A light snooze through the subjects of race, crime, politics, and jazz in said city -- hometown of director Robert Altman -- in the mid-Thirties. To summarize it in such terms is to make it sound more ambitious than it honestly is. The period re-creation -- the array of automobiles, clothes, storefronts, train depot, gas station, etc. -- is all that anyone could temperately demand. But the enumerated subjects are dangled very loosely and precariously from the shakiest of plot hooks: the kidnapping at gunpoint of a local politico's wife by an imposter manicurist desperate for leverage with which to retrieve her larcenous boyfriend from the clutches of black gangsters. There is much else going on around town. It's Election Day, and the marathon jam session at the Hey Hey Club -- an advertised "Battle of Jazz" -- shows no signs of breaking up. Yet, even though it could be argued that the dueling saxophones of Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins (no less) provide the "dramatic" highlight of the movie, these events never amount to much. They're just backdrop. Scenery. Window dressing. The primary focus of the movie, meantime, is on the personal interplay -- more discordant but less dramatic than the battle of the saxes, Pres vs. Bean -- between the brittle, clipped, tightly-wound, Harlow-worshipping kidnapper and her slurry, dulled, opium-nipping hostage. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Miranda Richardson, respectively, have their meager share of amusing moments, and Leigh in particular grows on you. Any soupçon of sympathy she earns, however, she earns on her own. Altman's laidback, lazy, laissez-faire camera technique is much more at one with the Richardson character: the eye of apathy. This curiously unaccented style -- at odds also, incidentally, with the furious energy of Thirties jazz, real jazz, swinging jazz -- works well at the end, making the brutal abruptness of the outcome seem all the more startling. That's a small payoff, though, for enduring a crucible of monotony. Harry Belafonte, Dermot Mulroney, Brooke Smith, Jane Adams, Michael Murphy, Steve Buscemi. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd