Confession: I’ve never seen James Foley‘s After Dark, My Sweet (’90), which Roger Ebert insisted was “one of the purest and most uncompromising” film noirs ever, capturing above all “the lonely, exhausted lives of its characters.”

I’ve decided to finally watch this respected but all-but-forgotten film, even though I suspect I’ll probably hate it. (I’ve come to fear adaptations of Jim Thompson novels — brutality and heartlessness are his calling cards.) Why am I catching After Dark, My Sweet regardless? I feel I owe it to the memory of Foley, who died from brain cancer earlier this week. He was only 71.

There’s no question that Foley’s At Close Range, written by Nicholas Kazan, will always be regarded as his masterpiece. It taught me to think of rural Pennsylvania as a place where blue-collar bad guys thrive and ugly things happen at night. Patrick Leonard‘s haunting score + Madonna‘s iconic recording of “Live to Tell”…perfect. Chris Walken‘s demonically twitchy performance as the sociopathic Big Brad is surely his all-time finest. Walken to Sean Penn in that third-act kitchen scene: “You think you have the guts?…to kill?…me?”

Foley’s direction of David Mamet‘s Glengarry Glen Ross (’92) is also top shelf, although nothing will ever touch the original 1984 Broadway play version (which I caught on opening night with all the big-gun critics) with Joe Mantegna, Robert Prosky and the others. I’ve alwaye loved the slogan on the Glengarry film poster: “A film for everyone who works for a living.”