Sliver *** (1993, Sharon Stone, William Baldwin, Tom Berenger) – Classic Movie Review 2029

Sharon Stone relishes enjoying her top star billing and salary ($2.5million) for director Phillip Noyce sleek and sexy if desperately tacky 1993 thriller in which she’s new girl in the title New York apartment block, where she soon finds that the previous occupant who looked like her was murdered. Sliver is a fair if not great erotic thriller and at least starts with a strong pedigree as coming from the novel writer of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and screen writer of Basic Instinct (1992), whose success it seeks to capitalise on.

Stone plays Carly Norris, a divorced book editor who moves into the Sliver apartment building in New York City. She quickly attracts the attention of a couple of her neighbours, a writer’s-blocked author Jack Lansford (Tom Berenger), who churns out thriller novels, and wealthy bachelor boy Zeke Hawkins (William Baldwin), the handsome owner of the apartment building.

Almost despite herself, she finds she can’t help herself falling for both of them, since they are both so darned good looking, though it doesn’t seem to occur to her that both of them seem increasingly deranged. Soon it turns out that various women living in the apartment building have been murdered and the cops suspect a serial killer is at work in the block.

When Carly starts bonking Zeke, she doesn’t know he’s wired the building with hidden cameras. Eventually the penny drops that  either Zeke or Jack may be the serial killer, and, oh my gosh, she is possibly in terrible trouble and may be the next victim. Time to leave the building, Sharon, surely, while you are still alive. Or maybe not.

Sliver is all terribly artificial, just a movie contrivance, like an old Hollywood thriller spiced up with the trimmings of lots of eroticism and sex. But, still, director Noyce’s adroit handling pulls you into the murky brew of lust, sex, voyeurism and murder. And the three stars plus Noyce make it reasonably persuasive and guiltily enjoyable, given the circumstances.

Stone holds centre stage with command and authoritative, so you can’t stop looking at her. And she and Baldwin really put the sex into sexy, and the steam into steamy, at least in the European cinema version, though Baldwin changed his mind about the script’s call for full male frontal nudity.

Also it’s a shame that Joe Eszterhas’s screenplay, based on Ira Levin’s novel, only partly hits the spot, though that may not be his fault as his script got frequently changed during the shoot by the producers and has a different ending. So if only there’d been more of a story, a surprising and effective climax and more suspects, this might have been truly special. But, even as it is, it’s still quite strong and engrossing, guilty pleasure adult thriller entertainment.

Even with a posh director, posh cinematographer (Vilmos Zsigmond) and posh co-stars (Martin Landau, Polly Walker, Colleen Camp, Nina Foch, C C H Pounder, Nicholas Pryor), nothing can hide that this is trash done with a lot of flash. As such, it did little to enhance careers or reputations. Maybe if Roman Polanski has actually directed it as producer Robert Evans initially wanted, it might have turned out a whole lot classier.

The European version features about four minutes of sex footage not present in R-rated US release. The long version is available in the US as an unrated video.

Eszterhas’s original ending fared poorly with test audiences and an alternate ending had to be quickly devised and shot. Eszterhas invented five different endings in three days.

Morgan Court, 211 Madison Avenue, Manhattan, stands in for the Sliver building.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2029

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