner (Raven) was an odd choice to play the grim contract killer, since there was little (no) call for his All-American smile which had served him so well for a long time (in fact for sixty years). He was remarkably effective and believable in the role. His character was forty to forty-five-years-old, and with the help of a lot of noir, Wagner pulled it off. His presence was sufficiently masculine and powerful that you were able to believe that his thirty-three-year-old hostage, Anne (Nancy Everhard) was falling in love with him and he with her. A significant facial scar and sixty years helped Wagner overcome the image of a pretty boy which also afflicted Alan Ladd who originated the role in the original 1942 classic.
Raven was as cold-blooded a killer as you will see in the movies that pretend to be somewhat realistic (ie. non-slasher). His highlighted soft spot for kittens and his allowing a little girl to live despite her having the ability to identify him, only served to make his remorseless brutality more stark in comparison. Yet the moment when he crossed the line into having feelings for Anne was compelling and made the emerging sexual tension between them palpable. Instead of being a gritty crime drama with a dash of sex thrown in, this film evolved into a love story set against a backdrop of violence and corruption.
The aspect of the film requiring the most suspension of disbelief was not Robert Wagner's age, nor the fact that his hostage was falling in love with him. It was the fact that even in a post-Hoover F.B.I., it would be unlikely for an agent to marry a Bourbon Street stripper. However Nancy Everhard made me believe that he would not only marry her but would probably consider it a signal honor. She was rivetingly female and attractive in a way that transcended the tawdriness implied in her profession - almost in spite of the fact that she was a stripper.
This movie is a success because of a lot of things including good writing (based on a Graham Greene novel), good acting including the performance by John Harkins as Boynton, in whom treachery and lechery combined to give us a character that not only made my skin crawl but made it want to crawl off into a scalding shower with a wire brush. Raven brutally killed several people without any apparent compassion, yet by the end of the film I was rooting for him and Anne just as I would root for James Bond or Indiana Jones.
At the risk of making more of it, philosophically, than it is, this movie depicted almost total amorality and the ability to love to the point of life sacrifice within one man. The complexities of this evolving change is made more interesting as Raven's cold, emotionless professionalism is relentlessly taken over by his increasingly emotional reactions in desperate situations. As his professional detachment deteriorates, so does his situation, and so do his chances.
