We Might Follow the Plot This Time

Chapman University winds up its film noir series tonight with a critically acclaimed movie that earned Kevin Spacey a best-supporting actor Oscar for his portrayal of a handicapped con artist who talks too much.

“The Usual Suspects,” a 1995 crime thriller directed by Bryan Singer, begins “last night” in San Pedro harbor with a shipboard explosion in which 27 men are killed during a multimillion dollar cocaine heist.

Spacey plays a character named Verbal, one of two survivors of the explosion, who is being relentlessly interrogated by a U.S. Customs special agent. Told largely through a series of flashbacks, the film shows how Verbal and four other notorious career criminals (Stephen Baldwin, Kevin Pollak, Benicio Del Toro and Gabriel Byrne) met in a police lineup in Queens six months earlier and later hatched their plan to heist the cocaine.

But it’s not as simple as it sounds. The plot of Christopher McQuarrie’s Oscar-winning script is so complex that critic Roger Ebert confessed to losing track of it both times he saw the film. Even The Times’ Kenneth Turan warned audiences to not “expect to completely follow the plot after the first viewing, or maybe even after the second.”

But Turan gave high marks to this “fatalistic tale of power, betrayal, crime and punishment,” calling it “a maze that moviegoers will be happy to get lost in, a criminal roller coaster with twists so unsettling no choice exists but to hold on and go along for the ride.”

Bob Bassett, dean of the School of Film and Television at Chapman, says “The Usual Suspects” is an example of “neo-noir.” Despite its being a wide-screen, color production with a contemporary setting, he said, the film reflects some of the themes, issues and stylistic devices of the classic period of film noir, from 1941 to 1958.

“It’s a very complicated movie and often that’s typical of film noir, that the narrative structure is complicated and it’s as though the viewer enters a maze and is trying to understand what’s going on,” said Bassett, who will lead a post-screening discussion of the film.

One of the key questions in the film is who is the mysterious Keyser Soze, a fearsome international criminal mastermind that no one has ever seen.

“What’s intriguing to me about the picture is the sensibility of the picture really harkens back to earlier noir where there’s this feeling of an unseen force out there and that unseen force can affect anyone at any time,” said Bassett. “I think the screenwriter did a really great job of insinuating that feeling of this force throughout the picture.”

* “The Usual Suspects,” which replaces the originally scheduled film “The Grifters,” screens at 8 p.m. today in Argyros Forum Room 208, Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. (714) 997-6765. Admission: Free. Running time: 105 minutes. Rated: R.

Sinatra, Brando, ‘Dolls’

“Guys and Dolls,” director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s lavish 1955 production of the Broadway musical based on Damon Runyon’s colorful characters, screens Friday night as part of the Frank Sinatra film series at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach.

The Samuel Goldwyn production stars Sinatra as Nathan Detroit and Marlon Brando (in his singing debut) as Sky Masterson--two gamblers who bet $1,000 on whether a pretty Salvation Army woman (Jean Simmons) will go to Havana with Masterson.

Orange Coast College professor Arthur Taussig, the museum’s adjunct curator of film, will introduce the movie and lead a discussion afterward. While Taussig considers the idea of Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando appearing in a musical together to be as “surreal as Woody Allen and Sharon Stone being lovers in ‘Antz,”’ he prefers to focus on the historical, psychological and sociological significance of films.

“ ‘Guys and Dolls’ is beautifully done, and it’s light and sort of funny with some serious overtones. And it certainly deals with a lot of gender issues,” he said. “Here are two gamblers that psychologically know something is missing in their lives, and it’s the psychological feminine [side of their personalities]: Their own feminine aspect is what they’re out of touch with because they’re macho gamblers. The irony is [Simmons] is the Salvation Army woman: Salvation! Get it? Get it? And that’s exactly what she does.”

* “Guys and Dolls” screens at 6:30 p.m. Friday in the Lyon Auditorium, Museum Education Center of the Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. (949) 759-1122. Admission: $5. Running time: 150 minutes. Not rated.

Pandora’s Duffel Bag

“A Simple Plan,” director Sam Raimi’s grim thriller starring Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton and Bridget Fonda, opens Friday at Edwards Town Center Theater in Costa Mesa.

Adapted for the screen by Scott B. Smith from his novel of the same title, “A Simple Plan” begins with two small-town brothers (Paxton and Thornton) and a friend (Brent Briscoe) discovering the snowbound wreckage of a small airplane containing a dead pilot and a duffel bag filled with more than $4 million in cash. Should they keep the money or turn it in? The cash-stuffed duffel bag quickly turns into a Pandora’s box in this dark, character-driven film. Fonda plays Paxton’s wife.

* “A Simple Plan” opens Friday at Edwards Town Center Theater, 3199 Park Center Drive, Costa Mesa. (714) 540-0594. Running time: 117 minutes. Rated: R.