One False Move: “Lock Things Up”

The video store I frequented in my southern Brooklyn neighborhood as a kid had an unassuming, generic name—I can’t even remember what it was, International Video maybe—but I called the place Wolfman’s because the guy who owned it, the only one who ever manned the counter, looked like a part-time werewolf, like he kept himself locked in the store so he didn’t go buck wild, like he was always on the verge of transforming, hunched and hairy, his mouth foaming. That place was a holy institution to me. Starting at age eleven, I’d go in there at least four or five times a week, renting anything that looked appealing, drawn in by boxes I thought were cool or actors I liked or directors I admired. At some point in junior high school—this would’ve been 1991, the burgeoning heyday of neonoir—I rented Stephen Frears’s The Grifters, which unlocked everything for me. I started reading Jim Thompson. I went back and watched as many classic noir films as I could get my hands on. I was hooked.

I vividly remember picking up One False Move (1992) for the first time, and that box cover. Cynda Williams’s face over a sunset shoot-out—a beater car and a police cruiser framing four shadowy figures, three on one side taking position against the cop, who looks to be freshly shot, a scene that’s different from what happens in the film—and the title in a fat white font, a four-star blurb from Gene Siskel’s review above it: “A brilliant detective thriller.” It was a beautiful time for me. A time of wonder and discovery. I wasn’t reading reviews. No one was telling me what I had to see—I was the only person in my family interested in movies, and my friends only ever went to watch what was showing at the multiplexes. I rented One False Move that day and went home and loaded it in the VCR. I knew Bill Paxton from Weird Science (1985), Aliens (1986), and Near Dark (1987), but his was the only familiar face. That first viewing blew me away: the urgency and rawness, the complexity of the characters. Back then, I couldn’t articulate what I was reacting to, but what I can say now—all these years later, having written several novels that are crime dramas—is that I’m most drawn to stories that are rooted in character and place, with deep psychological undercurrents. In my personal canon, One False Move is the quintessential example of what I respond to within the genre. For my money, it’s a perfect crime movie, infused with desperate energy and moral ambiguity, one that doesn’t miss a beat, one whose effects linger and deepen.

Directed by Carl Franklin and written by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, the film stars Paxton as Dale “Hurricane” Dixon, sheriff of a small Arkansas town called Star City, whose world brightens up when he finds out some crooks from Los Angeles are lamming it to his neck of the woods. Those crooks are Ray Malcolm (Thornton); his girlfriend, Lila “Fantasia” Walker (Williams); and Pluto (Michael Beach). They’ve left a body count behind them in LA and have skittered out of town with an ample haul of stolen loot and drugs. Both Ray and Lila are from Star City, and two LA cops (Jim Metzler and Earl Billings) team up with Hurricane in anticipation of heading them off. Tension and pressure take hold from the opening moments, and the film’s grip never loosens. Paxton gives his best performance, Thornton is skeevy as hell, Beach is chilling as a buttoned-up psychopath, and Williams is beguiling and mysterious as a once-tenderhearted girl who has been driven to the darkness by both Hurricane and Ray.

The story behind the script for One False Move starts in Arkansas with Thornton and Epperson striking up a childhood friendship. They drifted apart but then reconnected in their twenties, Thornton in a rock band (his hero was Elvis Presley) and Epperson wanting to write novels (his hero was Vladimir Nabokov). After a series of failed bids to make it in New York and California as artists—always returning to Arkansas, hats in hands—they decided to take one last shot, in Hollywood in the early 1980s, focusing their collective energy on screenwriting. Several years after moving there, barely scraping by, they sold a spec script, a thriller about a homicide detective and an actor, which never got made, but it provided them enough financial support to keep living and writing. They set to work on another cop script, Color Me Bad—which would eventually become One False Move. It rattled some cages, with Tri-Star Pictures leaping at the opportunity to buy it before the president of the studio read the script, disliked it intensely, and backed out of the deal. It languished in purgatory for a few years, until producers Jesse Beaton and Ben Myron optioned it for a dollar. Beaton eventually made a deal with I.R.S. Media and RCA/Columbia, a video company that was funding a lot of low-budget indies, and it was a go.

Carl Franklin had also taken a circuitous path to his breakthrough success. A native of the Northern California town of Richmond, he attended the University of California, Berkeley, and then set out on an acting career. Though his work on television in the seventies and eighties included costarring with Stacy Keach on Caribe and appearances on such shows as The A-Team, Cagney & Lacey, and Hill Street Blues, he grew tired of the lack of opportunities for Black actors, and decided instead to pursue a degree in the directing program at the American Film Institute. After graduating, he followed the path of other iconic American filmmakers by getting behind the camera and learning the ropes on Roger Corman pictures. Franklin directed three: Nowhere to Run, Eye of the Eagle 2: Inside the Enemy (both 1989), and Full Fathom Five (1990). But it was his earlier AFI thesis film, Punk, that had originally brought him to the attention of Beaton, who was hunting for a director for One False Move. In a 1992 New York Times profile of Franklin, Beaton (who would marry the director in 2000) praised his “understanding of the characters and of life’s complexities.” The other directors they’d considered, she went on, “all talked about the style and the edge, [but] he really seemed to have an understanding of the subtext of the film: the relationships between city and country, black and white, male and female.”

Along with location filming in Los Angeles and Pearblossom, California, One False Move was shot in and around the Arkansas Delta towns of Brinkley and Cotton Plant in 1990. When the film was done, it was headed for a straight-to-video release. And then Chicago film critic Roger Ebert saw it at a festival in 1991 and loved it, prompting Beaton to make a successful case to I.R.S. Media for a limited theatrical run. Ebert’s and fellow critic Gene Siskel’s continued championing of the film would ultimately lead to a wider release. Ebert said it belonged “on the very short list of great movies about violent criminals.”

The film is bookended by intensely violent sequences, opening with two brutal home-invasion robberies and closing with a bloody showdown, but the central part of the story relies on a more subtle juxtaposition of opposite forces: urban and rural, personal and impersonal, idyllic and nightmarish. In an interview with Terry Gross for Fresh Air in July 1992, Thornton said: “My heroes were Elvis Presley and Andy Griffith. The Hurricane character, if you really look at it, is a little bit like Andy Griffith . . . Sometimes, Tom and I refer to the movie as ‘Bonnie and Clyde meet Andy Griffith.’” Of course, what makes that idea work is that Hurricane isn’t a one-dimensional yokel. Ultimately, his layers are peeled back to reveal a dark core behind the goofy, aw-shucks sheen. His racism. His history with Lila. His desire to be a cowboy roaming the streets of LA like he sees on TV.

Franklin has spoken at length on the film’s violence, explaining his desire to portray the real emotion behind the crimes. He has often decried how violence was being utilized in the cinema of the time. The pageantry. The disconnection from reality. Graphic bloodshed with no sense of mercy or emotion. In One False Move, he makes sure that every life taken is felt. Lila’s friends at the beginning. The cop she shoots. Even the dealers Ray and Pluto slaughter. I think often of the cut from Lila finding the young boy hiding in the dealer’s house in LA, during the second home invasion, to Hurricane going to comfort his daughter after she wakes from a nightmare. Brutality tempered with moments of grace. This humanity is a product of Franklin’s gentle touch. He shoots and directs his actors with obvious compassion, never letting the characters drift into shallow representations and somehow managing to document all that’s boiling under the surface.

One False Move is many things. A stunning nineties neonoir. A tragedy. A movie that says more about race and class without being didactic than many others that try hard to say something. A road picture. A lovers-on-the-run tale. A flawless encapsulation of the desperate energy and desperate deeds that fuel real crime. It feels timeless. It’s a structural marvel. A study in tension and pacing. Having moved from Brooklyn to Mississippi over a decade ago, I feel like I understand the film in ways now that I couldn’t have previously. It’s a complex portrait of the South. The awful weight of history and tradition. Kindness often masking complicity. Buried secrets. The atmosphere misted over with sins of the past. Attempts to smile through pain and yearning. Cycles of poverty and grief and near escape. Dark humor.

Franklin followed this with his excellent (and underseen) HBO miniseries Laurel Avenue (1993) and his masterful 1995 adaptation of Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress and then made three more terrific features in the late nineties and early aughts. Thornton and Epperson had a good run as highly sought-after screenwriters in the nineties, and, of course, Thornton had his biggest success with 1996’s Sling Blade, which opened doors for him and led to roles in many wide-ranging pictures. They all went on to do compelling work, though the shifting landscape of the mainstream film world bent further and further away from the independent spirit that fueled low-budget nineties masterpieces like One False Move. Franklin has since become a TV/streaming director, with classic episodes of The Leftovers, Mindhunter, House of Cards (one of which was nominated for an Emmy), and Bloodline under his belt. Thornton’s most notable work in the last decade has come on two shows, Fargo and Goliath. Epperson has written several novels. I can’t help but look back longingly at an era when a film like One False Move could break big, when great craftsmen like Franklin, Thornton, and Epperson could make something this epic with very little money, when actors like Paxton, Williams, Thornton, and Beach could pour everything they had into gutsy portrayals of difficult people. More than thirty years later, watching One False Move brings me back to being the kid I was when I first saw it: trying to understand the world, seeking art that tells the truth, and finding something this urgent and poetic and haunting.

One False Move: “Lock Things Up”

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