Black Rainbow. 1988. Directed by Mike Hodges.

(1/29/01)

This film is strikingly similar to Night Has a Thousand Eyes, which I haven't seen in many years. It is about a phony spiritualist who starts to genuinely see disturbing events in the future.

I love watching Rosanna Arquette. I saw her some years ago in a film called Open All Night and in both cases I really responded to her. I waould definitely like to see more of her films from around this time. She has a presence and a sex appeal that really grab me. And of course it is a pleasure to watch a fine actor like Jason Robards.

I didn't really care for the film as a whole. Arquette sees into the future of a criminal conspiracy and this endangers her. But the conspiracy is not explained well; I was confused about what was going on.

The whole last part of the film is very confusing. Martha goes unconscious or into a trance and appears as an apparition. A killer sent to eliminate her sees the apparition, shoots at it and kills her father instead. Ten years later the reporter who had been involved with her tracks her down, but she won't talk to him and when pictures he takes of her are developed there is no image of her. So we are left to ponder what it all means.

I think that one point of all this is that by faking being a medium Martha inadvertently draws these events to her. It's sort of like the stories of people who have played with Ouija boards and have contacted something. It was like she invited the visions which came to her.

The great moment, the one moment I remember from the film, comes when Martha is doing her spiritualist act and is describing a supposedly dead person to his wife. She has the name right, but the woman protests, "But my husband's alive" and Marth asuddenly exclaims, "No, he's not." When she makes other prophecies it doesn't have the same impact. But when she is descibing another dead person and realizes she is talking about her own father, that is also riveting.

I liked a lot of the exterior photography of the South. Railroads figure prominently in this film as a means of transportation and the pictures of trains are kind of haunting.