by Frank Calvillo
John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club had made such a cultural impact when it premiered in 1985, achieving instant classic status and making stars out of its relatively unknown cast. You would think then that a noirish film about murder and cover-ups in a small town starring two of The Breakfast Club’s most popular stars would have been a no brainer. Well, so did a lot of people.
In Blue City, troublemaking local boy Billy Turner (Judd Nelson) returns to his small South Florida hometown only to discover that his father has been murdered. No one around town is willing to give Billy a straight answer as to what exactly happened, from his stepmother (Anita Morris) to the local chief of police (Paul Winfield). Aided by high school friend Joey (David Caruso) and his sister Annie (Ally Sheedy), Billy sets out to discover the true identity of his father’s killer.
The directorial debut of Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles producer Michelle Manning, Blue City is miles away from being a perfect film. The pacing moves at lightning speed and the overall handling of scenes shows an undeniable lack of directorial modulation. Adding to this is a script which does no one a single favor, with lines as insipid as, “I had to go to the state university football team to get these specimens!” Likewise, dramatic moments are handled in such an overblown manner that the hopelessly committed cast are left stranded as the first time director struggles to make some sort of order from the material in front of her.
For their part, Nelson and Sheedy do the best they can with what they’ve got. Sadly though, any magnetism the two brought to their previous joint cinematic outing all but deserts them here.
The making of Blue City was fraught with production problems including, among other things, a reshot ending. After the film’s disastrous reception, Manning attributed the rough shoot and flawed final product to a lack of support in her directorial debut. Because of the star power of the two leads and overall heightened expectations, Blue City was considered one of the year’s biggest disappointments.
It’s true that Blue City fails in many of the areas it hoped to excel in. Yet the one area the film happens to nail is in how it captures the noir feel of the film’s source material. Based on the 1947 novel of the same name by pulp novelist Ross McDonald, the nearly four-decade transfer of Blue City from book to screen proves nearly seamless. Manning and her team are able to successfully transplant this ’40s-set narrative to suit ’80s sensibilities without much fuss.
While many of the characters within Blue City, not to mention their fates, all exemplify the best that noir in the ’80s had to offer, it’s the film’s setting which proves its lone shining asset. The town depicted in Blue City has just the right look and feel of the kind of dead end place where behind the scenes crime and corruption take place. It’s a truly desolate place where nothing survives but the possibility of death, despair, and those individuals waiting for one or the other to happen to them.
Even today there is a definite curiosity factor at this unexpected Breakfast Club reunion and sure, it is interesting to watch Nelson and Sheedy here as their former characters trapped in a sort of alternate reality. Unfortunately there isn’t much more fun to be had than that. Though Blue City had high hopes of striking oil by capitalizing on The Breakfast Club’s success, as well as the unavoidable brat pack popularity, in the end it exists as nothing more than an extremely lifeless curio.
