Sea of Love

Sea of Love is a 1989 American neo-noir thriller film directed by Harold Becker, written by Richard Price and starring Al Pacino, Ellen Barkin and John Goodman. The story concerns a New York City detective trying to catch a serial killer who finds victims through the singles column in a newspaper. It is inspired by Price's 1978 novel Ladies' Man. The film does not credit the novel Ladies’ Man as source material because the novel only shares a similar main idea while having different characters, a different plot, and a different theme. Writer Richard Price said he wanted to explore the same idea as Ladies’ Man but make the protagonist cooler to an audience (by making him a cop and giving him a gun). The film involves the investigation of a serial killer which is completely absent from the book. Dustin Hoffman was originally in negotiations to star before Pacino became interested in the project. It was Pacino's first film after a four-year hiatus following the critical and commercial failure of Revolution. Sea of Love was a box-office success, grossing over $110 million. Plot New York City homicide detective Frank Keller is a burned-out alcoholic. His wife left him and married one of his colleagues, and he is depressed about reaching his 20th year on the police force. He is assigned to investigate the murder of a man in Manhattan, shot while face down in his bed, naked, listening to an old 45rpm recording of "Sea of Love." Keller has three clues — a lipstick-smeared cigarette, a want-ad that the dead man placed in a newspaper, and fingerprints of the perpetrator. A second man dies in the same manner in Queens. Detective Sherman Touhey from the local precinct suggests that he and Frank collaborate. Both victims had placed rhyming ads in the lonely hearts column of the newspaper, seeking dates. The detectives track down Raymond Brown, the only other man with a rhyming ad. He's a married man who admits placing the ad but swears that he threw away all the letters and never saw anyone. Frank gets an idea to place a rhyming ad in the paper, meet women who respond in a restaurant and take the prints from their drinking glasses. Frank's precinct chief is skeptical, but reconsiders when Brown turns up dead in the same manner as the other two murder victims.