dick tracy
Warren Beatty 1990
Dick Tracy is perfect — on paper. The concept is brilliant, the design is immaculate, the casting and acting are spot-on, the script sparkles with zingers. So why doesn’t it work?
It’s the structure of the film. The story is kicked off by mobster Big Boy Caprice (Al Pacino)’s murder of rival mobster and club owner Lips Manlis (Paul Sorvino). At the same time, his goons kill a cop, but that’s quickly forgotten: Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty) only asks Caprice about Manlis.
The problem is, we just don’t care about Lips Manlis. He’s a grotesque character and a gangster. Caprice’s henchmen blitz rival gangsters and we don’t care — that’s what (celluloid) gangsters do. And frankly, we don’t get that emotionally invested if they kill (celluloid) policemen either, because that’s also just what they do. In terms of storytelling, cops and robbers pays their money and takes their chances.
In order for a murder to act as a catalyst to a police procedural like this, it needs to be more than a murder. It needs to be a crime more heinous than a gangster killing another gangster. It needs to be a gangster crossing the line.
Big Boy Caprice is a great character, but there’s no sense of danger about him because his goons do all his dirty work, including offing Manlis. Contrast this with DeNiro’s fleshy, pampered Al Capone in The Untouchables — who suddenly, explosively kills several men with a baseball bat. Caprice should have got his hands dirty, by killing someone who wasn’t meant to die in such a squalid fashion: someone who didn’t choose to be there.
If Lips Manlis was the last straight club owner in town, that would have worked, as his murder would have been a tragedy. If the cop was days from retirement — he was pretty old — then that would have been (a cliché, but also) a tragedy. In order for us to really buy Tracy’s crusading zeal we need to feel Caprice isn’t just doing what gangsters do: he’s also preying on Joe and Josey Everyday.
Which we never see, apart from the opening radio news bulletins about shoeshine vendors getting leaned on. Even then, the good citizens are attacked for resisting the gangsters, so it’s almost like the citizens don’t need Tracy’s protection. And we should be shown, not told. When we do later see glimpses of the protection rackets in action, it’s during this colourful musical montage, devoid of any actual sense of threat:
Speaking of which, there are three musical montages, which is at least one too many. The first act of the film is Tracy’s repeated failure to nail Caprice, with the first plot point being the bugging of the club (not Manlis’ murder). This allows Tracy to smash Caprice’s operation , but where a kick-ass action sequence should be we get a musical montage. The campy punching-six-guys-at-a-time stuff is great, but we could have done with more fights like the brutal-yet-hilarious lean-to set-to with Steve the Tramp.
On the musical note, Madonna isn’t as bad as you might remember. As vampy nightclub chanteuse Breathless Mahoney, she is a bit blank-faced (no pun intended) but with those dresses, that lipstick and those killer lines she’s great value (Tracy: “No grief for Lips?” Breathless: “I’m wearing black underwear”). Beatty’s steadfast yet frequently-flummoxed Tracy is just the right side of self-righteousness, while the Kid (Charlie Korsmo) and Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly) are spiky and sparky enough to sidestep winsome child and whiny damsel cliché.
It’s interesting that Beatty originally wanted Bob Fosse to direct, while Martin Scorcese was also a possibility. Either may have given the film a little extra zip. Ultimately Dick Tracy suffers from comparison to Batman (the success of which probably helped Tracy get made). Despite appearing a year later, Tracy feels like an ’80s film, where Batman feels like a 90s film (even if it has dated badly and is inferior, IMO, to Batman Returns).