MOVIE REVIEW : A GRIPPING RIDE IN ‘JAGGED EDGE’

“Jagged Edge” (citywide) is really something. It vanishes from the memory like an old grocery list, yet while you’re in it you’re caught. Shocked, intrigued, confused, unnerved and finally snapped right back in your seat with fright, but held all the way.

It may be no later than the theater lobby that rational thought takes over and the questions come tumbling out, but by that time director Richard Marquand has done what he set out to do--worked you over thoroughly.

“Jagged Edge” is an upscale roller-coaster ride, set in what the romance-novel trade likes to call the playgrounds of the privileged. So we open with San Francisco in all its muted, magic-hour beauty, stocked with publishing-empire heiresses, swinish tennis pros and catty mistresses (or would-be mistresses), private stables and private clubs as backgrounds for violence.

Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas (“F.I.S.T.,” “Flashdance”) gets down to the violence within the first four minutes, and it’s ghastly stuff: a fatal hunting-knife assault on Jeff Bridges’ newspaper heiress-wife and her maid, alone at the family beach house. There is menace, an awful attack and butchery strong enough to brand the hooded killer as a real psychopath. And no fingerprints except the women’s and Bridges’.

Dist. Atty. Peter Coyote is convinced that this is exactly Bridges’ canny thinking: that people might suspect a husband and sole heir of simple murder to take over his wife’s publishing empire. But killing your wife in a way that looks like a visit from the Manson family would be unthinkable.

Would it? Could the grieving Bridges be this psychopath? To what lengths is the politically ambitious Coyote willing to go in winning this headline-grabbing case?

Attorney Glenn Close, who used to work with Coyote, knows something about his methods. Their last case together violated her sense of morality so deeply that she has left criminal law completely. But her prestigious firm handles Bridges; he wants a woman attorney, sex has to enter this movie somewhere and so . . . divorcee Close is virtually ordered into Bridges’ heady sphere of influence.

Psychological murder mysteries have come a long way from such silken exercises as “Dial M for Murder,” and wasn’t it a long way down? “Jagged Edge” is packed with false leads and courtroom shenanigans. What it really lacks is characters with character.

We know Coyote will stop at nothing; Bridges bounces back from his marital tragedy in record time, ready to put the moves on Close. For her part, this grandstanding moralist seems not to blink an eye at Bridges’ behavior even though her rules are that he must be innocent or else she drops the case. For someone in the legal system, the woman can be a decidedly dim bulb. When threatened bodily, when faced with incontrovertible evidence of a murder, the last person Close thinks of calling is a cop.

In a cast of hard-working performers, three stand out: Bridges (the nuances of whose performance are best studied in two visits); John Dehner, marvelous as a judge whose presence is the very embodiment of the decency of the legal system, and Robert Loggia, giving vivid life to that weary cliche, the gruff but sewer-mouthed investigator. Close is glowing but daft, and the usually splendid Coyote is reduced to good tailoring, a snarl and a glower.

Come to think of it, perhaps the inanities of the plot will get to you a little before the lobby. Let’s see . . . there’s a clear case for a mistrial. And Close’s bizarre need to play chambermaid in a house that has more servants than Buckingham Palace . . . And . . . and . . . and . . . .

‘JAGGED EDGE’

A Columbia Pictures release of a Martin Ransohoff Production. Producer Ransohoff. Director Richard Marquand. Screenplay Joe Eszterhas. Camera Matthew F. Leonetti. Production design Gene Callahan. Editors Sean Barton, Conrad Buff. Costumes Ann Roth. Art director Peter J. Smith. Set designer John Warnke, Christopher Burian-Mohr, Beverli Eagan. Set decorator Jerry Wunderlich. Music John Barry. With Jeff Bridges, Glenn Close, Peter Coyote, Robert Loggia, John Dehner, Leigh Taylor-Young, William Allen Young.

Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes.

MPAA-rated: R (persons under 17 must be accompanied by parent or adult guardian).