After Dark, My Sweet

Eccentric drifter Collie (Patric) left a career in boxing following a nervous breakdown. Having escaped a mental institution he wanders...And wanders...And wanders until one humid day he finds himself in the wrong town, stumbles into the wrong bar and meets Fay (Ward) -the wrong kind of older woman.

In need of someone to care for him some way, some how Kevin is vulnerable to her entreaties though she pretty obviously looks down on him. Her flirtations are punctuated by insults no self-respecting person would tolerate. She waves red flags like a matador but Kevin has no place to go. Taken back to her place and offered a job with room and board the fly contemplates settling into the web.

Fay takes Kevin to dinner and introduces him to Uncle Bud (Dern) - a mysterious older man who is a hundred different kinds of bad news. The quirky, charismatic, charming career criminal has a business proposition for Kevin. His instincts tell him to split especially after his new acquaintances have each warned him about the other. But a guy with limited resources can only get so far. In his case the fly nearly settles into a different kind of web which makes Fay's look appetizing.

Jason Patric was on the verge of Hollywood superstardom before he was 25. His performance in The Lost Boys (1987), The Beast of War (1988), this film and Rush (1991) not only made him a heart-throb to millions of young women but also established him as a serious actor capable of giving edgy performances consistently. The career on the A-list which seemed almost certain to be his eluded him perhaps because he eluded it.

Patric's first screen role was as Bruce Dern's drug-addict son in a dumb 1985 TV movie called 'Toughlove'.