Dick Tracy (1990)

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day...

Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty, 1990) Chester Gould's gangster comic strip, "Dick Tracy," started October 4, 1931 and, because it was so popular, it migrated to radio, movie serials, and even a short-lived television series. Gould's style was flamboyant, violent—bullets passed through bad-guy's bodies—and more than a little serio-comic (the villains had names that matched their physiques, so "Flat-Top" actually had a flat-head, and such). Gould made no mistake whose side Tracy was on, as his jaw was so square, you could slice sandwich meat on it, and sometimes ventured into the techno-exotic with Tracy's "two-way wrist radio" beating the I-watch by some 50 years. About the time I started reading it, Tracy and family was traveling to the moon on a magnetic Space Coupe and Tracy's son fell in love with the daughter of the Moon's Supreme Leader!

So much for the grit of a crime strip.

Tracy was popular, and after the successes of recycled comics on movies and Broadway, movie people started to buy up marketable properties. "Dick Tracy" was picked up in the 1980's for the inevitable film adaptation, and went through "development hell" through the hands of many creatives and studios, starting with United Artists, then a co-production between Universal and Paramount, and stars like Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Richard Gere and Tom Selleck (the usual suspects in the 80's) were sought out to star as Tracy. And Warren Beatty.

Beatty'd wanted to make a Tracy movie since 1975, when the rights weren't available, and watched from the wings as the film went through script development, director changes, and studio involvement, then purchased the rights in 1985, taking the film to Disney, and directing the film himself when the studio's Jeffrey Katzenberg couldn't interest any other director to take the reins. Beatty had already left the project once when director Walter Hill wanted to make the film more realistic and violent. Beatty had another idea, making a stylized homage to the old-style strip with a limited (just seven, with no gradients), but eye-popping color pallet, supervised by production designer Richard Sylbert.

With Beatty onboard, casting came easily...almost too easily. Glenne Headly played girlfriend Tess Trueheart, Charlie Corsmo played an orphan whom Tracy will eventually adapt, Seymour Cassel as co-hort Sam Catchem, James Keane as Pat Patton, and Charles Durning as Chief Brandon. But, as he did with Reds, Beatty started to hire pals to fill up the film and take on smaller characters, particularly the villains, who—unlike the leads—would be encased in prosthetic make-up (designed by John Caglione and Doug Drexler) to resemble Gould's group of bad-guy uglies.

Entombed in polyurethane are Al Pacino (as main villain "Big Boy" Caprice), James Caan (as a "Godfather"-type), Dustin Hoffman, Paul Sorvino, R.G. Armstrong, Henry Silva, William Forsythe, Ed O'Ross and other character actors who get the make-up, while Kathy Bates, Dick Van Dyke, Alan Garfield, John Schuck, Hamilton Camp, Catherine O'Hara, Estelle Parsons, and Henry Jones get minute screen-time, just enough for recognition.

And then, there's Madonna. The pop-star's role as a "bad-girl" femme fatale was, no doubt, beefed up when "The Material Girl" was cast, and of all the cast-members she seems to get the most screen-time besides Beatty, effectively crowding out the "Tess Trueheart" storyline for vamping in the tried and true Mae West manner. To be sure, she gives the movie a lot of cross-promotional material, releasing an album in support, and doing her best with the Stephen Sondheim songs Beatty acquired for the film. But, the role is slight in importance and its prominence merely there to put posteriors in theater-seats. So, she was indulged.

Which seems to be the over-arching—emphasis on the "arch"—theme of the film. Studio-bound and slightly inert, that limited pallet (which only distracts rather than serves a purpose) makes the enterprise look cheaper than it should, and, overall, Beatty's Tracy is an over-indulgent mess, flabby with excess, and uneven in pace, when the model of the thing should have been the tight, break-away austerity of film-noir. The thing went so far over-budget and the results still look dodgy and stagey. In fact, the film reminds of something that achieved the same results with greater success but hemmed in with a bargain basement budget in the 1960's.

And that was the "Batman" TV-show. It, too, had stars as villains, with a lot of make-up and a lot of scenery-chewing, the comic aspect of the characters were played up, the fights were unbelievably choreographed and tongues were placed firmly in cheeks. However, the "Batman" TV series had a "camp" sensibility, deliberately over-staging the drama and acting styles to achieve comic effect. It knew it was over-the-top and aimed high to achieve it. It knew it was deliberately jumping the shark (before "jumping the shark" was a "thing") Dick Tracy has very little of that intentionally self-deprecating humor, and plods along like it knows it's funny...even when it isn't. And although Adam West's deliberately haughty Batman persona wouldn't play for Tracy, give West his due in finding a way to effectively tight-rope the material; Beatty plays the character fairly straight...which is a bit dull. Pacino knows that he's going for comedy, but he doesn't have the timing or comic discipline to make it work. Sure, he gives it the energy (he always does), but that doesn't make it funny.

My memory of Dick Tracy was that it was elephantine in the way the film version of Annie was, but with none of the charm, or the ability to project something genuine without hedging its bets, lest it be thought unhip. Everything is encased in artifice, even in its rooting for "the good guys" with their sense of right and wrong. If they can't even do that with a straight face, then they just don't know Dick. 

Olde Review: McCabe and Mrs. Miller

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the kid I was back in the '70's a bit of a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1973) It is very rare when two examples of great artistic achievement can be combined to make something greater than the sum of the parts--where the two complement each other, instead of distracting from each other. But in the first sequence of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, director Robert Altman achieves such a moment. While Altman and master cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond float their camera onto the form of John McCabe (Warren Beatty) riding through a wintry landscape, Leonard Cohen's "The Stranger Song"* mystically describes the scene and the man. You know when you see this inspired piece of film that Altman has a special kind of vision as regards this project and he pursues this vision throughout with the result that McCabe and Mrs. Miller is Altman's finest film. I'm adamant about this, despite the number of Nashville fanatics who try to convince me otherwise.*

After doing the frenetic M*A*S*H, Altman felt that he was financially secure enough to try artistic projects. McCabe... was his first.** It is a slowly paced, beautifully photographed, acted and edited film about the formation of a western town, a town whose foundations are two rather dubious persons: McCabe, a gambler by trade, and Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), a madam. It is their vision that gives birth to the town and turns it into a self-sustaining community, a town that will soon displace their once-prevalent position and grow over them, just as surely as the snows accumulate over time. 

But if Altman were to show the growth of the town as that, the growth of a town, what sort of movie would that be?*** So, as it does with more traditional westerns (a term I'm not too comfortable with), the interest of the story falls on the people, in this case, the cornerstones of the community, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. And like most Altman films, there are many characters, many occurrences, but all in the whole of the community--it's a very satisfying film, by a sometimes exciting, sometimes exasperating, but certainly the most innovative of current directors, Robert Altman.

Broadcast on KCMU-FM on Novermber 19th and 20th, 1975.

Altman would continue to be innovative and sometimes exasperating, but never less than assured in the tricks he'd play with the camera and with the perspective he allowed us to see, right up to his final film. And McCabe and Mrs. Miller continues to be (after a recent re-viewing) a wonderfully dreamy frontier film, despite the usurping of some of Altman's strategies in various TV shows since its debut in 1971. Certainly, it feels like a more realistic film about building a community—the town of Presbyterian Church, its most prominent structure, in isolation in the West than most Western films would have you believe. And Vilmos Zsigmond's innovative cinematography set a high standard that most film-makers can only achieve with CGI and post-gradation.

I find it amusing that this movie didn't find that much of an audience, especially in the West, where the story probably mirrors the origins of every town out in these parts. It certainly does Seattle, where larceny and luck...and women imported from the East Coast...were part and parcel of the city's foundation.

But, as in this review, is it his best film? That would be hard to say. Altman was an iconoclast and rebellious, attempting to subvert film genres and even the organized standards for making films, being more free-wheeling and improvisational, even with a script that was as focused as, say, The Player or Gosford Park.

* And yet I just found a glowing "Olde Review" of Nashville that I'll be putting up in a couple weeks. Nashville certainly has more reach and is a more ambitious project than McCabe... But I did love the dreamy aspect of this revisionist western. Thinking about it the last few minutes I'd be hard pressed to pick "the best" Altman film, or even to a lesser degree, my favorite. How can you compare such disparate films as M*A*S*H, McCabe..., Nashville, Short Cuts, Gosford Park, The Player, and on and on right up to A Prairie Home Companion? Like comparing apples to sweet potatoes.

** I think I might have forgotten the quirky Brewster McCloud in there, and who's to say that M*A*S*H or that film aren't artistic?

*** "Deadwood," frankly...

*

Olde Review: Bonnie and Clyde

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the 1970's (I actually think I need to put the century in now). Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the snarky, opinionated, and woefully inadequate kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.

This Friday's ASUW Films in 130 Kane may comprise the best double-bill, with one notable exception, in the entire series. They are Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and Robert Benton's Bad Company.

Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) Bonnie and Clyde caused quite a stir when it was released in 1967. It was one of the first gangster movies, at least within most casual movie-goer's memories (which isn't much) to treat these people not as psychopaths, but as ordinary people who were caught in the Depression's whirl-pool and didn't know any other way to fight it. In other words, it attempted to de-mythologize the Barrow Gang. Unfortunately, the film created as many myths as it debunked. But then what else can you expect when you have two "beautiful people" like Warren Beatty (who does a fine impression of Warren Oates*) and Faye Dunaway (whose acting wasn't equaled here until Chinatown in 1974).

William Bayer in his book "The Great Movies"** has said "what is also personal about Bonnie and Clyde, and constitutes its unique flavor is its curious blending of comedy and horror, its romanticization of crime as something that is fun, and that also leads to violent, bloody death. Bonnie and Clyde is both real and abstract, a gangster-movie and a comedy-romance. It is a comedy that turns dark, a romance that ends with death."

Death in Bonnie and Clyde is of an explicit nature. It was the first popular film to use the modern film technology to present a heightened violence that created the trend that is still going on today. Of course, no one forgets the slow-motion slaughter of the two at the end--"the dance of death"--it's dream-like quality, because Death's constant presence in their lives has turned it into a dream. Slo-Mo violence has been used after ad infinitum with no imagination and less effect.***

There are other moments: the first violent death of a clerk;**** the performances of Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, Michael Pollard, Denver Pyle and Dub Taylor; Bonnie's escape in a corn field; the death of Gene Hackman; the comedic perfection of Evans Evans and Gene Wilder (in his first movie); and probably, best of all, the reunion with Bonnie's parents before their world falls apart.

Yeah, it is Arthur Penn's finest film. Borrowing from the past, but also using his own sense of cinematic imagery, Penn has made a complete, whole film--something that can't be said of his Little Big Man, Night Moves, or The Missouri Breaks with their only occasional moments of brilliance.

Maybe the reason Penn was so successful with Bonnie and Clyde is the material he had to work with--the script by Robert Benton and David Newman.***** Newman and Benton wrote it hoping that Francois Truffaut or Jean-Luc Godard would direct it. Arthur Penn was extremely lucky that they were unavailable. The two later scripted There was a Crooked Man, and, with Buck Henry, co-scripted What's Up, Doc? In 1972, after writing for others and seeing them reap all the laurels, Benton-Newman wrote a script and Benton got to direct it, It was called Bad Company and in many ways it's a better film than Bonnie and Clyde.

Broacdcast on KCMU-FM January 20th, 1977

* I sense "snark" there. I don't think it was related to Oates playing Dillinger in 1973—a film that owes a lot to Bonnie and Clyde, one should mention—but, rather the hyper roles that Oates played in the early 1960's. If you watch Dillinger (which came out six years after Bonnie and Clyde), with Oates as the titular gangster, you'll notice that he plays his role with more gravitas. It's the difference between Oates changing his intensity from a supporting actor getting himself noticed to a star role where there is more depending on the lead.

** Sadly, out of print, and not to be confused with Roger Ebert's "The Great Movies" series of books. Bayer's book was a fairly non-controversial heavy tome with well-written appreciations and beautiful photographs. I've still got it, and still treasure it. I became acquainted with Ebert's two-book series over a weekend, and found them both very enjoyable in Ebert's typically "personal-relationship-with-the-movies" style. All totaled, before his death, he increased the number of "must-see" movies to 379. You can find the list here. *Sigh* No rest for the wicked.

*** The thing that makes Bonnie and Clyde's death-scene in under-cranked motion so well-done (as opposed to most that came after) can be attributed to the editing of Dede Allen, whose scrupulous work for Penn and Sydney Lumet, raised it above the typical use of slow-motion, which is generally used for exploitation purposes. I might have been harping on Sam Peckinpah at the time I made this point, but, despite his reputation, even he only used flashes of slow-motion amidst a fast edited sequence to highlight a story-point, or prolong a moment of shock. Nowadays, the "dance of death" sequence (as it became known) looks a little tame compared to today's cinema carnage. It's still arresting, though.

****Based on a similar shot in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin--folks were getting into film-school references at this point, and I think it marks the bifurcation point where directors stopped drawing inspiration from life and, instead, drew inspiration from other movies—to the medium's detriment, I think.

*****Benton-Newman also wrote the book for "It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman," the short-lived Broadway musical, which paved the way for them working on the re-writes of Mario Puzo's scripts for Superman and Superman II. Benton went on to direct such great films as Kramer vs. Kramer (which won the 1980 Best Picture Oscar), and my favorite of his films, Places in the Heart.

Tomorrow: Bad Company

Rules Don't Apply

Never Check an Interesting Fact*
or
Hughes Kissing Her Now?

Warren Beatty's tall-tale about Howard Hughes, Rules Don't Apply, is about as ungainly as The Spruce Goose, but like the idea behind that aeronautical white elephant, it is not without its charms. 

For one thing, it's not done with any malice aforethought. Beatty's been trying to make a movie about Hughes since the 1970's, and they've started it up and shut it down at various times, the timing never seeming right. After Scorsese made The Aviator, I'm surprised this was made at all, but one can see why Beatty still forged ahead with his story that he wrote with Bo Goldman (who also touched on Hughes in his original screenplay Melvin and Howard) and came out of self-imposed domestic bliss (Beatty wanted to raise the kids he had with wife Annette Bening, for God's sake!) to make it. He's managed to make a somewhat racy Disney fairy tale out of Hughes' life, complete with princess, Prince Charming, and even a happy ending for all involved. And that takes some doing, even if it takes a lot of liberties with the timeline and history.

It starts in 1964, where Hughes (Beatty) is a recluse who has not been seen in years, and an elaborate phone hook-up has been set up with Hughes for experts from the press who are awaiting a call from the man, who is only speaking due to an unauthorized biography that a ne'er-do-well (Paul Schneider) has penned claiming it as a genuine autobiography.** His aides, Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich) and Levar Mathis (Mathew Broderick) are trying to convince the reluctant Hughes to go through with it, as his reputation is on the line. But, the fire's gone out of Hughes, who couldn't care less and would just as soon be left alone. How he got here and how it gets resolved takes some back-story.

It's six years previous. 1956, to be exact, in this movie's version. Hughes is head of RKO Pictures where he fiddles with movies and has big aviation dreams, still designing aircraft and leading a lifestyle that goes beyond reclusive. Frank Forbes is a driver for RKO, specifically for the bevy of starlets Hughes has under exclusive contract, all hoping to make it big in movies...or to, at least, meet Mr. Hughes personally. Frank and his immediate superior Levar are part of the motor pool for the RKO hopefuls—because the girls can't have their own cars, so as best to keep an eye on them (who knows how much trouble they could get into?) and the Hughes iron-clad contract guarantees that no Hughes employee is going to fraternize with them; the drivers stay in the front seats while the girls are completely safe and unmolested in the back-seats.

It's one of Frank's jobs today to pick up Marla Mabry (Lily Collins, who's presented as something like the love-child of Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor), RKO's latest recruit, escorted by her mother Lucy (Bening), who's there to make sure that Marla doesn't stray far from her Baptist upbringing (at one point, Levar, observing them says: "You know why Baptists are afraid of sex? They're afraid it will lead to DANCING!") and that things are on the up-and-up, especially with regards to meeting Mr. Hughes. 

They're going to have to wait awhile, as nobody sees Mr. Hughes except for a select few in his daily flight-path. In fact, his way to pay the starlets is to lower checks from a clipboard attached to a string from his second floor window. Weird, yes, but Hughes is a busy man with a lot on his mind besides merely the RKO lot. There's his aerodynamic firm, his Daddy's tool company—of paramount importance—his studio, his investments—he's interested in birth control advancements, the recent discovery of DNA, and what appears to be an attempt at a clinch is merely his noticing that the fabric of an actress' blouse is rayon—but also, he's concerned with Congress breathing down his neck about his recent plane plans, questions of his competency and possible incarceration into a "looney bin," his abhorrence of appearing in public (leading him to supervise the casting of "doubles"), and then, of course, there's "The Spruce Goose"—the HK Hercules—the wooden behemoth of a plane that has not yet flown (actually, Hughes flew it in 1947). It was built as an experiment to see if a transport could be built without commodities that might be in short ration supply during wartime, like aluminum.

A lot on his mind. Probably too much. Beatty plays Hughes in a hyper-scattershot style (which he excels at, and is always Beatty as his most interesting as an actor), usually obscured by shadow, often at a loss about what people are talking about when they're not talking about something that interests him. At this point, he's a man of reputation, which he keeps up by not being seen. A late night liaison arranged for Miss Mabry turns into a dinner where the two dine on TV trays with freshly warmed TV-dinners in tidy aluminum trays (which Hughes eats with gusto), a brief musical interlude where he plays the saxophone, and a lot of awkward silences.

The movie's at its best when Hughes is in the picture, although one wonders where it's all going when he doesn't show up for 45 minutes. At least, that early part of the picture is breezily, almost brutally, edited (Beatty has been known to turn in long edits of his movies, but this one clips along at just under 2 hours), and the director delights in period detail and idiosyncratic music choices for background—"Rockin' Robin," a Lawrence Welk tune—that entertain while teeing up the conflicts that will beset the young lovers from that first act as the movie progresses. The movie says something about breaking away from the constraints that hold us back, with Hughes as prime example, cautionary tale, and inconvenient road-bump on the path to true happiness. That's a lot of duty for the "Magical Helper" on a hero's journey, but Hughes was always an iconoclast.

Maybe too much. Around about the time Beatty's movie-Hughes starts making demands for a particular flavor of ice-cream, then flipping to another, the movie starts to sag away from that hyper first section and lose interest in the romance, losing its heart, but ultimately tying all loose ends together for a melancholy ending in which everybody seems to be getting what they want. It's a deft conceit and an odd unconventional addition to Beatty's short list of odd, sometimes unsettling, but always rather interesting films that linger in the memory far fonder than they do in the watching.

* Ascribed in the film as being said by Hughes, but I can't verify that.

** Anyone who's been alive as long as I have knows that phone conference didn't occur until 1971, when Clifford Irving published his bogus "autobiography" of Hughes that contained all sorts of wild speculations about Hughes' aversion to germs (not exactly false), and his dietary and personal habits, including growing out his fingernails—Hughes quipped during the call "Yeah, I was thinking how do I write checks?" As Beatty notes after that opening Hughes quote "Names and Dates Don't Apply."

*** One of my favorite films involving Hughes is Orson Welles F for Fake, which takes on the rather daunting subject of the worth of art, with amusing anecdotes about a particular art forger, who became friends with, and was subsequently, biographied by...Clifford Irving. 

Kaleidoscope (1966)

Kaleidoscope (Jack Smight, 1966) Very slight entertainment and very much of the 60's about a grifter, Barney Lincoln (Warren Beatty), who comes up with an undetectable (if somewhat complicated work-intensive) system for cheating at cards—let's just say it starts at the manufacturing process and leave it at that), then gallivants around Europe playing poker at specific casino's that will be easy prey to his scheme.  

It's shot off the cuff (in a slightly more disciplined manner than, say, Richard Lester of that same period), has two stylish stars in Beatty and Susannah York in a sort of fly-by-night romance of convenience, and some rather nice acting turns by Clive Revill (as the Scotland Yard detective who stumbles on to the plot and, rather than prosecute Lincoln, decides it would be better to employ his ploy to bring down a more dangerous target) and a weirdly affected Eric Porter (as that intended target). 

Smight had just come off the Paul Newman vehicle Harper, and he could be counted on to keep things well-lit and bereft of any subtlety or nuance, or even sub-text, that might get in the way of enjoying the film. But where Harper had an early 60's feel to it that clashed with some of the more ornate aspects of the screenplay (a California self-help cult, for instance), Kaleidoscope has a fey mod-Bond smell to it, that would turn into a five alarm conflagration with the next year's Casino Royale (five directors and no sense). Thank God, Smight didn't take it that far, instead having the villain of the piece (and one is not entirely sure what villainy he intends) resemble Napoleon, and throwing some stylish touches to the art direction.

"...claustrophobic and closed-in."

Smight started his career in television and would bounce back and forth between the two mediums with the winds of fortune and box-office. His TV projects usually rose above the limitations of the medium, but his movies never seemed suited for theaters, feeling claustrophobic and closed-in...as if they were made for television. Not as witty as it would like to be, and not as stylish as it attempts, Kaleidoscope is a diversion. But nothing more.