Trixie Zurbo
Created by Alan Rudolph

Back in 1990, cult writer/director Alan Rudolph scored big with Love at Large, a quirky but charming meditation on love, the games people play, and old detective films. It featured Tom Berenger and Elizabeth Perkins as star-crossed rival private eyes who fumble and bumble into love. Not exactly a box office smasheroo, but it's always been one of my favourite little movies nobody's heard of.

Rudolph works similar turf in Trixie (2000), but from the mostly negative, or at least confused feedback I've heard, lightning apparently didn't strike twice. This time all those charming little offbeat touches evidently just annoyed the hell out of people. Waifish, cute-as-a-button Emily (Angela's Ashes) Watson plays TRIXIE ZURBO here, a ditzy, gum-snapping, malapropism-spouting Chicago private eye working as a security guard at a casino. She's just dying to crack a big case. She gets her chance to prove she has the right stuff when she stumbles across a murder, and her chief suspect turns out to be a pompous, philandering state senator (played by Nick Nolte). Her investigation soon uncovers some rather nasty links between the senator and the mob.

Also along for the ride are Dermot Mulroney, Nathan Lane, Brittany Murphy, Lesley Ann Warren, Will Patton and Stephen Lang.

UNDER OATH

• "Alan Rudolph's "screwball film noir" (his definition) is a bit like Choose Me cast with buffoons--a handsome, smoothly directed, shaggy-dog mystery populated by thoroughly offbeat characters. Emily Watson plays... Trixie Zurbo, a security guard who wants to be a private detective. It's kind of like Gracie Allen trying to play Lauren Bacall in a Bogey film with a babble of mangled clichés and screwy punch lines."
  (Amazon.com)

THE EVIDENCE

• "I believe in taking the bull by the tail and staring him right in the eye."
  
  
• "No, you can't have a drink, you are not drinking yourself into Bolivia."
  
  
• "The sword of damocles is hanging over pandora's box..."
  
  
• "When I get on the trail of somebody, I'm going to find him by hook or by ladder."

TRIVIA

• Nolte's over-the-top incoherent, almost surreal political speeches are allegedly borrowed verbatim from those of actual elected officials.

FILMS

• TRIXIE...Buy this DVD
  (2000, Pandora Cinema/Sandcastle 5 Productions)
  117 minutes
  Tagline: "The only crime she couldn't solve was the murder of the English language."
  Story by Alan Rudolph and John Binder
  Screenplay by Alan Rudolph
  Directed by Alan Rudolph
  Produced by Robert Altman
  Co-producer: Joseph Patrick Finn
  Executive producer: James McLindon
  Original music by Mark Isham and Roger Neill
  Starring Emily Watson as TRIXIE ZURBO
  Also starring Dermot Mulroney, Nick Nolte, Nathan Lane, Brittany Murphy, Lesley Ann Warren, Will Patton, Stephen Lang, Mark Acheson, Vincent Gale, Jason Schombing, Robert Moloney, Troy Yorke

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.