The screenplay's credited to Aaron Sorkin (his first after A Few Good Men) and Scott Frank (who had Dead Again and Little Man Tate to his credit), but I don't know how that worked, and it was based on a story by Jonas McCord. Sorkin now calls it a 'mess', but we enjoyed it, it sort of reminded me of a 1940s film, with its slightly bonkers plot and femme fatale.
Good cast: Alec Baldwin, Nicole Kidman (great), Bill Pullman, Bebe Neuwirth, Anne Bancroft, Peter Gallagher, George C Scott, Josef Sommer, Gwyneth Paltrow.
I liked the writing, which is constantly sending you off in the wrong direction. You think Baldwin is going to be the baddie. You wonder if any of them might be the student killer. Because Pullman has married one of his students, you start to wonder if he's having an affair. And so on. And the story you think it's going to be isn't.
Enhanced by Gordon Willis' typically dark photography and Jerry Goldsmith's score.
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