Given my love for the erotic thriller sub-genre, Jade is surprisingly a film I’ve avoided watching up until now, primarily due to the lack of availability of the Director’s Cut. While most of these films have since made the transition from VHS, to DVD, to Blu-ray and finally to 4K UHD, due to the film’s initial poor VHS sales the Director’s Cut, which features 12 more minutes didn’t make the transition from VHS and Laserdisc to HD. Written by Showgirls/Basic Instinct/Flash Dance Scribe Joe Eszterhas, produced by Robert Evans, and directed by William Friedkin who was behind such classics as The Exorcist, The French Connection, Cruising and Sorcerer, this striking omission from my viewing history was finally removed thanks to Vinegar Syndrome who has chosen to deliver both the theatrical cut and the Director’s Cut on their latest 4K UHD release.
Watching Jade now, it’s interesting to see why this film was called “a critical and financial disaster” by its director. Given the success of Instinct, the film subverts the femme fatale/black widow archetype at the core of that film, with something much more intriguing and progressive. The film begins like most of these do with a murder – Kyle Medford a wealthy businessman and antique collector is found literally skinned to death in his lavish San Francisco apartment by an antique axe. Assistant District Attorney David Corelli (David Caruso) is called to the scene and it becomes quickly apparent that the last person who saw him alive was Katrina Gavin, a clinical psychologist played by Linda Fiorentino who’s real life actually could have been a film of its own. To complicate matters further Gavin was a former girlfriend of Corelli’s, who later married his best friend, defense attorney Matt Gavin (Chazz Palminteri).
What sets Jade apart from its previous iterations is the feminist slant of this film. Katrina, who is our female primary suspect, given the sub-genre isn’t portrayed as some praying mantis/black widow monster, both in and out of the bed. She’s not flashing the men in her interrogation and has a somewhat surprisingly normal justification for her possible guilt in the film when all is said and done, not to dig too much into spoilers. The film definitely feels very much of its time, with some amazing dialog choices and some of the zingers between the cops are, that are definitely some Joe Eszterhas specials like when the detectives refer to Kyle’s house for secret rendezvous as a “Fuck House.” Given the title and the backdrop, where San Francisco Chinatown is a big part of the film, Jade shockingly does manage to avoid the weird asian fascination/fetish angle I was almost expecting given the time and location of the film.
While the performances ebb and flow into and out of the melodrama, one thing that literally shocked me was the car chase at the heart of Jade, which definitely lets you in on the fact that this was a big budget studio film (Friedkin was at the time in a relationship with the head of the Paramount.). After a witness is plowed down in the middle of the street by a black Ford Thunderbird, David Caruso then hops in his police-issued Ford Taurus (Ford was definitely a sponsor) and chases the culprit down through the winding and steep streets of San Francisco, with the culprit’s car covered in gore. It’s a wild, and very practical set piece that has Friedkin really showing he still has it. It gets pretty gnarly as it of course makes its way into Chinatown, where the black car horrifically mows down parade attendees in a scene whose consequences are never really dealt with.
The Herculean task at the heart of this preservation/restoration was that the Director’s Cut didn’t really exist in a HD form, let alone a 4K one. So Vingar Syndrome went back and manually reconstructed the alternate cut with its re-worked ending for this new UHD release. There’s a few moments of standard def for the footage they could not locate, but for the most part this is the best presentation you could ask for. There’s no real visible DNR either so this film looks like just that – film, which I would expect from Vinegar Syndrome. There’s a wondrous warmth to the cinematic look of Jade that is achieved by embracing its celluloid source rather than trying to scrub it away, that helps to root it in its time and place. Another distributor would have simply included the standard def director’s cut as an extra or simply Ai upscaled it, it’s something that since Kill Bill release has made me weary of buying UHDs to be honest.
I consider myself fortunate it took me this long to see Jade, just so I had the critical tools to fully grasp it and could see it presented in the best presentation possible. I don’t feel like it was a bad film, but what it had going against it was Joe Eszterhas had turned a 180 here, with a much more progressive take that the world simply wasn’t ready for yet. The film’s sex is between consenting adults and the criminal aspects are fueled by the very real hunger for money and power and feels a bit more grounded, even given some of the films more outlandish and melodramatic leanings. I dug the hell out of Jade, it’s probably one of the more feminist leaning entries in the erotic thriller sub-genre that still has the humor and vibe of the time, just less of the more dated elements. While’s not going to convert any non-fans into fans, it most definitely delivers on what you’d expect from the sub-genre without some of the more worrisome thematic elements.
