EP Millstone wrote: ↑December 9th, 2022, 3:09 pm
CinemaInternational wrote: ↑December 9th, 2022, 4:48 am
Something Wild remains one of the most unpredictable and hair-raising viewings I have ever seen. It starts out as a hard-edged, highly sexualized romantic crime comedy, then it becomes a romantic drama, before becoming a thriller, and then an outright horror film, before ending happily. Griffith and Daniels are both great, Ray Liotta gives one of the most terrifying performances on film, a 1980s answer to Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death.
I saw
Something Wild during its initial theatrical release, and have avoided watching it since then precisely because Ray Liotta's psycho terrified me. To me, "Ray Sinclair" is like "Jonathan Brewster" in
Arsenic and Old Lace (except that JB never frightened me) -- an outlier who upsets the otherwise light-hearted harmony and rhythm of the movie. I agree with your opinion, CinemaInternational, that, tonally, this "comedy" is all over the map.
The film already had a few hints of danger before Liotta arrived with Griffith leading Daniels into a world of petty theft and casual habitual lies (like Daniels saying he was married, when actually he was a bachelor), to say nothing of the very kinky bedroom scene with the handcuffs. They were living life on the wild side, and the film carefully hinted that they could not get away with it. But at the same time, Liotta's character was an awfully fierce punishment for what were at heart, two likable characters, who were already changing toward more normal characters in the Pennsylvania scenes.
I assume it is because of the film's later hairraising scenes that Demme was hired to do Silence of the Lambs a few years later; he had directed a good, Hitchcock-like thriller in 1979 called Last Embrace, but it was not successful.
But getting back to Something Wild and Liotta, the film was released more or less simultaneously with Blue Velvet, and an argument could be made that they are practically twin films, just with slightly different attitudes. Both certainly have berserk, terrifying, psychotic villains, but by 1986, audiences would expect to see Dennis Hopper play a frightening, unhinged villain, whereas Liotta was brand-new to most at the time (he had appeared on some soaps, and in a role in the Pia Zadora "opus" The Lonely Lady). And so, while both are among the scariest roles put to film, Liotta actually comes across as even more of a force of nature than Hopper does, largely because Something Wild initially seems to be light entertainment. (Blue Velvet had dark subterranean currents rippling through it within its first three minutes hinting at all that lay ahead)
Liotta was, by all accounts, a nice guy in real life, and I remember that one member on the old boards who knew him personally offered nothing but praise for him being so kind when he passed away, but the film caused him to be typecast as a sicko afterwards, much like Widmark in the 1940s. Liotta played very few likable roles, although he was good at it in 1994's Corrina Corrina, and it sounds like he plays a nice character in Dominic and Eugene.
As for the comedy heading for the film, it is a major stretch, but is probably derived from the film's competing as a comedy at the 1986 Golden Globes where the two leads were nominated in the comedy acting categories; they lost to Paul Hogan and Sissy Spacek.