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Something like twenty of Elmore Leonard's novels have been made into movies, several of them quite good (e.g., 52 Pick-Up, Cat Chaser, Get Shorty) and none better than this oddly neglected 1997 Quentin Tarantino film based on Leonard's Rum Punch. Given the quality of the movie (and it is very close to Tarantino best work), you have to think that Jackie Brown was the victim of too much Leonard (two other Leonard-based films, Touch and Pronto, and one TV mini-series, Gold Coast, came out the same year), and too much Tarantino. The video-store-clerk-turned-wunderkind-director's previous successes with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and two films he wrote but didn't direct-True Romance and Natural Born Killers-had established him as something like the Mr. Blonde of '90s moviemaking. Audiences came to expect the same gleefully Blonde-like level of sadistic violence, hip wisecracks, pop culture screeds, underground comic book freakishness, and sheer moviemaking flash from every Tarantino effort, where Jackie Brown was simply a good, old-fashioned, character-based comic thriller about a resourceful black woman who outfoxes an ATF agent and a dangerous L.A. gun-runner.

Not that Jackie Brown is devoid of Tarantinoisms-as this DVD's "trivia track" (an endless stream of footnotes identifying every cultural, cinematic, and personal reference in the movie, kind of like a director's commentary in subtitles) points out. Among other things, Jackie Brown was Tarantino's tribute to "blaxploitation" films and the (triumphant) casting of Pam Grier, one of the icons of blaxploitation (Coffy, Foxy Brown, Sheba Baby, etc.), as Jackie was both an homage and an incredibly deft bit of career resuscitation. (If there is a director with a better eye for discarded talent, I'd like to know who he is.) Tough, strong, smart, and sexy, Grier earns the tribute that Robert Forster, as her co-conspirator, bailbondsman Max Cherry, pays her at the end, when she half-playfully asks if he's afraid of her and he half-playfully pinches his thumb and forefinger together to indicate just a little bit. Of course, Max isn't merely afraid of Jackie; he's in love with her. But at the finish he's too damn sensible and set in his ways-and Jackie is just a little bit too dangerous-to risk a commitment. Without pretending to play anything but their age, which is squarely and unapologetically middle, Grier and Forster are so winning, apart and together, that their unconsummated love affair really does touch us, as well as greatly entertain us for the better part of two-and-a-half hours.

As winning as they are, Grier and Forster aren't the only pleasures that Jackie Brown has to offer. Though you wouldn't think it from his frenetic TV appearances, Tarantino is-or must be-a marvelous actor's director. (It doesn't hurt that he writes dialogue like a mosh-pit Congreve.) Every performance in this film is memorable, from Chris Tucker's funny cameo as the ill-fated petty thief Beaumont, to Bridget Fonda's pitch-perfect surfer-girl-past-her-prime Melanie, to Robert De Niro's hilariously sullen thug Louis ("Lou-issss")-a character whose buttons are so easily pushed that, in an homage to Lee Marvin in Don Siegel's The Killers, Tarantino has him shoot another character for needling him. And, then, of course, there is Samuel L. Jackson's Ordell. Though he has played the same smart, ironical, viciously profane, fast-talking, street-wise thug many times, all you have to do is compare this performance-or his equally marvelous turn as the prophetic Jules in Pulp Fiction-with, say, Denzel Washington's Academy Award-winning Alonzo Harris, in Antoine Fuqua's Training Day, to gauge the difference between the designer original and pr?t-?-porter. Jackson's pony-tailed, skeleton-faced Ordell is such a cheerful mix of funny and lethal, of laidback and coiled-to-strike, of affability, cunning, stupidity, and self-preservation that you almost feel for him at the end, when he is outwitted and outbrazened by Jackie, of whom he is, like Max, rightly-but, unlike Max, insufficiently-wary. It's a shame that Grier, with her Amazon-like body, gorgeous skin, and incomparable sneer-her mouth seems to move, Picasso-like, entirely to one side of her face when she talks tough-will never find another role like this, because, I, for one, just love looking at her. In Jackie Brown, we all fall a little bit in love with Jackie-and, yes, we're all a little intimidated by her, too.

Although it doesn't have the wild, loopy peaks of Pulp Fiction and could have been shortened a bit (though its lazy pace is one of its charms), Jackie Brown is nearly as smart and winning as popular entertainment gets. Miramax's anamorphic transfer is good, not great. I don't know if it is a problem with transfer-rate or focus-pulling or registration, but the film isn't quite as sharp in medium to long shots as the best transfers, though it can be breathtaking in close-ups. Though the telecinest has tried to disguise poor focus with edge enhancement, the DVD, as is always the case in such situations, doesn't look sharper, just more enhanced. The DTS soundtrack is like a '70s and '80s soul-music jukebox (the Delphonics and Bobbie Womack get particularly memorable play, but so does Pam Grier's own "Long Time Woman").

-Jonathan Valin