The main
pitfall of modern noirs is that filmmakers get so caught up in the chiaroscuro
lighting schemes and florid twists of dialogue and voiceover that they forget
noir was about expressing more than just attitude and style. Rachel Samuels'
thin, affected jazz-age noir Dark Streets
is worse than most, grafting an indifferent series of twists and double-crosses
onto a blues-nightclub backdrop that overwhelms the foreground. Featuring songs
by Etta James, Aaron Neville, Chaka Khan, and Natalie Cole, and an original
score with an assist by B.B. King, the film so lavishly fetishizes the period's
glittering costumes and leggy chanteuses that it can barely work up the
interest to tend to its junior-league Chinatown plotting. The imbalance proves distracting on both
ends: Working from a screenplay by Wallace King (based on a play by Glenn
Stewart), Samuels treats the overwritten dialogue as another layer of
set-dressing, while leaning on blurry telephoto camera effects that make the
club look like a Bush video.
Sporting a
pencil moustache like a middle-schooler highlighting his peach-fuzz, Gabriel
Mann throws himself into a blues operation called The Tower. Unfortunately, his
recently deceased father, the wealthy industrialist who ran the local power
company, left him out of his will, and Mann ends up deep in hock to some very
unsavory characters. As he pokes around and discovers the dark secrets behind
his dad's business dealings, Mann also has to mediate a romantic and
professional crisis: His headliner and sometime girlfriend (Bijou Phillips)
feels threatened by a new singer (Izabella Miko) brought in by a shady cop
(Elias Koteas) who protects the club. A series of blackouts recalls the
intrigue over the water supply in Chinatown,
but the crucial difference is that the earlier film evokes a corruption endemic
to a major city, while Dark Streets
turns out the lights in Phonytown. Samuels and company seem impatient to get
back to the music and dancing, but they aren't nearly impatient enough.