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| 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.
