This World, Then the Fireworks (1997)

Taglines: Some people look for trouble. Carol and Marty make their own.

This World, Then the Fireworks movie storyline. As children, Marty and Carol Lakewood, fraternal twins, witness a brutal murder involving their father. They grow up to become depraved and incestuous adults, living in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s.

Marty is a skillful journalist, but grows bored with every new job and is easily distracted. When he seduces a young police officer, Lois Archer, and discovers she owns a beach house, Marty sets out to double-cross her and make the property his own.

Carol is a heartless prostitute, willing to go to any lengths to con men out of their money, or make them pay in other ways. Powerless to stop them is Mrs. Lakewood, a weak-willed woman who suspects the terrible truth in her children’s relationship, but knows no way to stop it.

This World, Then the Fireworks is a 1997 American neo-noir film directed by Michael Oblowitz, starring Billy Zane, Gina Gershon, Sheryl Lee, Rue McClanahan, Philip Loch, Elis Imboden, Christian Durango, Roberta Hanley, Richard Edson and Matt O’Toole The screenplay is based on a short story of the same name by Jim Thompson.

Film Review for This World, Then the Fireworks

Hardly a frame passes in ”This World, Then the Fireworks,” a stylized 1950’s-style film-noir mood piece, when you don’t have a nagging sense that the actors aren’t living up to the genre that the movie exalts with a smothering reverence.

Adapted from a posthumously published story by the pulp-fiction writer Jim Thompson, the film ravenously sinks its teeth into the juiciest kinds of evil. Its long list of crimes begins with a double murder and includes incest, matricide, a botched Mexican abortion and several more murders. As the movie, directed by Michael Oblowitz from a screenplay by Larry Gross, solemnly trots out one nasty stereotype after another, there are moments when you have the sense of being guided through a museum curated by a film scholar deliriously misty-eyed with film-noir nostalgia.

Most of the action takes place in Los Angeles in 1956. The main characters, Marty and Carol Lakewood (Billy Zane and Gina Gershon), are beautiful, incestuously involved twins, both grifters, who grew up rotten as the result of a childhood trauma. The graphic opening flashback remembers when they were 4 and witnessed the gruesome double murder of their father and his mistress in bed.

This crime left both children unhinged. Marty, who narrates most of the film, has a viciously comic sense of the ridiculous. He recalls the double murder as appearing as hilarious as a Krazy Kat comic strip because ”the man on the floor didn’t have any head.” He also has a tendency to fly into murderous rages in which he screams quasi-biblical mumbo jumbo.

Carol, after marrying and deserting a wealthy man she despises, becomes a coldblooded prostitute who has no qualms about poisoning a pair of mobsters when they try to get a piece of her business. Both children live with their eccentric, ailing mother (Rue McClanahan), who suspects the incestuous hanky-panky taking place under her roof.

Marty, who also married and left his wife, has thrown away a promising journalistic career to become a con man. One afternoon, he picks up a sexy policewoman named Lois Archer (Sheryl Lee), who has a house by the beach and a repressed need to be sadistically dominated. Marty is only too happy to stoke her fires, and while doing so he hatches a scheme to take over the beach house.

Mr. Zane has a meaty role in the maniacal, sadistic gigolo who systematically reduces Lois into a grovelling servant. But the handsome actor, who resembles the young, ultra-slick George Hamilton, conveys no aura of physical menace. Narrating the story in a soft chocolaty voice that should be edged with hard-boiled insinuation, he sounds merely petulant. Ms. Gershon’s Carol is more convincingly tough. Slinking through the film in vintage cocktail dresses and pouting provocatively, she is a cross between Ava Gardner in her spitfire mode and the young Raquel Welch.

On its own self-conscious terms, ”This World, Then the Fireworks” is an elegant piece of filmmaking that sustains a visual mood of sensuous gloom, with period recordings by Peggy Lee and Chet Baker intensifying the atmosphere. But the movie’s explosive passions are never unleashed. The whole sordid story unfolds from a safe esthetic distance.