In 1980s New York and 1936 Ethiopia, if you’re handsome and white and the people you hurt are women and/or minorities you literally can get away with murder. He ends up killing and burying the young woman to hide evidence of his crimes.Īs in Vampire’s Kiss, the anti-hero/villain Cage plays confesses to his crimes without any consequences. The very married Lieutenant Enrico doesn’t have much time to grapple with what he’s done before he accidentally shoots the Ethiopian woman with a stray bullet while shooting at a hyena. The Ethiopian woman does not have the language to consent to sex with the tortured Italian officer but it isn’t long until she’s staring adoringly at him. Time to Kill belongs to the distressingly vast subsection of films from the 1970s and 1980s that depict sexual assault in a problematically ambiguous, even positive light, as something that begins non-consensual but eventually turns into something much different. Lieutenant Enrico has a terrible toothache that demands treatment, but when he spies a beautiful young Ethiopian woman named Miriam bathing herself he forces himself on her. Time to Kill opens with this most American and 1989 of Italian officers in, what else, a state of intense pain. In Time to Kill, Cage is convinced that he has contracted leprosy despite little in the way of evidence, which connects it both to Vampire’s Kiss and our uncertain and terrified present, when the whole damn world is convinced that it might have a terrible illness, whether those fears are justified or not. In Vampire’s Kiss, that disease was vampirism. In Vampire’s Kiss and Time to Kill, Cage, at his most broodingly method, plays a dark and tormented man who commits sexual assault and kills someone, and becomes convinced that he has contracted a horrible disease. Time to Kill echoes Basements in myriad ways but it’s an even more fascinating companion piece to Cage’s last starring vehicle, the wonderful, pitch-black horror-comedy/social satire Vampire’s Kiss. Enrico Silvestri every bit as contemporary and unmistakably American as his Yankee take on Hanlan.īasements and Time to Kill both cast their American leads as killers, but Cage’s bad lieutenant commits a number of other crimes as well. Despite playing an Italian in a bona fide Italian movie, with an Italian cast and an Italian crew, Cage makes tormented Lt. In 1986’s The Boy in Blue, Cage played real-life 19th century Canadian legend Ned Hanlan as a totally contemporary Los Angeles type with an accent that’s unmistakably Southern Californian rather than Canadian.Ĭage pulls a similar stunt here. Second or third generation Italian-American? Sure. If Travolta tries too hard to play a foreigner, Cage makes no effort whatsoever to seem even vaguely Italian. Where Travolta embarrasses himself trying, and failing, to seem British opposite genuine Brit Tom Conti in Basements, Cage goes an opposite route. Instead of illustrating their range, however, the miscasting of Travolta as a short-tempered hitman with the world’s worst Cockney accent and Cage as an Italian soldier in Ethiopia in 1936 proved just how inextricably contemporary and American Travolta and Cage have always been. As I wrote in my little-read article on Basements, both films find their stars on foreign ground, figuratively as well as literally, in that both Basements and Time to Kill take place in foreign countries and cast Travolta and Cage as non-Americans. Basements and Time to Kill are shockingly little known for movies starring cult icons like John Travolta and Nicolas Cage but they have more in common than richly merited obscurity.
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