Billy
(Loren Dean) falls for Mrs. Preston (Kidman), a classy
society dame with a taste for dangerous liaisons. Teetering over a fast-running
river, his feet encased in concrete, Mrs. Preston's first gangster lover (Bruce Willis) draws a promise from Billy to take care
of "his girl." After plunging naked into a quarry -- Kidman's white body arrows
through murky water like the visible death of desire -- Mrs. Preston wonders
"why he thought I couldn't take care of myself." It's as though, by echoing her
lover's fatal fall, she's washed him out of memory. Does she dress herself, put
on a new face, consciously prepare for her next performance, always the
free-spirited star of her own moving picture? ("I'm not his girl," she says of
Dutch Schultz. "He's my gangster.") Sister to F. Scott Fitzgerald's Daisy,
Billy's angel is a creature privileged by beauty, ruthless innocence, the lack
of any imagination of mortality. In the end, Mrs. Preston ascends (to her next
"movie"?), boarding a plane and flying out of the world of blood and money where
"ordinary people" -- the folks out in the dark -- live and die.
(Image: Touchstone Pictures/Everett Collection)
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