Warm Nights on a Slow-Moving Train Movie Review

Wendy Hughes is among the most gifted actresses in the world today, yet her last two Australian films, Shadows of the Peacock and Warm Nights on a Slow-Moving Train, are romantic fluff pieces in which travel represent sexual fulfillment. I can actually see very little difference between Warm Nights and the Sigourney Weaver flop Half Moon Street. In both films, we are asked to believe that intelligent, well-educated women can only achieve a fair rate of exchange for their work if they moonlight as hookers. For all their independent chatter, they make stupid mistakes, act against their stated principles in pursuit of sexual highs, and live out every male fantasy in the book. Two questions: Do you have any trouble with the idea that a woman would willingly become a political assassin at the request of a man with terrific staying power she's bedded only twice? Would this concept seem even more ridiculous if a man agreed to kill a stranger just because a great two-night stand asked him to do it? In a popular film like Body Heat, William Hurt is seen as a sexually obsessed schmuck for doing everything femme fatale Kathleen Turner commands. In Warm Nights, Wendy Hughes is just another woman in love.

1987 (R) 90m/C AU Wendy Hughes, Colin Friels, Norman Kaye, John Clayton, Peter Whitford; D: Bob Ellis; W: Bob Ellis, Denny Lawrence; C: Yuri Sokol. VHS, LV