Stormy Monday **** (1988, Melanie Griffith, Tommy Lee Jones, Sting) – Classic Movie Review 11,346

Stormy Monday (1988): ‘The Most Dangerous Choices Are Made With The Heart’.

Writer-director Mike Figgis’s 1989 British neo noir movie Stormy Monday is an exciting and moodily atmospheric crime thriller set in a rain-swept, neon-lit Newcastle during the city’s America Week, designed to promote transatlantic friendship but actually the backdrop for threats, violence and, finally, murder.

Writer-director Figgis (Internal Affairs) kicks up a storm with Roger Deakins’s striking camerawork and attracts incisive performances from the big names he has assembled for this homage to the Hollywood crime B-movie.

Melanie Griffith and Sean Bean are tender as the lovers, Kate and Brendan, while Sting and Tommy Lee Jones exude a brooding menace as their bosses, Finney and Cosmo. Brendan (Bean) takes a job as janitor for Finney (Sting), who runs a jazz nightclub in Newcastle, where American boss Cosmo (Jones) arrives and Brendan falls for his escort Kate.

Stormy Monday is a real style object. Figgis also provides his own score.

Also in the cast are Prunella Gee, Alison Steadman, James Cossins, Mark Long, Brian Lewis, and James Cosmo.

Stormy Monday is directed by Mike Figgis, runs 93 minutes, is made by British Screen Productions, Film Four International and Moving Picture Company, is released by Palace Pictures (1988) (UK), Atlantic Releasing Corporation (1988) (US) and Virgin Vision (1989) (UK) (on VHS), is written by Mike Figgis, shot by Roger Deakins, produced by Nigel Stafford-Clark and scored by Mike Figgis.

Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where filming took place, is the birthplace of Sting.

It cost $4,000,000 and grossed $1,791,328 in the US.

It is released by Optimum Home Entertainment in 2006 in the UK on DVD.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,346

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