Dick Tracy (Beatty, 1990): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.40pm
This is a 35mm presentation.
Time Out review:
Set in the '30s, Warren Beatty's film culls its villains - a gallery of
grotesques with names like Pruneface, Flattop and The Brow - from the
later '40s strips. As Tracy (Beatty) sets about foiling the plans of Big
Boy and The Blank to take over the city, Breathless Mahoney (Madonna)
introduces emotional conflict for the careerist detective, whose
long-standing relationship with Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly) is going nowhere
fast. Beatty has rejected 'psychology and behaviour' (read complexity)
in characterisation; this is old-fashioned, clearly defined morality,
with literally no shades of grey (the use of colour is wonderfully
imaginative and carefully modulated). Pleasing restraint is evident in
the way Beatty allows his character to be outshone by his adversaries.
As mobster Big Boy, a brash thug fond of misquoting Lincoln, Nietzsche
and Plato, Al Pacino is virtually unrecognisable and hugely enjoyable; and Madonna gives confident renditions of the Stephen Sondheim
numbers. A spectacular movie whose technical achievements - notably the
sharp editing - will surely provide a gauge by which subsequent comic
strip films are judged.
Colette Maude
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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