Jagged Edge (1985)
Directed by Richard Marquand
After a wealthy heiress is murdered in her beach house, her devastated husband becomes the prime suspect. He hires a lawyer who hasn’t taken a criminal case in years, and as they work together, a complicated romance develops amidst the trial.
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What critics compared Jagged Edge to
This last one, Side Effects, looks like an homage to the '80s heyday of the twisty psychological thriller—Fatal Attraction, Jagged Edge, and Dead Calm—and to a large extent, it plays out as exactly that.
A doozy of a Hitchcockian thriller with Jude Law, Rooney Mara and Catherine Zeta-Jones, “Effects” is a go-for-broke valentine to ’80s cinematic psychological potboilers such as “Jagged Edge” and “Fatal Attraction.”
The result suggests Jagged Edge retold in the measured voice of the New Yorker.
The movie’s fundamentally “beach read” nature (promotional interviews with the filmmaker have pinpointed such influences as Fatal Attraction and Jagged Edge) means it’s not a summation — it’s a one-off.
As Romy risks her career and her family in pursuit of great (read: kinky) sex, I kept thinking about what Robert Loggia told Glenn Close in "Jagged Edge," way back in 1985: "Is that your head talking, or another part of your anatomy?"
The film's original screenplay was the work of Joe Eszterhas, whose scripts for Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct were among the most influential of that subgenre, and New Line reportedly paid $4 million for this one.
His fourth film on the subject, "Basic Instinct" is obviously a reiteration of the stories and subtexts of his earlier films, "Jagged Edge," "Betrayed" and "Music Box." Writing to a population battered with headlines about pedophiles, cannibals, one-man sperm banks, sleep-around pols, Eszterhas exploits all of our fashionable fears.
For that princely sum, Eszterhas rewrote "Jagged Edge" and disgorged such lines as ''Look lady, we can do this downtown if we have to" and "You like watching, don't you?"
The screenplay, by Joe Eszterhas , resembles his “ Jagged Edge ” (1985) in keeping the secret until the last shot.
This, you may recall, is the movie that aroused the ire of gay groups, that seemed destined for an NC-17 rating (though, of course, it was trimmed to get a more commercially desirable R), that had a script by Joe Eszterhas (Jagged Edge, Flashdance) that fetched a record $3 million.
Writer Joe Eszterhas shamelessly reworks ideas and themes he had earlier exploited in films such as Jagged Edge and Music Box, but the sheer overheated nature of Verhoeven's direction makes this extremely watchable.
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Yet this isn’t “Jagged Edge” or “Presumed Innocent” in Gen-X clothing.
Normally, I'm not a fan of this school of storytelling, which seems sorta lazy to me -- The Usual Suspects fell back on a similar one-twist gimmick in 1995, and Joe Eszterhas has used it repeatedly, to my great irritation (Jagged Edge, Basic Instinct, and Sliver).
His credits include " Jagged Edge ," " Basic Instinct " and the forthcoming " Jade ."
Writer Joe Eszterhas had done "Jagged Edge," "Basic Instinct," and "Nowhere to Run," and producer Alan Marshall had done "Basic Instinct," "Cliffhanger," and "Angel Heart."
Eszterhas (whose name was loudly hissed by the audience during the opening credits) mysteries, from Jagged Edge to Basic Instinct , are known to follow a specific formula (anyone familiar with his work will know what it is).
The mark of an Eszterhas script seems to be that nothing in the first half of the movie really syncs up with anything in the second half of the movie -- that's how he concocts them surprise endings, and why the conclusions of his Jagged Edge, Basic Instinct, and Sliver scripts are so unsatisfying, even in the context of our low expectations.