“First prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anybody wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.”–Blake (Alec Baldwin).
It’s hard to think of a director with a messier career than James Foley. He made masterpieces (At Close Range, After Dark, My Sweet, and Glengarry Glen Ross), a trio of solid films (Reckless, Fear, and Confidence), a three-piece of mediocrity (Two Bits, The Chamber, and the Corruptor), and a quad of absolute howlers (Who’s That Girl, Perfect Stranger, and the final two Fifty Shades films). How does one even begin to make sense of Foley’s output? Calling the guy who made the greatest David Mamet stage-to-screen adaptation a journeyman surely doesn’t fit. At the same time, a filmmaker who made those three classics and four films as bad as Who’s That Girl, Perfect Stranger, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Freed is impossible to square.
Foley made his big screen debut with Reckless, a teen movie starring Aidan Quinn and Daryl Hannah about a rebellious high school football player who falls for a cheerleader in a working-class Midwestern town. Reckless is like Vision Quest or All The Right Moves, a genuinely serious film about the trials of teens on the precipice of an unknown future. Granted, Quinn and Hannah were 25 and 26 when the film was made, but the honesty of the film and their performances come through, and while Reckless may not hold the same level of respect as Vision Quest and All The Right Moves, it doesn’t mean the film doesn’t deserve it.
While Reckless wasn’t the hit Foley or the studio had hoped for, the film did lead to a working relationship with the biggest female pop star in the world: Madonna. To say that their connection led to mixed results is an understatement. Foley directed Madonna’s videos for “Dress You Up,” “Live To Tell,” “True Blue,” and “The Look of Love.” Of particular note is the video for “Live To Tell,” which was attached to Foley’s great rural crime drama starring Sean Penn (Madonna’s husband at the time) and Christopher Walken: At Close Range. Much like Reckless, the film struggled to find an audience. Walken’s performance as a low-level crime lord is the very best of his career, and as his on-screen son, Penn matches his wicked father word for word. “Is this the family gun, Dad?” is one of the great modern film-noir lines, and Foley paces the film ruefully–no matter how much hope you may have for Penn and his girlfriend (a lovely Mary Stuart Masterson), there is no question that this ship will end in wreckage.
As if Foley made a trade with Penn and Madonna, Foley’s next film was Who’s That Girl? With the “Material Girl” in the lead. Whatever good intentions may have existed, the film was (unlike Reckless and At Close Range) a complete bust with critics and at the box office. I could describe the plot’s basics, but honestly, the film isn’t worth the words. It’s simply dreadful in every way possible, and let me be clear, I like Madonna.
Three years would pass before Foley would make another feature film. Moving away from the silly screwball comedy of Who’s That Girl, Foley returned to noir with an adaptation of pulp novelist Jim Thompson’s After Dark, My Sweet. This time, Foley was back on the gritty ground of Reckless and At Close Range, and boy, was he ever in his element. If At Cose Range was a grim movie (and is it ever), After Dark, My Sweet made it look like a Disney ride.
Jason Patric (in a career-best performance) plays a mentally addled former boxer who is lured into a kidnapping plot by femme fatale Rachel Ward (also never better). After Dark is a pitch-black thriller with a tone that ranges from the woozy dreamlike to full-on nightmarish. After Dark, My Sweet is one of the great lost movies of the ‘90s.
In 1992, Foley would make the best film of his career. Henry David Thoreau once said, “Most men live lives of quiet desperation.” Glengarry Glen Ross is about those men. Although Jack Lemmon’s Shelley Levine and Alan Arkin’s George Aaronow might be the only real estate sales office members who one would describe as “quietly desperate.” The rest of the crew, played by a stunning cast including Al Pacino, Kevin Spacey, Ed Harris, and Alec Baldwin (in the scene of his life), would be described as “loudly desperate” in their countenance. Even Pacino’s Ricky Roma, the office’s top salesman, chews his gum like it’s a metaphor for “it could all go away at once.”
Speaking of Pacino, when Spacey’s office manager ruins a slick deal Pacino is running on Jonathan Pryce (I told you this film had a cast), the verbal destruction Pacino unleashes against Spacey should be outlawed in all fifty states. Depending on how you feel about Spacey these days, the scene may give you pleasure, but there can be no denying that Pacino goes full monster on Spacey in a way rarely seen on camera. To Spacey’s credit as an actor, he takes it as if he were wishing death to take him at any moment. There are many movies based on Mamet’s work (some of which he directed himself) that are worthy of high regard, but Glengarry Glen Ross is on another level. The dialogue and performances are astounding. One second the film is hysterical, and the next horrific. People speak of Death of a Salesman as the greatest work about those who wore out shoe leather door-to-door, but to my mind, nothing beats Glengarry Glen Ross, and James Foley directed it.
After the one-two punch of After Dark, My Sweet and Glengarry Glen Ross, Foley would wait another three years before returning to the director’s chair with Two Bits, a sweet but overly saccharine film starring Pacino as an ailing grandfather imparting life lessons to his grandson. After the dark beauty of his two previous films, Two Bits felt like a Hallmark film. It’s as if Foley didn’t understand his own mojo. As Leonard Cohen is to songwriting, so should Foley have been to filmmaking.
Foley bounced back (to a degree) with 1996’s Fear, a surprisingly slick film about a young girl (Reese Witherspoon) who falls for a handsome, but extremely jealous psycho (Mark Wahlberg). Fear is not a great film, but an unexpectedly good one. It’s instructive to remember that Wahlberg was better known as a member of “The Funky Bunch.” No one took Wahlberg seriously as an actor before Boogie Nights, a year later, but Foley planted seeds with Fear.
It’s hard to say for sure, but the beginning of Foley’s downfall may have begun with his adaptation of the John Grisham novel, The Chamber. Before Foley’s 1996 take on the hottest scribe to screen author, Grisham was box office gold. But even with Gene Hackman and the then still rising Chris O’Donnell in the leads, the film was a massive flop about a (naturally–if you read Grisham) young southern lawyer’s attempt to save his Klansman grandfather from death row. Hackman aside, it’s simply awful, and this Grisham adaptation (all of which I find mediocre or worse) didn’t pass with the public. Nor did it deserve to.
Foley’s next effort, The Corrupter, paired Wahlberg with the legendary Hong Kong actor Chow Yun-Fat (mostly known for his work in John Woo films and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). While Foley stylishly directed the film, to call the script “pedestrian” would be kind. Despite the star power of the two leads, The Corrupter was another flop for Foley.
Another four years would pass before Foley directed again. His 2003 Elmore Leaonard-ish Confidence, a caper film starring Edward Burns, Rachel Weisz, Dustin Hoffman, and Paul Giamatti, deserved far better reviews and ticket sales than it received. Confidence may have been the most purely entertaining film Foley ever made. Hollywood tried to turn Edward Burns into a star for years. This time, it should have worked.
After the disastrous Bruce Willis/thriller Perfect Stranger, Foley turned to the small screen for work. He directed an episode of Hannibal, two of Billions, and twelve of the HBO hit House of Cards. Based upon his TV work, it was obvious that Foley still had the goods, but his final two opportunities are both the most successful and worst films on his resume, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed. I’m sure the paychecks were massive, but James Foley directed At Close Range, After Dark, My Sweet, and Glengarry Glen Ross.
Maybe that’s all the words this obit needed. James Foley directed Glengarry Glen Ross. That would have been enough.
James Foley died on May 6, 2025.
