IMPULSE. 1990. Teresa Russell, Jeff Fahey, George Dzundza, Alan Rosenberg, Nicholas Mele, Lynne Thigpen. Director: Sondra Locke.

   For the first thirty minutes of this movie, the type you’d see on late night cable, you’ll be tempted to dismiss this as just another “undercover-female-cop-with-an-attitude-problem” type of picture, but I think you’ll regret it if you turn it off too soon.

   After the relatively slow beginning — brief bursts of action on the streets of Los Angeles, combined with a lot of talking about various problems, including brief glimpses of Lottie’s therapy sessions with the department’s resident psychologist – things pick up in a big way.

   An undercover operation goes bad. There is a lot of shooting, and some guys dealing in drugs end up dead. Lottie is responsible for a couple of them. On her way home, she stops in a bar, she’s picked up by a guy with a billfold of $100 bills, and on impulse she goes to bed with him.

   Which is when the real story begins. There are some small quirks of fate involved, a la Cornell Woolrich. and some giant-sized one. This movie is solidly in the pulp-oriented, hard-boiled tradition, but with a difference. The protagonist is female, and no shrinking violet.

   Female, but aggressively active in the role, not passive, not a behind-the-back sort of manipulator. There are sane loose ends in the plot, I think, but in the final sixty minutes or so there’s one of the finer, more engaging mini-movies made recently that I’ve seen in a while. (There’s one well-behaved love scene, too, in which both participants seem to want to make the other party happy to be involved, as well as themselves.)

[UPDATE] 10-24-11. I will have to see this movie again. I remember only parts of it, and I have a feeling that if I hadn’t read this review just now myself, I might not remember even those.

   Reviews are IMDB are mixed. Those leaving comments are mostly positive, and those that are say very much the same sort of things as I did. The overall rating for the film is only 5.6 out of 10, though, which suggests the possibility that some viewers who watched saw the movie were looking for something else.

   I also wonder if the fact that Impulse has a female director had more than little with the way it came out. (That’s a lie, actually. I’m not wondering.)

   I wish I’d found a copy of the scene below in color, but perhaps in black and white it will enhance the movie’s (neo)noir credentials all the more: