TIFF Comic Book Hero Series Review: Dick Tracy (1990)
Cast: Warren Beatty, Madonna, Al Pacino
Director: Warren Beatty
Country: USA
Genre: Action | Comedy | Crime | Romance | Thriller
Official Trailer: Here
Editor’s Notes: This review of Dick Tracy is apart of TIFF’s Comic Book Hero series which runs from March 9th to 24th at TIFF Bell Lightbox. For more information, visit TIFF.net.
Dick Tracy (Beatty, 1990) is a production designer’s dream. Director/Producer/Star Warren Beatty went out of his way to make his film look as much as the Dick Tracy comic strips as possible (but only the Sunday ones, the weekly strip was in black and white). In so doing, he has created a visual masterpiece. If only he’d had a story to match. There’s not so much of a story as there is a cast of characters that interact until the last half hour or so, then there’s a story. The main plot involves Tracy (Beatty) and Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly) take in a homeless kid, conveniently named Kid (Charlie Korsmo) while Tracy is trying to take down the big boss of the town Big Boy Caprice (Al Pacino). The supporting cast is rounded out by a Who’s Who and Who’s That? of Hollywood including Dustin Hoffman wonderfully playing a character named Mumbles who mumbles everything unintelligibly, Paul Sorvino playing Lips Manlis who has a disturbingly large mouth, Seymour Cassel plays Tracy’s loyal right-hand man and of course there is Madonna as Breathless Mahoney. I could go on, but then the only thing I’d write about is who’s in the picture and nothing else.
Director/Producer/Star Warren Beatty went out of his way to make his film look as much as the Dick Tracy comic strips as possible (but only the Sunday ones, the weekly strip was in black and white). In so doing, he has created a visual masterpiece.
So, with Kid in tow and Tess the ever stalwart girl left to pine away for a day when she and Tracy can be married and he’s out of danger, Tracy gets pushed and pulled into a series of calamities by various players. The first half of the film shows Tracy’s real detection prowess: setting up surveillance, dusting for prints, working up theories based on hunches and leads, conducting interrogations and just being a great detective. The first half of the film feels like a police procedural in the mold of The Naked City (Dassin, 1948) or Detective Story (Wyler, 1951) crossed with the noir talk of The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941), The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946) or Out of the Past (Tourner, 1947) with shades of the old Warner Gangster pictures of the 30’s like The Roaring Twenties (Walsh, 1939), Little Caesar (LeRoy, 1931). Seeing all of these homages up on screen together is great, but it begins to get muddy very quickly. The film loses focus and can’t seem to decide where to fall. What it wants is to be the confluence of all of these pictures and what it gets is an indiscernible hodpodge of influence with no substance to support it. There is montage after montage of Tracy rounding up Big Boy’s operation then about Tracy being a dirty cop and so on.
One of the film’s main faults is the character of Breathless. I don’t mean Madonna is bad in the film, she’s not. In fact, she’s the perfect modern femme fatale. The trouble is that the writers tried to pull off The Big Sleep and make her and Tracy’s chemistry a focal point regardless of the plot and they failed mostly due to the moral fortitude of Dick Tracy. He’s so upright that he does not let himself be lured in by Breathless away from Tess, and that undermines the entire idea of a femme fatale. Her job is to take the detective down the wrong path while they become romantically involved only to have him be wise the whole time and send her up the river, breaking her heart and his. Since Tracy would never betray Tess, this cannot happen. The fact that Breathless is, in fact, the ‘faceless man’ who pulls everyone’s strings and Tracy has no idea clues us in that the writers were out of their depth with the plot and Tracy himself. Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe would have known the whole time who this person was and would have let her do the dirty work for them while they sat back and played the saps until the end. Knowing that Beatty and Madonna were a couple at the time only compounds the forced nature of the scenes and her character. It feels like when they got together and the film was a go, Beatty said to the writers “Get her to do more”. The rewrite to increase screen time between Bogie and Bacall worked in The Big Sleep (there’s a version on the DVD that is more linear and has less of them together and it’s just not as good), but it doesn’t work in Dick Tracy.
The plot, such as it is, is very muddled and confusing in the last half as well. Confusing plots are a staple of Film Noir (an old story goes that on the set of The Big Sleep, someone turned to director Howard Hawkes and asked who killed the chauffer. Hawkes said he didn’t know and to ask Raymond Chandler, the author of the novel. When asked, Chandler replied that he didn’t know either!) and using one further emphasizes the point that this film is, among being an homage to the Dick Tracy comic, it is an attempt at a neo-noir. The difference is that in classic noir, characters come and go with no cause or explanation, murders are never solved, or a dark past is revealed and overcome. Here, the plot is complicated not by ulterior motives or an undiscovered piece of the puzzle, but by a woman who wants a man she can’t have. The ‘faceless man’ ruins what should have been Tracy working the whole thing out himself. Tracy also isn’t a very good character for a noir because he’s too noble and moral. Noir detectives need to be willing to crawl through the mud and come out a little dirty to get what they need. They also aren’t cops. This gives them flexibility within the law that Tracy does not and will not take. The closest Tracy gets to skirting the law is keeping the Kid longer than he should have.
The pacing of the film is completely off as well. The first hour clips by and is incredibly entertaining. Then, when the plot starts to convolute, the pace takes a dive and the rest of the film crawls to the finish.
The pacing of the film is completely off as well. The first hour clips by and is incredibly entertaining. Then, when the plot starts to convolute, the pace takes a dive and the rest of the film crawls to the finish. It is almost as if the novelty of the film has worn off just in time for the main plot to take hold. This is unfortunate, because this is the part where the main action set-pieces are. Beatty even homages his (arguably) most famous film, Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 1967) with an all-out Tommy-gun battle with the combined criminal forces of the city versus the police. The trouble is that you’re so bored by this point, the excitement is wasted. Then, when Tracy finally corners Big Boy to rescue Tess and the reveal of the ‘faceless man’ happens, there’s no energy left.
With all that in mind, I submit that the plot and story are completely secondary to how the film looks and feels. Like Days of Heaven (Malick, 1978), the true quality of this film is not what’s going on, but how what is going on looks. I am in no way equating Dick Tracy to the brilliance of Days of Heaven, but the mindsets are similar. Beatty has channeled his idea of the world of Dick Tracy through the lens of the noir and gangster pictures of the 30s and 40s and filtered them through the sensibilities of Martin Scorsese and production designer Boris Levin used to create the magnificent look of New York, New York (Scorsese, 1977). Like New York, New York, there is a deliberate attempt to make the sets look artificially real. Beatty makes sure we know he’s using matte paintings for most of the backdrops and crane shots. He uses hyper-real colors to pop the wardrobe and spectacular make-up to duplicate the outrageous characters from Chester Gould’s comic strip in ways not seen before or since. The painful attention to detail and precision of the look of the film falls to Beatty’s credit. He worked hard to make Dick Tracy look like the comic strip that (unless I’m mistaken) still runs in the newspapers across the country.
Then there is the make-up. I’m not one to normally call out the make-up department, because unless it’s a sci-fi or fantasy film the make-up is normally imperceptible. Here, due to the outrageous character designs of Chester Gould, the villains of the film look so odd that to do justice to the strip the make-up had to be amazing. Each villain has a distinct name to match their odd feature, like Flattop does not merely have his hair cut in a flat top; his entire head is flat on top. Others like this abound in the film and so the make-up design gets a mention.
Beatty also gets some magnificent performances out of all the actors, considering the script they were given. There are no slackers in the cast and everyone is to be commended for the way they helped evoke the period. Pacino is a master at scenery-chewing and he leaves no set untouched. The only quibble I have with his Big Boy is that when he is absconding with Tess near the end, he keeps making threats of violence like he has Tourette’s syndrome because Tess is not struggling or trying to escape. One moment he is speaking quite normally then, out of the blue, he yells that he doesn’t want to hurt her but he will. This happens six or seven times in the span of maybe five minutes of non-continuous screen time and really made absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Ultimately, Dick Tracy stands as an epic achievement in look, tone and production design and a curio of how one can blend so many similar but disparate genera. As many issues as I had with the way the story played out, I kind of regret Beatty never pursued a Dick Tracy series of films. With the attention to detail and one or two more films as Dick Tracy, he could have worked out something that would have been magical. What he have instead is a film whose mediocre story is elevated and buoyed by an impressive visual style and characters that work despite the story they are working within.
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