As a charter member and prime theoretician of the American nouvelle vague, Schrader has gone a long way in Hardcore toward defining his strengths and weaknesses. One can see in certain mysteriously lateral movements the author of a book on the transcendental art of Bresson, Dreyer, and Ozu. Schrader has written also, and with considerable expertise, on the parameters of the film noir. His formulas, consequently, are in opposition to those of the Philco Playhouse school of antigenre humanist playwrights with their endless explanations and motivations. Schrader goes to the other extreme of dissolving character in action. Curiously, his projects seem more lurid and violent in their conception than in their execution, which is to say his latest movie is neither as opportunistic nor as sensational as its shrewd and succinctly commercial title would suggest.

At the outset he shows us two young girls, standing side by side...