Neglected Gem: Mike’s Murder (1984)

Debra Winger in James Brooks' Mike's Murder. (Ladd Company/Warner Bros.)

James Bridges directed Debra Winger’s breakthrough performance in Urban Cowboy (1980), but almost no one saw her in Mike’s Murder, which he wrote for her subsequently. It got mostly terrible reviews and no support from Warner Brothers, the studio that released it, even after Bridges had made the changes they’d asked for. But it’s a tense, compelling little movie on a subject other filmmakers hadn’t ventured toward, at least not in quite the same way. And Winger’s unheralded performance is one of the best she’s ever given. She plays Betty Parrish, a Los Angeles bank teller who has a casual sexual relationship with the title character (Mark Keyloun), her tennis instructor. She has no expectations that it will turn serious, and he doesn’t lead her on, but she falls hard for him. He approaches their fling the same way he seems to approach everything else – impulsively and without a great deal of afterthought. He doesn’t make much money (and he doesn’t hold onto the tennis pro job) so he sells a little dope and sometimes makes himself available to gay men when he needs some cash. He has an appealing youthful, athletic look, no more striking than that of many other kids in their twenties wandering through L.A., but there’s something sincere about him; the fact that he doesn’t lead her on is part of what makes him likable, and his aimlessness is sexy. (He has one friend, a photographer played by Robert Crosson, who used to shoot him on the tennis court from his balcony, like a voyeur.) Mike is naïve and careless, and his buddy Pete (Darrell Larson) is an idiot who keeps getting them both in trouble. They manage to get away with peddling drugs on someone else’s territory (though just barely), but when Pete gets them hired as coke couriers and then persuades Mike they should steal a small baggie, they become targets for the dangerous people they’re working for, who have Mike killed. When Betty finds out she becomes almost obsessed with finding out what happened to him; she questions some of his friends and even shows up at the crime scene, unseen by the forensics cops. She had no idea how perilous a life he was leading; she can hardly recognize him in the stories she hears about him, and when she sees the quantity of blood in the apartment where he was murdered she’s horrified. It’s as if she’d stepped into a nightmare.

Bridges locates the elements of the cocaine world in L.A. in the eighties that other movies with drug narratives haven’t isolated, specifically that it resides right on the cusp of ordinary life and a violent underworld that deals out retribution swiftly. Young men like Mike and Pete who don’t consider the consequences of their actions – who sell drugs or steal a little in the same way that they might have smoked a joint in the schoolyard or cheated on a test when they were in high school – are flies that get devoured by the Venus flytrap of a drug culture that’s far more dangerous than they realize. It’s a culture that has links to people with extravagant lifestyles that draw them; when Pete, on the lam from the “enforcers” who offed his friend, shows up at Betty’s, desperately scared, he justifies the theft of the small quantity of cocaine by protesting that guys like him don’t get close to the kind of money that the professional dealers handle. One of Mike’s acquaintances whom Betty talks to, Phillip (Paul Winfield), is a record producer who picked Mike up, brought him to L.A., loaned him money and let him live with him for a while. Phillip went out on the road with a band and came home to discover that Mike had moved on – to Brentwood, a neighborhood pointedly out of his class, where, Phillip heard, he was snorting a lot of coke, which Phillip knows he couldn’t possibly have been able to afford. Phillip’s attraction to younger men (like his current roommate, played by William Ostrander) means he has to tolerate their excesses and their sloppy, inconsiderate friends, like Pete.

Paul Winfield and Debra Winger. (Ladd Company/Warner Bros.)

In the decade and a half during which she was a bona fide movie star, Winger gave one performance after another – in Urban Cowboy, An Officer and a Gentleman, Terms of Endearment, Mike’s Murder, Everybody Wins, A Dangerous Woman and Shadowlands – that were so vivid and distinctive, and at the same time so natural and unforced, that following her work was like following Barbara Stanwyck’s in the thirties. She also made a lot of duds, though. She finally got so fed up with the way Hollywood used her that she stopped acting for a few years, and she’s appeared only sporadically since, sometimes memorably – for Jonathan Demme in Rachel Getting Married, on the TV series In Treatment. And she spent a season performing live with her husband, Arliss Howard, at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. She’s the one who got away, and when you see what she does with a character like Betty, finding the depth and intensity in a woman of normal emotional range, you may still grieve for the work she never got to do. There’s a scene early in Mike’s Murder where Mike calls Betty up after not having had contact with her for several months and engages her in a little phone sex; it doesn’t go on long enough (my guess is that Warners made Bridges cut it short) but the fact that Betty is playing along with a sex game that’s clearly beyond her experience is what makes the interlude so fascinating. As Winger plays her, Betty is both turned on and embarrassed, and you can see how her feelings for Mike affect her; of course the scene is about sex but it’s much more about her emotions.

The cast, which includes Dan Shor as a performance artist Betty is friends (or perhaps lovers) with, is solid, though if you recognize any of them besides Winger and Paul Winfield it’s likely to be from the odd small role in a movie or a TV episode. This must be the best role Darrell Larson has ever scored, and he’s good (he has the most frightening moment in the picture). But no one else is on Winger’s level except for Winfield. Their time on screen together is limited to one scene but it’s a remarkable one: it’s about their shared mourning for Mike, with whom, they admit to each other, they were both in love. (In a review of the film on CrimeReads, Vince Keenan reports that Bridges based Mike on a friend he met through Winfield – he and the actor had been lovers – who wound up being brutally murdered over drugs.) This picture is one of the most infuriating casualties of studio indifference I can think of. What makes you feel even worse about it is that, had Mike’s Murder been released a decade earlier, when both Hollywood and the popular audience were taking a chance on offbeat stories with characters we hadn’t seen in other films, there’s an excellent chance it would have found an audience.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.