Mad Dog and Glory.

I don't highly recommend Mad Dog and Glory, I merely love it. In this movie, trashiness and artfulness so meet and mingle that it's difficult to tell where one leaves off and the other begins.

While watching, I kept shaking my head at the whole retrograde project (a milquetoast spends two hours of reel time summoning up the courage to whip a bully for the sake of a pretty girl!) yet I couldn't take my eyes off the screen. The film succeeds at a very low level through a combination of filmmaking savvy and the curious knack of its makers for diluting their own juvenile modern skepticism about the compatibility of the sexes, and a very unmodern willingness to suspend that skepticism during flights of sheer romantic lyricism.

Like Passion Fish, Mad Dog is an account of a rescue operation in which the rescuer desperately needs the succor of the rescued. Wayne, a police photographer sarcastically nicknamed "Mad Dog" by his cop buddies because of his seemingly unshakable mildness, saves the life of a well-connected criminal named Frank who then promises to be for his savior "the expeditor of your dreams." Into Wayne's apartment and celibate existence walks "Glory," a beautiful would-be actress who has fallen into the gangster's clutches and is now on loan to Wayne for a week. Love, threats, and violence ensue in ways I needn't describe because you can now figure out the rest of the story for yourself with perfect accuracy. Yes, Mad Dog runs on rails, too, but unlike the ones in the Sayles film, these rails are rarely visible while you watch the movie. And even when they are, the moviemakers keep shaking the passenger cars so violently that you never get a chance to look down at the track.

The script is by Richard Price who is, like Sayles, a novelist. But whereas Sayles tries to give his films some of the expansiveness and depth of a long novel, Price seems to be bringing only a veteran movie buff's sensibility to his work. And this buff must have seen a lot of B movies. For if Mad Dog, at its worst, has a B movie's tinniness, it also has a good B movie's speed, fluidity, modesty of scale, and unexpected grace notes in the basically stock characterizations. And director John McNaughton (whose first release, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was, indeed, a latter-day B picture) gives every scene a present-tense vividness that, fortunately, leaves us little time to think about what we're seeing. But McNaughton can't redeem Price's worst conceptions, including a climactic fist fight in which the hero, after getting beaten to a pulp, suddenly jumps up to thrash the villain. At its core Mad Dog and Glory is a boy's movie.

The acting helps immensely. Mike Starr makes the cliche he plays lovable, strong-arm moron out of Damon Runyon bearable and, yes, rather lovable. Bill Murray, helped a lot by a make-up and hair style that give the very shape of his skull a brutal appearance, is surprisingly scary as Frank and it's a scariness that abides even during Murray's comic moments. Uma Thurman as Glory achieves the first complete characterization I've seen from her. She uses nervousness as a mask, as a way of making Glory mysterious as well as sexy.

For Robert De Niro's performance, I will try to go light on the superlatives. This is his best performance since... well, it's his best, most committed performance in a long time. Trying to calm a crazed killer during a convenience store robbery, Wayne cautiously opens the cash register and urges the psycho to take the money and flee. De Niro keeps his body and head very still for this moment and allows only his outstretched hand to tremble. In that contrast of motionless and tremor, De Niro makes us feel both Wayne's terror and the fundamental courage of the man who feels that terror. There's not a moment in this performance that doesn't convey the same richness of counterpoint.

Now this is what I call a bad week on the job: an admirable film that I can't love and a silly movie that I can't shake. But, after all, strange things happen to the mind in the darkness of movie theaters.