Blue City (film)
| Blue City | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Michelle Manning |
| Produced by | William Hayward Walter Hill |
| Written by |
Lukas Heller Walter Hill |
| Based on | novel by Ross Macdonald |
| Starring | |
| Music by | Ry Cooder, the Textones |
| Cinematography | Steven B. Poster |
| Edited by | Ross Albert |
| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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83 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $10 million |
| Box office | $6,947,787 |
Blue City is a 1986 drama film based on the 1947 Ross Macdonald novel of the same name about a young man who returns to a corrupt small town in Florida to avenge the death of his father. The film was directed by Michelle Manning, and stars Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy and David Caruso.
Returning to the small Florida town where he grew up, Billy Turner (Judd Nelson) learns that his father has been killed. With little help from the police, Billy will take matters into his own hands and go up against a ruthless local mob in a desperate search to find the killer.
The Textones (Carla Olson, Joe Read, George Callins, Phil Seymour and Tom Jr Morgan) appear in the film performing their song You Can Run as produced by Ry Cooder.
The novel was originally published in 1947. It was compared to the work of Dashiell Hammett, in particular Red Harvest.
Walter Hill wrote the script with Lukas Heller; it was originally intended to star a leading man in his mid-30s but by the mid 1980s a number of popular young male actors had emerged, so the script was rewritten to accommodate one of them. (The lead in the original novel was a man in his early 20s, although a war veteran.)
Hill handed over directing duties to Michelle Manning. It was Manning's first film as director although she worked with Sheedy and Nelson on The Breakfast Club as a producer. Manning had produced The Breakfast Club with Ned Tanen and when Tanen took over as head of production at Paramount, the studio agreed to finance Blue City with Manning directing.
"I don't think I'll become Samantha Peckinpah," said Manning, "but I don't think as a woman that I should have to make a movie with girls in locker rooms putting on make up." Manning did admit being a woman director meant "You're under a microscope. You suddenly become a media event for no good reason."
It was the first film Judd Nelson made since St Elmo's Fire. He had taken a year off to appear in several plays. "It's the first part ever that I didn't have to audition for," he said. "Instead of having to make the rounds and go to casting calls and auditioning with hundreds of other guys, suddenly my agent has more offers coming in than I can possibly handle. I'm in a position where I can actually turn a job down. It's a strange experience."
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