Rating summary

Movie		5.0
Video		1.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		4.0
Overall		3.5

The Last Seduction Blu-ray Movie Review

Deadlier than the Male

Reviewed by Michael Reuben December 9, 2018

The Last Seduction is one of the great film noirs of the 20^th Century, and its anti-heroine, Bridget Gregory, is one of cinema's most memorable femme fatales. On the scale of sheer manipulative badness, she easily ranks with Double Indemnity's Phyllis Dietrichson, Out of the Past's Kathie Moffat, Cora Smith in The Postman Always Rings Twice (Lana Turner's version) and Matty Walker in Body Heat. Indeed, Bridget outdoes them all in one respect, because she takes such obvious delight in the sheer mechanics of luring men to their doom. Bridget's predecessors did it for money, or to escape a bad marriage, or sometimes (like Mary Astor's Bridget O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon) to save their own skins. But Bridget relishes the con as much as its rewards, and her sexual appetite matches that of any of her victims. She doesn't just enjoy being bad; she luxuriates in it.

So why aren't Bridget and The Last Seduction (or "TLS") better known today? There are many reasons, but probably the biggest is that its production company, the U.K.'s ITC Entertainment, had no idea that director John Dahl and screenwriter Steve Barancik were making anything more than a cheap R-rated skin flick for late night cable TV—which also explains why the film premiered on HBO, thereby disqualifying it for Oscar consideration. Otherwise, star Linda Fiorentino would almost certainly have been nominated for best actress, possibly accompanied by Dahl's efficient direction, Barancik's clever script and superb work by supporting actors Peter Berg and Bill Pullman. The film was ultimately named 1994's Best TV Movie by the National Board of Review, while Fiorentino won best actress from several critics' societies and was nominated for a BAFTA. Reactions of film festival audiences persuaded ITC to release the film theatrically in the U.S. through October Films, where it received rapturous reviews and grossed over twice its production cost. Roger Ebert listed TLS at number five on his 1994 ranking of the year's top ten films.

On U.S. video, TLS has been treated even worse than in its theatrical release. The 1995 laserdisc from Polygram and the 2002 DVD from Lionsgate used a full-frame VHS-era transfer that didn't even begin to capture the film's subtly suggestive cinematography, wardrobe and production design—and, of course, there were no extras. The U.K. saw better versions released through Network, including a two-disc special edition in 2006 with newly created extras and an extended version billed as the "director's cut" (created without Dahl's participation or approval). Network subsequently released the film on Blu-ray in 2015 with much of the same material.

Scorpion Releasing has now brought the film to Region A in what can fairly be described as a "good news, bad news" Blu-ray edition. The transfer is dated and problematic, but it's so vastly superior to anything previously released here that fans of the film probably won't care. (A tiny disclaimer on the back cover states "Master Provided by ITV".) Scorpion has also managed to obtain nearly all of the 2006 DVD extras, and it has recorded an excellent new commentary with the director.

When we first meet Bridget, we don't initially see her face, just her body confidently striding past the desk of the telemarketing drones she's imperiously supervising. The tone of her voice, simultaneously commanding and dismissive, is enough to let us know she's a force to be reckoned with. She's married to Clay (Bill Pullman), a doctor completing his residency, who's a sap but not an idiot. Clay is as willing to color outside the lines as Bridget, but what he doesn't yet realize, like Walter Neff in Double Indemnity, is that he's hopelessly outmatched. At Bridget's urging, he's borrowed $100,000 from a loan shark to support their still-threadbare lifestyle, and now he's handing out prescriptions for diet pills to every speed freak who knocks on his door. (He calls it "my retail business".) The latest stunt to which Bridget has inspired him is a $700,000 sale of pure cocaine that he's stolen from a hospital pharmacy. But the joke's on Clay, because as soon as he brings home the cash, Bridget hightails out of New York with the entire score, leaving Clay to face the shylock's increasingly violent demands for repayment. (Clay spends the rest of the movie with his hand in a cast, and not from an accident.)

Initially planning to hide out in Chicago, Bridget ends up stopping in upstate New York, where the sleepy town of Beston turns out to be an unlikely haven for a big city girl who regards her new surroundings as hicksville. Her longtime legal consultant, Frank Griffith (the late J.T. Walsh, a veteran of Dahl's Red Rock West), advises her to stay put until she can persuade Clay to give her a divorce. Meanwhile, Clay has hired a private detective (Bill Nunn) on contingency to track her down. Bridget assumes the name of "Wendy Kroy"—the name has a hidden meaning—and talks her way into a job with a local insurance company, persuading her new boss to keep her real identity a secret with a heart-wrenching tale of being an abused wife on the run.

Wendy also picks up a new sap in the person of local boy Mike Swale (Peter Berg, before he became a big-time director, e.g. Patriots Day and Deepwater Horizon). Mike is desperate to escape Beston for the big city, which in his mind is nearby Buffalo, but his brief sojourn there didn't end well. (I'll leave that story for new viewers to discover, much as Bridget does.) Bridget represents everything that appeals to Mike about the wide world beyond Beston, but she also scares him to death—which is no doubt why he finds their sex life so addictively exciting. For Bridget, by contrast, Mike is just a useful piece of meat. "You're my designated f*ck", she tells him—and if he insists on more,"Then I'll designate someone else." Not since Lauren Bacall has an American actress possessed a voice so aptly described as "sultry"—but Bacall never talked like that.

Bridget quickly inveigles her new man into a twisted and illegal moneymaking enterprise. In what is no doubt a conscious nod to Billy Wilder's classic, the plan involves murder, insurance and, yes, double indemnity—and like Walter Neff before him, Mike doesn't realize until far too late that he's the patsy. How the whole thing plays out is something you'll have to discover for yourself, but Dahl's direction is so unobtrusively simple, his cast so good and Barancik's script so ingeniously written, that watching this twisted anti-morality tale is never anything less than bracing. And Fiorentino is hypnotic. Even when you've seen the movie repeatedly, as I have, you can't resist studying her every move and change in expression, trying to figure out what makes Bridget tick. The script wisely gives her no back story, no attempt to explain how she became a remorseless force of nature who blasts past every obstacle in her way.

The Last Seduction was the actress' first starring role after her blazing debut in Vision Quest and her darkly comic supporting turn in Martin Scorsese's After Hours. If Hollywood had any sense, it would have leapt on the unanticipated buzz generated by TLS to build her into a major star. The lack of an Oscar nomination probably hurt, as did the abject failure of the actress' next two major projects, William Friedkin's disastrous Jade, and a second film with Dahl, the inauspiciously titled Unforgettable. Fiorentino would have one more success as the suspicious medical examiner in the first Men in Black before fading into the background, popping up only occasionally in independent projects (e.g., Ordinary Decent Criminal). Bridget remains her supreme achievement, a queen of mean and a beacon of destruction atop the film noir heap. The lady may be toxic, but she can't be ignored.

The Last Seduction Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Last Seduction was shot by cinematographer Jeffrey Jur, whose range extends from the cheerful palette of My Big Fat Greek Wedding to the foreboding shades of HBO's Carnivàle. (He also photographed several episodes in Season One of Westworld.) In his new commentary, director John Dahl repeatedly praises Jur's understated lighting, which, like the rest of the production itself, doesn't forfeit its realism in search of a stylized re-creation of film noir (for an example of the latter, see the recent Terminal). As noted in the introduction, Scorpion Releasing has disclaimed any responsibility for the condition of the master used for this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray; the disc's back cover includes a short note (in tiny type): "Master Provided by ITV".

Scorpion is wise to put some distance between itself and this video master, because its quality is very poor, especially for 2018. The image is soft, even in closeups, and detail quickly vanishes as we move to medium and long shots. Signs of artificial sharpening are evident throughout, as are indications of heavy filtering and grain reduction. But perhaps the master's greatest sin is the continuous presence of digital noise, which is difficult to capture in still images but is unmistakable in motion. If you're someone who insists on turning up your sharpness setting, I suggest you turn it off for this disc. Even without any sharpness added by your equipment, you're likely to see fields of noise quickly pass up and down and back and forth across the image like swarms of tiny insects. I initially thought the disc suffered from fluctuating densities, but on closer inspection it became clear that the problem is shifting fields of digital gunk, which have largely replaced the original element's natural grain.

On the positive side, the colors are strong and decently saturated, and the blacks decently rendered (for the most part), which is important in a film where the heroine's consistently black-and-white attire is a conscious design choice to convey the nature of her character. Scorpion has authored the film with a more-than-respectable average bitrate of 29.08 Mbps, and the encoding appears capable, but a good encode can't fix a bad master. Scorpion may have done the best it could with the available materials, but TLS's Blu-ray would be an embarrassment coming from a major studio. The film is great, and the new disc is such a quantum leap past prior Region A video versions, that fans desperate for an even remotely watchable release may be thrilled just to have this badly flawed product. I freely admit to being one such fan, but that doesn't blind me to the video shortcomings of Scorpion's disc, which are considerable and, especially in the current era, fully deserve the low score of 1.5 out of 5.

The Last Seduction Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The news is somewhat better on the audio front, where TLS's original "Ultra Stereo" soundtrack—the poor man's Dolby Stereo—has been encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0. Scorpion either could not obtain or decided not to use the 5.1 remix that appeared in the U.K., and as a fan of original audio formats, I applaud the result. When played through a good surround decoder, the track effectively creates a sense of ambiance for differing environments in New York City and Beston, and it maintains the dialogue clearly in the front center, with intelligible and natural prioritization. There are no "big" sound effects (with one possible exception, which I won't spoil for newcomers), but there's an infectiously upbeat jazz score by Joseph Vitarelli (She's So Lovely), which is essential to the film's impact, because, like so much else in TLS, it's the polar opposite of what one expects in a film noir. (Dahl's commentary delves into the score's development.) The soundtrack also includes some effectively used pop songs, of which the most memorable are a pair of tunes by blues guitarist and singer Charlie Terrell.

The Last Seduction Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

TLS was released without extras on both U.S. laserdisc and Region 1 DVD. A British special edition DVD in 2006 contained a number of extras, including a roughly assembled "director's cut". These extras were ported over (and supplemented) on a Region B Blu-ray released in 2015. Scorpion has provided most of these extras, and it has added a newly recorded commentary by Dahl.

• Commentary with Director John Dahl: This commentary can be found under the disc's audio options. Interviewed by Nathaniel Thompson, Dahl recounts the film's development, production, casting and tortuous release history. He also discusses the editing, which was done without the benefit of test screenings (unlike many directors, Dahl says he likes them). Prompted by Thompson, Dahl describes the twists and turns of his career after TLS, and he and Thompson consider the massive shifts in the business of creating filmed entertainment since cable and streaming services began producing original programming. It's intriguing to hear Dahl compare such projects to working in the old studio system, and he clearly prefers being a director-for-hire to slaving over projects that may or may not get financed. (Check his credits; there's an impressively long list of prestige TV.)



• The Art of Seduction—Featurette (1080p; 1.78:1; 30:17): This 2006 documentary short features Dahl, writer Barancik and the principal cast. Berg and Fiorentino appear in archival footage. The final segment includes a frank account of the movie's subdued release and unexpected success.



• Behind the Scenes (1080p; 1.33:1; 8:35): There's no narration, but if you know the film, you recognize each scene, and you can usually make out the discussions being had about blocking, camera placement and other practical details of getting a good shot.



• Deleted Scenes (w/Optional Director's Commentary) (1080p; 1.78:1; 59:58): The scenes aren't separately listed or selectable, and there are no title cards to identify them. However, substantial footage from the completed film has been inserted before and after so that the viewer knows where they would have appeared, making the one-hour running time somewhat deceptive. The deleted scenes themselves add up to less than twenty minutes, and they are easily identifiable by time codes and their workprint (or VHS) quality. Dahl's commentary is as much a general overview as an explanation of the scenes and why they were dropped. For some reason the collection cuts him off in mid-sentence.
  
  The bulk of the deletions expand on the relationship between Mike and Bridget, and all of them were appropriately cut as unnecessary, although the performances are uniformly excellent.



• Alternate Ending (w/Optional Director's Commentary) (720p; 1.78:1; 10:42): Dahl discusses this version of the ending both here and in his new commentary. The original scripted ending brought back J.T. Walsh's attorney, but Dahl wisely filmed a second version with a different actor and found, in the editing room, that it worked better. (This one is also longer than it needs to be, which is always a mistake as a film is winding up.)



• Still Gallery (1080p; 2:04): A combination of poster art and production stills.



• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 1.78:1; 1:45).

The Last Seduction Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Fiorentino's Bridget is a terrible person, but in a curious twist, she's also an inspiration, because she was a female protagonist who took charge, for good or evil (mostly evil). In an early season of Sex and the City, some of the characters watch one of the film's memorable sex scenes, cheering as Bridget rides her chump of a boyfriend while joyfully proclaiming, "I'm a total f*cking bitch!" Women hadn't displayed that kind of sexual moxie in movies, especially if they were up to no good. It was a long way from Mary Astor's manipulative tears or Barbara Stanwyck's chilly repartee or Lana Turner's suggestive poses. Even Kathleen Turner in Body Heat had to play shy, soft and wounded to get what she wanted. Not Bridget. She's an unapologetic scoundrel from first to last, and you still can't help rooting for her. Scorpion's Blu-ray doesn't present her to best advantage, but it's a big improvement over anything released on home video in the U.S. to date, and I cautiously recommend it, simply because the film (and Fiorentino) are that good.