The Woman Chaser

Dir: Robinson Devor; Scr: Charles Willeford; Cast: Patrick Warburton, Eugene Roche, Ron Morgan.

35mm, 90min., 1999 (RP)

Strange bedfellows, commerce and art. They’re enough to make any one of us crazy. Take used-car salesman Richard Hudson (Warburton) — equal parts numbskull and iconoclast. He’s out to make a movie but along the way got “reality mixed up with the dream.” But what a dream! In the opening reel of his movie, The Man That Got Away, a little girl in a charming white dress is run over by an 18-wheeler. This is the Fifties; the studio head turns Hudson’s 63-minute masterpiece into the pilot for a television series and that makes Hudson mad — really mad. “Why are you so unhappy?” Hudson’s one-time moviemaking stepfather asks him. He couldn’t be happier, he replies, as he makes one of those crucial decisions that can’t be reversed, the kind of decision that has the police knocking on your door. Devor’s love of Fifties noir is infectious and exact; The Woman Chaser is far from being a hollow genre exercise. At once hilarious, jagged, and nostalgic in all the best ways, The Woman Chaser is a refreshing breath of smoke-tinged, deadpan air. Fri, Mar 17, 7:30pm, Convention Center

This article appears in March 17 • 2000.

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