Hopper elicits cool era with his 'Hot Spot' | Interviews

Down at the used car lot, Johnson also catches the attention of another girl (Jennifer Connelly), a shy, virginal kid with soft brown hair that floats down to her shoulders, and big brown eyes that blink ever so slowly at the concept of lust. Johnson's partner at the lot is another salesman (Charles Martin Smith), who somehow senses that Johnson will flash through this job like a meteor, on his way to better things -- or death.

The plot involves all the great old noir concepts, such as an evil man who lives in a shack outside of town and knows a dread secret out of the virginal girl's past, and has on occasion been the lover of the bored car dealer's wife. It also involves a plan to commit the perfect crime by sticking up a bank in broad daylight. And it includes a lot of scenes where women look yearningly at the hero through plate-glass windows, and seem ready to come right through the glass after him, and bleed to death if that's what it takes.

"Virginia Madsen drives an old car, too," I observed. "A '58 Cadillac."

"Yeah, right," Hopper said, "and there's a scene that's not in the picture - I hated to, but I had to cut it out; the movie was running four hours - a scene where he first comes into town, and they drive past each other, and slow down, and look at each other's cars, and she flicks her cigarette at him and drives off, and he almost runs into a truck that's backing out."

Madsen plays the Lana Turner type.

"Yeah, exactly. Lana Turner is just what I had in mind. Of all the young actresses, she's the only one who has that kind of style. That '40s movie star kind of quality. She has it. And Jennifer Connelly, the young girl, she has a different style. It's almost invisible acting. She doesn't push but she's there. I hate to compare her to Montgomery Clift, but it's there, that simplicity."

Hopper is holding court now, enjoying the sound of his words. He has the air of a man who has triumphed over great adversity, as indeed he had. He is eight years clean and sober, after hitting a bottom so hard that he actually spent some time locked up in the proverbial rubber room. We've talked about that before. Since then, he has enjoyed a career renaissance that leaves you almost breathless, wondering what he might have accomplished if he hadn't spent those years of oblivion.

His first career - his first lifetime, really - was as an actor of alienation in movies like "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955). He played the kid in a lot of Westerns (how many people know he was in "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" and "True Grit"?). In 1968, he single-handedly ushered in the whole era of low-budget "youth pictures" with the great success of "Easy Rider." He was here and there in the 1970s, often playing the spaced-out character he had become, in movies like Francis Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" and Henry Jaglom's "Tracks." Then came the lost years, followed by his comeback in 1980 as the director of "Out of the Blue." As an actor, he has been unceasingly busy, starring in movies such as "Blue Velvet," "Hoosiers," "River's Edge," "Black Widow" and the recent "Flashback," in which he played a 1960s survivor. His career as a director resumed with "Colors," the 1988 Sean Penn cop drama, and now here is "The Hot Spot." And that's not all. People magazine likes to run cover lines like, "He's back with a new film, a new wife and a new baby!" And in Hopper's case, that's true.