Cody Hamman has Film Appreciation for the 1991 thriller Past Midnight, featuring Quentin Tarantino's first film credit.
Three months before Quentin Tarantino's feature directorial debut Reservoir Dogs had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January of 1992, a different movie was shown at the Vancouver International Film Festival and put a Tarantino credit on the big screen for the first time. That movie was the thriller Past Midnight, directed by Jan Eliasberg (who has spent most of her career directing episodes of TV shows) from a screenplay credited to Frank Norwood, who had previously written a TV movie in 1979 and a biker movie that was also first shown in 1991. Quentin Tarantino is credited as an associate producer, sort of a consolation prize for the fact that he wasn't given a writing credit. The script for Past Midnight originated with Norwood, but Tarantino did an extensive rewrite - so if you're a Tarantino collector, this movie should be in your collection.
The film begins with Ben Jordan (Rutger Hauer) rushing out of his home on a dark and stormy night, covered in blood and clutching a knife. The next time we see Ben, he has been paroled after serving fifteen years in prison for murdering his wife, who was six months pregnant, by stabbing her thirty-six times. The murder was filmed with a Super 8 camera, and word is that this snuff film "makes Nightmare on Elm Street look like Charlotte's Web". Social worker Laura Mathews (Natasha Richardson) is assigned to help Ben with his transition back into the outside world, and despite his reputation we can tell that she's immediately attracted to him when they first meet. She feels that he has been rehabilitated by his time in prison, that he's a different person than he was fifteen years ago. He's intelligent, charming, earned a masters degree in psychology while he was serving time. It probably doesn't hurt that Ben is an older man (Hauer was 19 years older than Richardson) and Laura has some daddy issues, since her father just passed away, leaving her his tools and pulp fiction mystery novels.
Unable to imagine that the man she met is capable of such a horrific murder, Laura is able to get that Super 8 film from Ben's parole officer Lee Samuels (Tom Wright). She needs to see for herself that Ben could do such a thing. But the film's reputation was way overblown; all that's there is Ben's pregnant wife Kathy (Dana Eskelson) smiling and dancing for the camera while drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette. When the cameraman pulls out a knife, the home movie ends. And the hand holding the knife is the only part of the cameraman that is ever shown, there's no proof Ben was there. While Samuels is convinced that Ben is guilty, even if he isn't a "natural born killer", seeing the film gets Laura thinking that Ben may truly be innocent, and she starts digging into the case even more intensely. While she's conducting this investigation, she spends a lot of time around Ben, and their interactions go beyond the professional. They go to dinner together, Ben stops by the isolated cabin Laura lives in. By the time things turn romantic between them, right after she compliments him by saying "You have hands like my father's", she is completely certain of his innocence.
But is Ben innocent? Can he be trusted? Those questions hang over almost the entire movie, and since he's played by Rutger Hauer it's impossible to call whether or not Laura is right about him. While Laura is going down her questionable path, her best friend and co-worker Steve Lundy (Clancy Brown) is there to keep an eye on her and Ben, ready to act if anything goes wrong, and hoping Laura will end up with him at the end of the day. But can he be trusted? Would he be willing to do some shady things to keep Laura and Ben apart? Is he the person who starts sending anonymous messages to Laura? Since Steve is played by Clancy Brown, you can't be 100% sure about him, even if he does seem genuinely nice and caring in some of his scenes with Laura.
Past Midnight tells an intriguing mystery story that builds up to a thrilling conclusion. Along the way, there are definitely moments when you can tell that Tarantino had a hand in the writing, like those Nightmare on Elm Street and natural born killer lines. I first read about Tarantino's involvement with the film in the mid-1990s, and the author of the piece pointed out an exchange that happens early on between Laura and Steve as some obvious Tarantino writing: Steve offers to tell Laura a joke, and asks if she wants to hear a sexist joke or a dead baby joke. Laura is surprised that he doesn't have a racist joke on hand, he says he does but racist jokes "aren't funny anymore".
I've heard that Richardson embraced the script revisions and that her scenes that don't involve Hauer - which are a large percentage of the scenes in the movie, since we follow Laura throughout while Ben comes and goes - have the Tarantino polish. However, the Norwood draft is what Hauer read when he signed on and he wanted to stick to that script, so he didn't go for the Tarantino rewriters, his scenes are all Norwood. Allegedly. Past Midnight isn't the most well known movie, so there is no behind-the-scenes tell-all to give us all the facts on the making of it. If that's true, it's disappointing that we missed the chance to have Hauer delivering Tarantino dialogue, but Ben's scenes don't stand out as different from the rest of the movie around him.
One thing Tarantino definitely added is the name of a doctor that Laura visits at one point. That character is credited as Dr. Zastoupil. Zastoupil was the name of Tarantino's stepfather.
Tarantino is the reason why I watched Past Midnight in the first place, but regardless of what the Tarantino-to-Norwood ratio ended up being in the finished film, it is a very good and interesting thriller, with Richardson, Hauer, and Brown all turning in solid performances in the lead roles, and Wright (the Hitchhiker from Creepshow 2!) makes a strong impression in his scenes. This movie is also notable for featuring the film debut of Paul Giamatti, as a young man named Larry Canipe, who knew Ben back in the day.
Laura visits Larry at the farm where he lives with his truck driver brother Todd (Guy Boyd), who used to be good friends with Ben. There is a shot in this movie of Laura and Todd walking away from the farmhouse, Todd's semi truck parked in the background, that I think is absolutely beautiful, and this is very much a "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" situation. A lot of viewers probably wouldn't see anything special in this shot, but it really hits home for me. I grew up in country areas, and I love seeing wide open farmland in movies. My father was a truck driver, the son of a truck driver, so when you mix farmland with the presence of a semi truck, that gets me right in the heart. When the truck goes out of frame and the characters stand near a tractor, that's pretty good too.
Past Midnight was originally intended to get a theatrical release, but it ended up going straight to USA Network in December of 1992 instead. By then, Reservoir Dogs had already received its limited theatrical release, but while Tarantino was getting a lot of attention for his film, Past Midnight didn't seem to benefit from that attention at all. It went to home video and sank into obscurity. If you're a fan of thrillers and/or Tarantino, I highly recommend checking it out. It deserves more recognition than it gets.
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