With this one added on to Bedroom Window (added on to the screenplay of Silent Partner), Curtis Hanson has taken another long stride toward enthroning himself as the Patricia Highsmith of the cinema. Never mind "the new Alfred Hitchcock" and never mind the "innocent man" theme. What Highsmith knows well, and what Hitchcock is generally too polite and considerate to point out, is that the innocent man is a contradiction in terms. To say so is not to say much. The thin line (or better, the dotted line) between sanity and psychopathy, the murky and muddy depths beneath the placidest surface, the merest accident or coincidence that can divert a life from the straight and narrow to the twisted and wobbly -- all these are no more than truisms of the thriller genre. They await patiently a plot, or a plotter, to animate them, or rather to re-animate them, to demonstrate all over again that the truisms are true. Here they get what they need and deserve: the unpleasantness in the barroom, the helpful stranger, the lost wallet, and we're off and rolling. (Highsmith's novel, Found in the Street, a title that conveys to perfection the unmomentousness of the life-altering moment, also utilizes a lost wallet to get things rolling.) Hanson sets himself apart from most of the drinkers at this particular well by his strict sense of form, of propriety, of necessity -- his use of a soda straw, if you please, and his refusal to slurp and to splash and to get himself soaked. If the plot in this one is more straight-ahead and less agile than in Bedroom Window, and slower to get to the sticky stuff, it also never gets as careeningly out of control. Intense and intent, it vindicates its overall restraint upon each little loosening of it: upon, for a prime example, the ingeniously stage-managed discovery of the body behind a nailed-shut door (ingenious in its use of videotape to create a past tense in the midst of the present one; ingenious in whipping up suspense over what has happened rather than will happen). And as ridiculous as it might be to have to say, it goes to show what movie thrillers in general have come to, that it seems here such a relief and a joy that no apparent corpse pops up again after it has once been put down. James Spader, Rob Lowe, Lisa Zane, Kathleen Wilhoite. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd