Tequila Sunrise (Warner Bros., Mount Productions, 1988)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I hadn’t realized until last night that Turner Classic Movies had been spending the entire month of July showing so-called “neo-noirs” from the 1980’s on Friday nights, with co-hosts Ben Mankiewicz and Eddie Muller (who does the classic “Noir Alley” showings on Saturday nights) picking 15 films, of which I caught the last, Tequila Sunrise. This was a 1988 production by Warner Bros. (with the current melting-soundstages logo set to a record of Herman Hupfeld’s “As Time Goes By,” a song famous for the film Casablanca starring iconic noir actor Humphrey Bogart) in association with producer Thom Mount, written and directed by Robert Towne (the second of just four directorial credits for him, though he’s remained in demand as a writer) and probably fitting more in with two other recent thrillers Charles and I had watched together lately, Carlito’s Way (1993) and Contraband (2012), than with classic film noir. The big thing all three movies have in common is that their male leads are people who’ve been involved in the drug trade but more or less want to get out of it; in Tequila Sunrise he’s Dale McKussic (Mel Gibson), who when we first meet him is in a seedy motel room with a tall, striking-looking blond man who we’re told is his lawyer but we almost never see again. They’re supposedly concluding a drug deal – at least we see large packets of white powder and a briefcase that’s supposed to contain a great deal of money – only Dale puts the drugs in the tank of the toilet (with a plastic shield to keep them from being flushed away) and escapes with neither drugs nor money.

He’s good friends with a local police agent, Nick Frescia (Kurt Russell), who’s supposed to be after him and other big-time drug smugglers, but who keeps letting Dale get away because they’ve been friends since they went to high school together. This arouses the ire of a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent who’s in town ostensibly to work with the LAPD to bust McKussic and also to discover the secret identity of “Carlos,” the head of the cocaine cartel supplying McKussic’s product. Meanwhile, both Dale and Frescia are dating Jo Ann Vallenari (Michelle Pfeiffer), who owns a high-end Italian restaurant where much of the film’s action, such as it is, takes place. About midway through the movie the reluctant cop allies are joined by officer Jaime Escalante (Raul Julia) of the Mexican federales, though almost from the moment he enters we know that he’s going to turn out to be Carlos. After all, not since Charlton Heston’s role in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) has a Hollywood movie depicted a Mexican drug enforcement agent who wasn’t corrupt and secretly part of the cartels he was ostensibly trying to bust. This nearly two-hour movie meanders through various plot points, including the melodramatics of McKussic’s relationship with his ex-wife Shaleen (Ann Magnuson), who’s complaining that he’s being a dead-beat on his alimony and child support (he protests that he’s not making as much money as he used to when he was still involved in the drug business – though, ironically, the “legitimate” business of selling hydroponic farming equipment is one that at least in this country is most associated with marijuana growers) while McKussic is not only romancing Jo Ann but even using her as a baby-sitter for his son Cody (Gabriel Damon) when Cody (in one of his occasional custodial visits to his dad) crashes his surfboard into a pier piling and is confined to bed rest for a reel or two.

Tequila Sunrise is one of those movies that isn’t really bad but isn’t very good either; in terms of stories about drug dealers riven by conscience into trying (or at least claiming to try) to quit the trade, Carlito’s Way and Contraband have it all over this one (though it helps that they have better actors playing the part: Carlito’s Way star Al Pacino is of course a legend, but after mentally comparing this film to Contraband Mark Wahlberg looked better to me than he ever has before: he may not be at Pacino’s level but he’s a damned sight better at this sort of character than Mel Gibson!). Before the movie Ben Mankiewicz and Eddie Muller had warned me that the film would feature one of my pet peeves in moviemaking – an inability on the part of the director and writer (here, the same person!) to decide whether they were making a serious film or spoofing the genre. I’m not that big a fan of the 1951 film His Kind of Woman, directed by John Farrow (Mia’s dad) and starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell and Vincent Price, because after about an hour as a serious film noir it goes off the deep end and becomes pure camp at the end – but at least it works better than Tequila Sunrise, which bounces back and forth between the two rather uncertainly.

In fact, as my husband Charles noticed when he came back from work with half an hour left to go on the film, this is one of those movies that seems spliced together from other films: he recognized Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Key Largo, while from the moment Michelle Pfeiffer came on screen it seemed obvious to me that director Towne had told her, “I want you to look, dress and talk like the young Lauren Bacall.” (She did surprisingly well; for all the flaws in the way Towne drew her character, she’s still by a comfortable margin the best actor in the film.) Ben Mankiewicz says he particularly likes the film because of Raul Julia, but he did little for me – apparently he and Towne couldn’t decide whether to overplay or underplay his character (though as I noted above the fact that the supposed Mexican cop turns out to be the head of the drug cartel is absolutely no surprise whatsoever!), The moment we start taking Julia’s character serioiusly as either cop or crook, Towne literally starts having him sing light-classical pop like “Cielito Lindo” or “Santa Lucia” in a quite credible tenor voice (not operatic quality but good enough to remind us that Julia played in stage musicals, notably Nine, the Broadway musical adaptation of Fellini's film 8 1/2.)

Towne also does a classic bit of old-Hollywood “planting” when McKussic complains that his boat (a red speedboat in which Escalante hides half a million dollars’ worth of cocaine and sends McKussic off with it for no apparent reason – the only explanation I can think of is that he wanted McKussic to get busted for it and go to prison, whereupon he would use his drug-cop incognito to steal the coke from police impoundment and make off with it) has a gas leak, which sets up a spectacular climax off the Pacific coast in which both McKussic’s speedboat and Escalante’s yacht blow up, they start a conflagration that takes out all the subsidiary characters (Kurt Russell’s character presumably excepted, though earlier he’s shot the DEA agent who was trying to bust McKussic), while McKussic and Jo Ann are shown at the end hugging each other in front of a seascape that has turned bright orange from the fires. There are some good aspects to Tequila Sunrise, notably Conrad Hall’s stunning cinematography (though this is one of those annoying neo-noirs that attempted to do the noir atmosphere with dank greens and browns rather than seeking a color equivalent to the dark shadows and vivid chiaroscuro contrasts of classic black-and-white noir the way John Alton did beautifully in Allan Dwan’s 1956 film Slightly Scarlet) and a quite effective use of music (notably a remake of the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry, Baby” with the Beach Boys joining the Everly Brothers quite beautifully), but it suffers from a set of filmmakers all too conscious of what they’re doing.

Just as, in Dwight MacDonald’s words, “the builders of Chartres Cathedral didn’t know they were making Gothic architecture (though the builders of our modern collegiate ‘Gothic’ did),” Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, John Huston, Howard Hawks, Edward Dymytryk and the other directors of the classic noirs didn’t know they were making film noir but modern neo-noir directors do – and it shows; elements that seemed fresh and spontaneous in the 1940’s (or in modern viewings of 1940’s noirs) just seem derivative and clichéd today. We’re all too aware of how a film noir is supposed to go: an innocent but naïve hero, a sinister criminal plot and a femme fatale out to ruin him – though I give Towne points for avoiding the femme fatale, at least; he could easily have turned Michelle Pfeiffer’s character into one but I’m really glad he didn’t. Instead he used an even hoarier cliché. setting up a romantic triangle between McKussic, Frescia and Jo Ann, and loading down this two-hour movie with a lot of boring footage of the soap-opera complications between the three – though Pfeiffer gets a nice line to the effect that Gibson’s character is really interested in her while Russell’s is only fucking her to get information about his quarry. And one would (at least I would) excpect that a film called Tequila Sunrise would feature the titular cocktail in the plot – at least it would be the favorite drink of one of the characters (a 1940’s screenwriter would likely have established that the mysterious drug lord “Carlos” is fond of them and given Escalante’s identity as Carlos away wheh he ordered one at Jo Ann’s bar) – but the film runs almost two hours with no explanation of the title.