Dick Tracy (1990)

I have to start my review of Warren Beatty’s 1990 Dick Tracy movie with a disclaimer. I’ve seen several of the 1940s Dick Tracy B-movies and a couple of the 1930s serials but I have no familiarity at all with Chester Gould’s comic strip. I therefore can’t way how close this movie goes to capturing the spirit of the comic strip. It certainly tries very hard for a comic-strip feel but whether it’s consistent with that particular comic strip I can’t say.

Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty) is of course a square-jawed tough guy police detective in an imaginary American city. Tracy is a popular hero in the city.

There’s plenty of organised crime in the city and now Big Boy Caprice (Al Pacino) is trying to create a unified crime operation that will more or less run the whole town. His first step is to take over Lips Manlis’s night-club/gambling club. That means he also takes over Manlis’s girlfriend, sexy blonde canary Breathless Mahoney (Madonna).

Now it’s going to be all-out war between Dick Tracy and Big Boy. Much mayhem will ensue.

The mayhem is done with energy and style. There are quite a few explosions but in 1990 there was no way you were going to get away with an action movie without explosions. Millions of rounds of small arms ammunition are expended, resulting in very little actual bloodshed. Dick Tracy’s submachine gun seems to be fitted with a 10,000 round magazine. It all adds to the comic-book style fun.

Tracy has a girlfriend, Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly). Tess is pure and virtuous.

Needless to say at some stage Tess is going to get herself kidnapped by the bad guys.

Dick Tracy will also have to choose between the virtuous Good Girl and the sexy Bad Girl. Breathless Mahoney is the femme fatale and she’s definitely a bad girl but she might have genuinely fallen in love with Tracy.

There’s a complication. It’s not just a war between Dick Tracy and Big Boy. There’s a third party, a man with no face, and he seems intent on destroying both Tracy and Big Boy.

The plot feels like a comic-strip plot, which is a good thing. It does have a major romance sub-plot, a romantic triangle between Tracy, Tess and Breathless Mahoney, but in 1990 a romance sub-plot would have been commercially essential.

Glenne Headly has what is in some ways the toughest role. Not only is Tess Trueheart the pure virtuous Good Girl, she’s the least flamboyant character in the movie and of course she’s inevitably going to be totally overshadowed by Madonna in full-on Wicked Sex Kitten mode. Glenne Headly does at least manage to make Tess likeable.

Full marks for Charlie Korsmo for making Kid one of the less obnoxious and irritating child characters in movies. Junior (as he later becomes known) can be incredibly annoying in the 1930s serial but here he’s actually quite likeable.

This is the first time I have ever enjoyed an Al Pacino performance. Pacino goes wildly over-the-top (as he always does) but here it works.

I hate to say this but I really liked Madonna in this movie. She nails her part pretty well. She makes Breathless Mahoney ambiguous enough to be interesting (she might stick with the bad guys or throw in her lot with the good guys). And she convinces us that Breathless really is confused about her feelings for Dick Tracy.

I like Warren Beatty a lot here. Dick Tracy is not supposed to be a real person. He’s a square-jawed Comic Strip Hero. He’s not supposed to emote. That’s now Beatty plays him and it works.

The best thing about this movie is the visual style. Given that he’s the star, the producer and the director I’m guessing that Warren Beatty had a great deal of creative control and that the visual style is exactly what he wanted. If so then his instincts were correct. All the colours are impossibly bright and vivid. Everything looks totally and wildly and deliberately artificial. It looks like a comic-strip come to life, and the impressive makeup effects make the characters look like comic-strip characters come to life. That’s as it should be. Beatty makes zero concessions to realism, and that is again as it should be.

What I love most is that this movie looks nothing at all like Tim Burton’s Batman. It has its own visual style.

Stephen Sondheim’s songs work well. A soundtrack of modern pop songs would have dated the movie very quickly and would have felt wrong. Even though the songs are sung by Madonna they feel more like standards than current chart-toppers, and Madonna sings then well.

I enjoyed Dick Tracy very much indeed. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed three of the very good RKO movies - Dick Tracy (1945), Dick Tracy vs Cueball (1946) and Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947) and I’ve reviewed the hugely entertaining 1937 Dick Tracy serial.