I know that when somebody dies, you’re supposed to honor them by remembering their good deeds and great works, but when it comes to Ira Levin, all I can think about is Sliver. Philip Noyce seems to have wanted his Sharon Stone/Billy Baldwin-starring adaptation of Levin’s novel to be Hitchcock with closed circuit cameras instead of binoculars, with sweaty copulation in place of double-entendre and suggestion. In practice, it plays more like expensively-produced softcore, and it only begrudgingly gives itself over to a strand of inscrutable murder mystery in order to make Stone’s character feel really, really bad about the pleasure she gets from sex and voyeurism. It’s terrible, but every time it pops up on HBO, I can’t click away??????it’s just such decadant fun to watch.
Unfortunately, the only unadulterated clip I could find from the film on YouTube is the farcical dinner scene above. Sharon Stone has just begun an affair with Billy Baldwin, the owner of the skyrise apartment building into which she’s just moved. She doesn’t yet know that he has cameras installed in every unit, that he gets his kicks from watching the feeds on a giant bank of monitors, or that he had something to do with the death of a tenant that looked a lot like her. All she knows is that he wants her to take off her panties in the middle of dinner. “Panties?!?” she asks. Yes, those.
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