”The Big Town” (Matt Dillon, Tommy Lee Jones, Diane Lane, Suzy Amis, Bruce Dern, Lee Grant; Ben Bolt, dir. Vestron, 1987; color. Running time: 109 min. Rating: R. $89.98)
Small-town gambler boy comes to the big city. Meets good girl and falls in love. Meets bad girl and falls in lust. Beats house and pays off old debts. Haven`t we seen this somewhere before?
But of course. It`s the little-fish-in-the-big-pond-who-could scenario, a plotline that ranks right up there with boy-meets-girl-etc. in number of scripts launched.
In this retelling, Matt Dillon is Cully the Arm, a gifted crap shooter who brings his talented limb to Chicago in the 1950s. What happens to him in
”The Big Town,” alas, is all quite predictable.
As is the acting. Dillon and his crew-good girl Suzy Amis, bad girl Diane Lane, housekeeper villain Tommy Lee Jones, among others-chew up the scenery as if they`d been trained by beavers.
But what scenery it is. Movie magic-and movie set designers-have restored the glamor that was Chicago nightlife three decades ago.
A word of warning: Don`t wear out the rewind button on your VCR trying to place all the ”Chicago” scenes. For budgetary reasons, some neighborhood scenes were actually shot in Toronto.