`After Dark, My Sweet' Has That Contemporary Look And Feeling

``I always feel one should update something set in period, unless there's a compelling reason not to.''

Writer-director James Foley (``At Close Range'') was commenting on his adaptation of Jim Thompson's 1955 novel, ``After Dark, My Sweet,'' in a phone interview last week. He adds, ``I wanted to avoid the kitschy elements of film noir and to avoid imitating something that was original 50 years ago, a film form indigenous to the '40s.''

The film, which opens tomorrow at the Harvard Exit and Seven Gables Theatre, is the tale of a bungled kidnapping as seen through the booze-addled and paranoid eyes of ex-boxer Kid Collins (Jason Patric). Helping him make a mess of things are young widow Mrs. Fay Anderson (Rachel Ward) and her dubious sidekick Uncle Bud (Bruce Dern).

The book, although film noir-ish in tone, was easily transposed to a contemporary setting. Set in Anytown, U.S.A., it is narrated by Kid and is almost Kafka-like in its lack of period detail. The director confirms, ``No particular cultural or social thing in the outside world is impinging on the characters' lives.''

Foley, an 18-year Los Angeles resident, chose to shoot the film in the area around Indio, Calif., near Palm Springs. ``I liked the desert because it's separate from popular culture . . . no McDonald's, no record stores. And I'd been taken by this amazing thing of desert-rat people, who have flipped off to the end of the earth, living in close proximity to rich people who - by sheer force of money - have turned the place into golf courses. You can see the greenest lawns and the sandiest desert in the world side by side.''

The juxtaposition of rich and poor provided an apt atmosphere for ``hatching this crazy plot to kidnap a kid. It would seem accessible.'' The exotic setting also ``didn't bring any connotations of small-town America.''

Indeed, the date groves, arid mountains and paradisiacal gardens add up to one of the strangest landscapes in the United States.

Cinematographer Mark Plummer, in his first big feature film, handily captures that landscape in luminous wide-screen. (His work on the film's one eerily wordless love scene is also masterful.) Foley describes Plummer ``a kind of superstar of commercials and videos.'' He made Steve Winwood's ``Roll With It'' and Madonna's ``Express Yourself'' videos. Madonna introduced Plummer to Foley. When Plummer was the one who ``most got the material,'' Foley hired him on.

Foley's interest in Thompson's fiction is longstanding. A screenplay adapted from ``Nothing More Than Murder'' came his way a couple of years ago and was being considered for production by Avenue Pictures, until it decided it was ``too dark a proposition.''

Eight or nine months later a script for ``After Dark, My Sweet,'' written by Robert Redlin, came along which Avenue deemed more accessible. Foley read the book and liked it even better than ``Nothing More Than Murder.''

He then rewrote Redlin's first draft: ``He had strayed a bit more from the book than I thought was right.'' Foley's one minor plot change - an addition to the body count - doesn't violate the spirit of the original. ``If someone in a tragedy winds up dead, that gives a certain transcendent fullness to the character. So I killed him off,'' Foley chuckles.

Apart from updating the setting, the biggest change was in Fay's nationality. English actress Rachel Ward, an old friend of Foley's, struck him as right for the part in spite of her accent.

In the book, he says, Fay's character has ``a suggestion of mystery, of life lived somewhere other than where she is now.'' The implication in the movie that Fay is culturally adrift seemed apt.

Like Ward, Patric was a first choice for his role. Foley saw Patric in ``The Lost Boys,'' where he thought he was ``fine, but nothing to get excited about.'' ``The Beast,'' Patric's second feature, ``really woke me up to him,'' Foley says. ``Regardless of how the film does or doesn't do, I really feel he was the right guy for the part. And there's a certain satisfaction in that.''

``After Dark'' is only the first of several films taken from Thompson novels that are due out this year. Waiting in the wings are ``The Kill-Off,'' by director Maggie Greenwall, and ``The Grifters,'' with Anjelica Huston, John Cusack and Annette Bening, directed by Stephen Frears (``Dangerous Liaisons''). Thompson also was the screenwriter for Stanley Kubrick's early films, ``The Killing'' and ``Paths of Glory.''