DARKLY HIP NOIR LIGHTENS UP IN '90S.

Byline: Rene Rodriguez Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Near the beginning of Oliver Stone's delirious new thriller ``U-Turn,'' down-on-his-luck gambler Bobby Cooper (Sean Penn) finds himself stranded in the desert town of Superior, Ariz., the victim of a busted radiator hose.

While waiting for his car to be repaired, Bobby makes the acquaintance of Grace McKenna (Jennifer Lopez), whose carnivorous sexuality, dangerously tight red sundress and slinky walk all scream big-time trouble. Minutes after meeting Bobby, Grace is spouting breathy come-ons: ``You ever see something and know you just had to have it?''

Despite all the warning signs, when Grace invites Bobby to follow her home, he does - and the decision eventually snares him in a harrowing, bloody mess.

Maybe if Bobby had seen more film noirs, he might have instantly recognized Grace for the femme fatale she really is.

``U-Turn,'' which opened Friday, does not fit the traditional description of a film noir. Its sunbaked locale is far removed from the shadowy, rain-slicked cityscapes of classic noir; its tone is lighter and more comical than noir's brooding atmosphere of dread; and there isn't a single glimpse of a fedora hat or world-weary gumshoe in all of the movie's two hours.

But ``U-Turn'' still qualifies as a modern-day film noir - a neo-noir - because it embraces many of the thematic elements of betrayal, alienation and murder that typified the moody crime dramas of the postwar 1940s.

``U-Turn,'' the recently released ``L.A. Confidential'' and a slew of other films due out soon are proof that film noir are thriving. Audiences remain fascinated by the underbelly of American society, and the genre has stayed relevant by evolving along with society's changing mores. Their themes resonate in the cynical '90s as strongly as they did 50 years ago.

``Film noir has always been a particularly apt genre for exploring the malaise, the tensions and the suspicions underlying our supposedly cheerful existences,'' says Annette Insdorf, director of undergraduate film studies at Columbia University. ``Filmmakers continue to play with this genre to depict a darker vision of human relationships.''

Tinseltown treatment

Along with the western and the musical, film noir is one of the three movie genres Hollywood can lay claim to inventing. But while the western has gone out of fashion and the musical is dead, new generations of filmmakers have kept film noir alive, injecting contemporary sensibilities into old formulas.

``There's an appeal to the genre that lies in its brand of cynicism,'' says Richard Allen, chairman of cinema studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. ``It's a kind of cynicism about values and relationships - at least a ``knowingness'' about relationships. Film noir used to be the dark side of Hollywood. But now, in a certain way, it's become mainstream.''

Film noirs were born in the 1940s, low-budget B-films cranked out by Hollywood studios struggling to survive the economic hard times of World War II. The term ``film noir'' was first coined by French film critic Nino Frank in 1946, when Hollywood was able to resume distributing its films around the world, and Europe was suddenly flooded with a slew of violent, strangely erotic crime films stockpiled in the United States during the war.

Seen back-to-back, movies like ``Double Indemnity,'' ``The Big Sleep,'' ``Detour'' and ``Woman in the Window'' coalesced into an identifiable film movement: grim, often downbeat stories about crime and corruption that did more than simply tell a good yarn. They also reflected the psychoses and neuroses of their characters through stark, shadowy black-and-white cinematography and extreme camera angles that were the complete opposite of the elegant, evenly lit look of Hollywood films of the 1930s like ``His Girl Friday'' or ``The Philadelphia Story.''

From the past, darkly

Today's neo-noirs may not be quite as stylistically distinct as classic noirs - for one thing, they're in color - but, like their predecessors, they carry a connection between their shady motifs and our national mood.

``In classic noirs, there were a lot of characters who were World War II veterans returning home to find things had changed - and being alienated by that experience,'' says film producer and scholar Alain Silver, co-editor of ``Film Noir Reader,'' the influential collection of essays on the genre. ``In neo-noir, a lot of protagonists don't need an excuse for being alienated. It's a fundamental situation in which they find themselves: They're in a society they don't find particularly welcoming.''

Stranded in Superior longer than he expected, ``U-Turn's'' Bobby finds himself a stranger in a very strange land: The town's oddball residents all seem to go out of their way to make Bobby's visit an unpleasant one, which contributes to the movie's sense of noirish dread.

But ``U-Turn's'' director Stone believes his movie can't be classified as pure noir.

``Film noir is an American genre, a tough-guy genre,'' he says. ``I think of `U-Turn' as more of a thriller, but it certainly has elements of noir. With noir, you know the mood, you know everybody's going to make desperate choices, everybody's going to die. There's a lot of despair. I think there's a lot more hope in `U-Turn.' ''

The iconoclastic Stone, who chose to make a low-budget genre film like ``U-Turn'' to take a break from the controversy that always accompanies his more political movies, does concede ``U-Turn'' embraces many of the archetypes of classic noir.

``You could say it's an homage to ``Double Indemnity,'' Stone says. ``And Grace is certainly a femme fatale, but with a twist. In a lot of the older films, they don't tell you why the woman is so tough. Here it's explained.''

Not `Happy Days'

``L.A. Confidential,'' the epic look at police corruption in 1950s Los Angeles that opened recently, has already been widely described as a noir. Like ``U-Turn,'' it, too, contains several classic noir elements: A period setting, a cast of hard-boiled detective antiheroes and a beautiful femme fatale whose kisses may or may not be deadly.

But much like Stone, ``L.A. Confidential'' director Curtis Hanson isn't convinced his movie qualifies as traditional noir. ``If you think of film noirs as movies that take a look at the darkness that exists beneath the bright, then ``L.A. Confidential'' is certainly that,'' Hanson says. ``But I also tend to think of noir as the 1940s. I wanted my movie to have the feel of not only the 1950s, but the forward-looking 1950s, when things were beginning and there was an excitement about it. To have the kind of color and flavor of Confidential magazine, to be a little bit lurid and entertaining and kind of funny, which are adjectives you would not think of with noir.''

When they're not echoing the themes of classic noirs (like 1981's ``Body Heat,'' a faithful and true updating of the genre), today's neo-noirs often pay homage to them - or simply just borrow the genre's iconic elements, often contemporizing them in the process.

``I think the re-emergence of the genre really has a lot to do with postmodernism,'' NYU's Allen says. ``The interest in the genre lies in the nature of the images being refashioned: Images of high-contrast lighting, femme fatales, a certain kind of sexuality. It's a question of style, and in that sense it's rather different from the nature of the earlier cycle.''

The new noir women

But that same recycling of surface is one of the things that has kept noir fresh over the years. The traditional femme fatale figure, for example, could easily feel like a hoary and sexist '40s cliche to modern audiences - a demonized view of femininity in a male-oriented genre (the overwhelming majority of film noirs were directed by men, and their central characters almost always male).

But by combining the femme fatale archetype with more modern sensibilities - think of Jennifer Tilly's whiny-voiced schemer in ``Bound,'' who connives with her lesbian lover (Gina Gershon) to bump off her gangster boyfriend - the femme fatale becomes a symbol of female liberation and empowerment.

``The femme fatale is particularly interesting, because it's a sexual figure, but it's also a woman with some degree of intelligence, a woman who plays a very active role, so it fits in with certain kinds of modern images of femininity, which want to combine a kind of masculinity with an allure and a sexuality,'' Allen says.

Independent means

Some neo-noirs are even more playful with noir conventions. Movies such as ``Blood Simple,'' ``Red Rock West'' and ``The Underneath'' are made by independent filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, John Dahl and Steven Soderbergh, respectively) who understand film noir's conventions well enough to both update and slyly satirize them at the same time.

``What those films have reinjected into the genre is an eye-winking irony about the conventions being tweaked with,'' Insdorf says. ``There's a real consciousness of the movies that have come before.

``When the Coen Brothers (who wrote and directed `Blood Simple') have a shot that travels along the top of a bar - and the camera literally goes over the head of a drunk that's slumped over the bar and back down again - you know this is a much hipper version of film noir than `The Maltese Falcon.' It's self-referential, and it suggests that the filmmaker wants to play with the viewer, using familiar elements in a slightly new way.''

Obviously, this kind of cinematic gamesmanship isn't meant to cross over into mainstream audiences: Most neo-noirs are low-budget productions that don't need to break box-office records to make a profit. Even ``U-Turn'' is Stone's lowest-budgeted project in years, costing a relatively cheap $20 million.

Coming next year, however, are some high-profile neo-noirs with impressive marquee value. Due in theaters next winter is ``The Magic Hour,'' a film noir from director Robert Benton (``Kramer vs. Kramer,'' ``Nobody's Fool''), starring Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon and Gene Hackman; and ``Fallen Angels,'' a noirish thriller about a cop (Denzel Washington) tracking down a serial killer who may be one of heaven's fallen angels. Plans are also under way to adapt Frank Miller's noir comic book series ``Sin City'' into a feature film.

If the trend continues, film noir may well make good on its promise to become the most eternal American movie genre of all.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1) While acknowledging the film-noir influences in ``U-Turn'' (starring Jennifer Lopez and Sean Penn), director Oliver Stone thinks there is ``a lot more hope'' in his film.

(2) ``Double Indemnity,'' starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, inspired him to make ``U-Turn,'' says Oliver Stone.