Classic Film Collection: Get deep cover for pounds 3 this weekend
Pick up a video at the newsagent when you buy The Independent on Saturday or the Independent on Sunday
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Your support makes all the difference.On Saturday and Sunday you can walk into your local newsagent and walk out with a film classic with your copy of The Independent or the Independent on
Sunday.
In our collection we have offered When
Harry Met Sally, The Grifters, The Last
Seduction, On Golden Pond, Brief Encounter, The 39 Steps, Naked, Educating Rita and A Matter of Life and Death.
This weekend we complete the first series of The
Independent Classic Film Collection. The tenth and
final film in your collection is Deep Cover, directed by Bill Duke. Starring Larry Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum, it can be yours for only pounds 3 (excluding the price of the
paper).
If you would like to order any of our
previous videos, please see Saturday's and Sunday's
paper for further details.
Bill Duke's stylish second feature trawls the seedy world of a West Coast drugs ring. With its grainy direction, dark photography and complex plot, the film is a fine example of modern noir, as well as the vehicle that launched Laurence Fishburne on his career as a Hollywood leading man.
Fishburne plays John Q Hull, a man who as a child witnesses the fatal shooting of his junkie father and later joins the police "to make a difference". As an undercover agent, the fastidious Hull is plunged into the duplicitous and violent underworld of Los Angeles. Working his way up from street deals to meetings with the local crack barons, he befriends Jeff Goldblum's unctuous dealer-cum-lawyer, and begins an affair with an upmarket art trader called Betty, who supplements the income from her ethnic artifacts by laundering drugs money.
Goldblum is brilliantly cast as a suited lizard whose conversational patter returns obsessively to a prurient fascination with deviant sex, and who maintains his suburban family lifestyle with the blood money that he rakes in from crack. Goldblum wants to "have his cake and eat it too" and, although Fishburne is repulsed, he soon finds himself up to his neck, killing, trading and peppering his nose with the product. Compromised, Hull looks to the police force for a firm moral footing, but finds himself floundering in the quicksand of government hypocrisy and political expedience.
With Michel Colombier's moody, dissonant score a menacing presence throughout, Michael Tolkin's story of urban degradation and government corruption is powerfully realised.
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