RIP director James Foley, 71

Glengarry Glen Ross is one of my favorite movies.

He also directed At Close Range, possibly the most underrated film of the 80's starring Sean Penn and Christopher Walken, who both deliver powerful performances.

I also like Who's That Girl. Yes, that Madonna comedy film that was panned by critics and most audiences.

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“Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place and I don't care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard ya hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done!” ~ Rocky Balboa

Glengarry Glen Ross was an amazing film. RIP

I love Glengarry Glen Ross, but my favorite James Foley movie is easily After Dark, My Sweet. My thoughts from the MoFo Top 100 Neo-Noir Countdown thread...

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The only title from my ballot’s Top Ten that will not show is one of the first great films that signaled the Neo-Noir renaissance that the 1990s were going to bring.



Adapted from pulp legend Jim Thompson’s novel, After Dark, My Sweet (1990) is a tale of a drifter, a punch-drunk ex-boxer Kevin “Kid” Collins (Jason Patric) who has recently escaped from yet another mental institution. Wandering down the desert roads near Palm Springs, CA a woman offers to give him a lift. She is Faye Anderson (Rachel Ward), a beautiful but depressed alcoholic living by herself. She offers Collins a place to stay in her guest house. Then enters “Uncle Bud” (Bruce Dern), a former cop turned ne’er-do-well. He remembers The Kid from his boxing days. He also knows he left the sport after he killed a man in the ring. Turns out Uncle Bud and Faye have been cooking up a little kidnapping scheme, and Collins may be the perfect third person they have been looking for.

The caper, such as it is, involves Collins dressing up as a chauffeur and simply arriving a few minutes early to a local prep school and hoping nobody pays that close attention to the help, then calmly driving off with a boy and ransoming him to his rich family. Like most Thompson stories, the crime itself barely matters. He was a master at writing non-judgmentally from the perspective of damaged, desperate, depraved, lost souls. Director and co-screenwriter James Foley (At Close Range, Glengarry Glen Ross) deftly adapts the book, capturing the tone and the characters perfectly. Jason Patric never quite became a movie star, but this performance as well as Joe Carnahan’s Narc (2002) show what kind of fine work he may have done given more opportunities. Rachel Ward is one of the sexiest actresses of her era, and she too perfectly inhabits this sad woman willing to cross the line who may still have some of her soul in tact. Bruce Dern…well Hell, he was born to play sleazy but charming fellas like Uncle Bud.



Builds to a very satisfying conclusion that is heroic and tragic. Jim Thompson country. Fantastic flick, and a perfect Noir. I couldn’t leave it off my ballot just because it had a small chance of placing.

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

His New York Times obit...




James Foley, a veteran director whose films included Glengarry Glen Ross and the Fifty Shades of Grey sequels, and who also worked on the hit television series “House of Cards”, died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 71. The cause was brain cancer, said Taylor Lomax of ID, the firm that represents Mr. Foley, on Thursday.

Mr. Foley made his directorial debut with the 1984 film Reckless, a drama about a high school romance between a rebellious, motorcycle-driving football player and a cheerleader. In the decades that followed, he built a career directing movies, television shows, and music videos, working with some of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

Among his most celebrated works is the 1992 film adaptation of Glengarry Glen Ross, the play by David Mamet that won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1984. The movie, about real estate salesmen trying to make ends meet in a tough economy, starred Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey, and Alan Arkin. Mr. Foley also directed Fifty Shades Darker (2017) and Fifty Shades Freed (2018), the final two installments of the “Fifty Shades of Grey” franchise. Those films were adapted from the second and third books of the E.L. James trilogy.

Mr. Foley told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017 that he was pleased that his career had not been pigeonholed. “I think in terms of what fascinates me and what intrigues me and what I feel is engaging for the year that you spend making the movie, what’s personally engaging, not adhering to any kind of conventions,” Mr. Foley said.

James Foley was born on December 28, 1953, in Brooklyn. His mother, Frances, was a homemaker, and his father, James Vincent Foley, was a lawyer. Mr. Foley grew up on Staten Island. He studied psychology and graduated from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1974. He planned to attend medical school, but he decided instead to pursue directing after taking a six-week film production course at New York University. He went on to earn an M.F.A. at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts in 1979.

Mr. Foley recalled screening the short film he made during the six-week course in New York while speaking to film and media studies students at Johns Hopkins University in 2013. “That was the first time that something I had done got a reaction out of a lot of people,” Mr. Foley said. “From that moment on, I decided I wanted to do that again.”

Mr. Foley directed At Close Range, the 1986 crime drama starring Sean Penn and Christopher Walken. Several years later, he directed and co-wrote the 1990 film adaptation of After Dark, My Sweet, the pulp crime novel by Jim Thompson. His directorial credits also include Fear (1996), starring Mark Wahlberg and Reese Witherspoon; The Chamber (1996), with Chris O’Donnell and Gene Hackman; Confidence (2003), with Edward Burns and Dustin Hoffman; and Perfect Stranger (2007), with Halle Berry and Bruce Willis.



Mr. Foley also directed several music videos for Madonna, including “Live to Tell,” “True Blue”, “The Look of Love,” and “Papa Don’t Preach.” That led to directing Madonna in the 1987 feature film Who's That Girl, a modern screwball comedy co-starring Griffin Dunne.

Mr. Foley made his foray into television directing an episode of “Twin Peaks” in 1991. He later directed twelve episodes across Seasons 1, 2 and 3 of “House of Cards”, the hit Netflix series about the underbelly of American government that was adapted from a BBC series of the same name. He also directed episodes of “Hannibal”, “Wayward Pines”, and “Billions”.

Mr. Foley is survived by a brother, Kevin Foley; two sisters, Eileen and Jo Ann Foley; and a nephew, Quinn Foley. He was predeceased by his brother, Gerard Foley. “I’ve had a very fluid career of ups and downs and lefts and rights, and I always just responded to what I was interested in at the moment,” Mr. Foley said in the 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I’ve always just followed my nose, for better or for worse, sometimes for worse.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/a...oley-dead.html

Other than "Material Girl", "Papa Don't Preach" is probably Madonna's most iconic music video, certainly of the first part of her career, and for me might be her second or third best acting performance. Having no dialogue and being opposite Danny Aiello certainly helps. The video for "Live to Tell" is inter-cut with scenes from At Close Range, where it was featured on the soundtrack.