Five Corners

Five Corners

Five Corners is a 1987 crime drama by Tony Bill (Flyboys) starring Jodie Foster, Tim Robbins and John Turturro.

The movie takes place in 1964, and the quite psychotic neighborhood bully Heinz (Turturro) got released from prison. Linda (Foster) who works in a pet store, is scared becaus he tried to rape her before and her boyfriend Jamie (Todd Graff) can’t protect her, she fears. She turns to the neighborhood’s upstart Harry (Robbins), a young lawyer who is getting into the civil rights movement. But while he has taken to non-violence and assumes that he can just talk love into Heinz, the neighborhood is already on the edge with teachers getting shot with arrows, young girls being drugged and now Heinz on the loose…

Five Corners

Now, Five Corners is not terribly well known. It has a fan base, but it’s quite an under the radar movie in the sense that it never broke out from the wave of late 80s early 90s crime movies in the way Coen or Scorsese movies have. It’s an oddball, quirky cult movie if you’re lenient, or a mess of an effort if you’re mean. And there’s a reason why it may split audiences (and critics alike). On the positive side, at little over 90 minutes, this one’s tight and on point, not an urban epic of some sort. It boasts a nice store by James Newton Howard (Falling Down), some really good camerawork and and overall high qualty look that’s not at all indicative of a low budget effort. This is quite a premise.

Five Corners

On the other hand, while it looks great, it doesn’t much look like set in the 60s, and as some reviewers have pointed out, the era it is supposed to take place in also doesn’t do much for the movie. There’s a few indications such as the civil rights context, the odd classic car and a lack of modern technology but it’s not an immersive feeling that’s generated. It feels 80s masquerading as 60s. The more serious “offense” if you so will however, is the movie’s tone. The light tone doesn’t quite fit either the era or the genre. And despite the light tone it mostly has, it is quite a serious movie. It goes from a good goofy and weird to downright shocking… and yeah, so it might just be a tad too weird and the tone is off, but it’s still fun and the actors are all great. It’s just not a Scorsese type movie about the hood, but more of a slight satire of pastiche characters that might also be in a Scorsese picture if it were meant to be darker and serious.

Five Corners

Some stuff is even just plain absurd, including the death by arrow, the penguins etc, but there are some shockers in there. Alll in all a captivating little movie albeit one that’s all over the place. What ties it together is a raft of great performances and familiar faces, good pacing and great dialogue (“What’s this? This is your life, clown!”). It struggles a bit in deciding who the main characters are, in that it feels a bit like American Graffiti as it’s just an ensemble or hang out movie in a way, then. Todd Graff is not very familiar name today, by the way, but that also might just be my bad. He’s known for his role in The Abyss, among others. The movie is co produced by George Harrison, by the way, which may be a reason for the respectable budget they had to invest in some quite popular songs of the era.

Five Corners

Signal One has released this one now on DVD and BluRay in the UK and I had a chance to rewatch it after, possibly, decades since I had last seen this on television. The new HD transfer looks nice on the DVD, too, that was made available to me. Scaled to HD, it still looks fine – I bet the BluRay does the movie justice, I wouldn’t recommend sticking with DVD anyway. The contrasts are solid, the colors rich and it seems like it was sourced from a properly restored print. It does show its age but it looks totally solid and even in its upscaled DVD form, its film look is preserved, it should look really neat on BluRay. The audio is absolutely alright as well, with nice 2.0 stereo doing proper justice to dialogue and some action. There are optional English SDH subtitles included on this.

Five Corners

There are a few extras on there, namely an audio commentary with Mike McPadden (the movie journalist and podcaster who died in 2020) as well as Ben Riser (UW Madison), a still gallery and the trailer. The commentary is an excellent, entertaining and trivia rich commentary that’s almost as good as the movie, if not better. But the two also do struggle to make sense of the movie, but in a good way, what a blast.

Buy now: From Amazon.co.uk

Five Corners
A DVD version was provided to us for this review.

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