Mickey Rourke stars as the New York private detective Harry Angel. The setting is 1955, and this normally lowbrow investigator is hired by Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) to find a missing singer named Johnny Favorite, who owes Cyphre a debt. Angel begins making the usual inquiries, finding out that Favorite was an amnesiac WWII veteran who was spirited from the local hospital by a mysterious duo who paid a morphine addicted doctor $25,000 to keep the patient on the books as a resident there. Angel seems to have hit a dead end, learning Favorite had a society girlfriend down south, as well as a secret lover. Cyphre keeps pushing Angel, plying him with cash. Angel also takes a more personal angle on the case, especially since the doctor ends up dead of an apparent suicide, and Angel is a murder suspect. Angel goes to New Orleans, and tracks down the society girlfriend Margaret (Charlotte Rampling). As Angel finds more and more people who used to know Favorite before the war, but have not seen him since, they start to turn up dead.
This film is most notorious for Cosby Show alum Lisa Bonet's sex and nude scenes, which are not all that notorious except that she was on the squeaky clean sitcom first. Rourke is very good as the slightly dumb Angel, who kind of stumbles from person to person as opposed to doing any kind of brilliant Sherlock Holmesian deductions. De Niro is great as Cyphre in his few scenes. This was made back when DeNiro did not agree to appear in EVERY film made and his very screen presence was an event. He should make more genre films, but he made the laughable "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," instead. Rampling is given nothing to do except make a cute corpse. The main surprise ending of the story is too easy to figure out. Parker's visuals are stunning, nothing appeared on screen this disturbing until "Jacob's Ladder," to which this film favorably compares. His version of New Orleans is appropriately hot and humid, another great instance where he makes his main characters sweat and suffer just like normal people. A great look and good script, by Parker based on the novel by William Hjortberg.
All in all, "Angel Heart" succeeds enough times to make it a scary, suspenseful ride. You may know how it all comes out, but getting there is the fun. (* * * * 1/2) out of five stars.
*Get a physical copy of "Angel Heart" on Amazon here*
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