Dick Tracy (1990) – Review

Passion projects, especially ones set in a more fantastical realm, rarely ever go well, but even so, Dick Tracy must have looked like a sure thing on paper. After all, Tim Burton’s pulp/gothic Batman had exploded from the Batcave the year before and had made a ton of moolah, so surely the day glow fusion of pop art and film noir that came with Tracy’s territory would be a shoe-in on release, right.
However, the build up to Dick Tracy’s release started getting a little strange. Not only did the budget balloon to something that the studio wasn’t exactly comfortable with and there was some tension on set between some of the actors thanks to bouts of method acting that allegedly crossed lines, but a rather famous dick measuring contest occurred when director/star Warren Beatty and notoriously excitable producer Don Simpson started a war of words about which of their movies (Simpson was releasing Days Of Thunder) would out perform the other that summer. But once the dust settled and notes that read “Don’t fuck with the thunder” and “You won’t believe the size of my Dick” had been exchanged, how did the custard clad cop ultimately fare?

The year is 1938 and as two-fisted police detective Dick Tracy does everything he can to keep the streets safe from organised crime, forces are amassing within the weirdly misshapen criminal community to try and violently seize a larger slice of the illegal pie. After a young street urchin named simply “The Kid” witnesses a gangland slaying of a bunch of lumpy lieutenants who work for mob boss Lips Manlis, Tracy realises that somethings up, but the push becomes even more aggressive when rival boss, Alphonse “Big Boy” Caprice has Manlis sent to the bottom of the ocean wearing a concrete overcoat after signing over his club. Once in possession of everything his rival once owned – including vampish singer Breathless Mahoney – Big Boy hopes to rope all the other gangsters in the city under one banner in order to maximise profits at the expense of the working man, but that’s only going to work if Dick Tracy is out of the picture.
Meanwhile, aside from trying to foil Big Boy’s grand plan and avoiding various hits from goons such as Flattop and Itchy, Tracy has his hands full with trying to get the willful, gutsy Kid into an orphanage, avoiding the amorous advances of Breathless Mahoney while trying to get her to testify and try and verbalise his feelings for long suffering sweetheart Tess Trueheart. However, both help and hindrance is at hand in the form of the mysterious Blank, a literally faceless schemer who seems to be aiding the police in taking down Big Boy, but only because the creepy figure wants to supplant him as the guy at the top of mobster mountain. However, the Blank’s plan ramps up when he frames Big Boy for the kidnap of Tess – can Dick Tracy, with the help of The Kid, save the day? He’s on his way.

Like a lot of big budget summer movies that foundered critically in the 90s, Dick Tracy emerges as less of bold swing that deserves to be cherished and more of an awe inspiring oddity that demands to be studied and picked apart – not unlike David Lynch’s Dune. While the adaption of Chester Gould’s 30s pulp strip certainly was more financially successful than Lynch’s dessert dwelling epic, I’ve always found the two to be incredibly similar because for all the things it gets wrong, there’s still aspects of it that remain fiercely watchable. Plus, it was also marketed to kids for some reason, which always amuses me to no end.
So let’s get the things that don’t work out the way first and while Dick Tracy is an incredibly handsomely mounted production, there’s a real sense that, at times, both the director Warren Beatty and the actor Warren Beatty often seem to have no idea what they’re doing. In front of the camera, you get the feeling that Beatty couldn’t wait to portray the hard-boiled, yet brightly clad hero as a primary-colour Elliot Ness, equipped with his unbreakable morals, nifty radio watch and a blazing tommy gun. However, in practice, whenever Beatty isn’t sprinting to the scene of a crime or coercing a confession out of a suspect, he seems to just stand there with look on his face that’s blanker than the character of the Blank himself. He seems unsure of the tone he should be setting, there is no real sense of the character he’s inhabiting and he has precious little chemistry with any of the other cast – in fact, the scenes between him and Madonna are so stilted and awkward, they’re actually tough to watch which is especially weird considering they were actually dating in real life at the time.

Elsewhere, Beatty the director seems so enamored of the style he’s creating, he seems to have no idea how to pace the thing or what tone he should be setting. The whole rainbow coloured 30s aesthetic is genuinely remarkable, but he keeps breaking up the plot (and sometimes even the action) with endless montages set to Madonna crooning songs by Stephen Sondheim which slows everything down to a frustrating crawl. Add to this a Danny Elfman score that sounds like a bunch of discarded Batman cues and you’d think that Tracy doesn’t know dick about crafting a summer blockbuster.
However, while Dick Tracy certainly has its issues, the pros are so striking, it often means you forgive a bunch of the cons. In fact, speaking of cons, one of the film’s greatest assets is the truly heroic amount of recognisable character actors buried under layers of Oscar winning prosthetics to make up the extensive rogue’s gallery of do-badders. Be it Al Pacino delivering possibly his most screamy performance ever while made up to look like the bastard child of Al Capone and Richard III, to the sight of a cackling William Forsythe as the level-skulled Flattop, every single one of these bluntly-named thugs are remarkable to look at. Pruneface, Flattop, Itchy, The Brow, Shoulders, Lips Manlis, The Rodent, Little-Face, each one is a mini-master piece of character building and as an added, extra joke, a fair few of them are actually played by actors famous for playing heavies. Henry Silva, Ed O’Ross James Tolkan, Mandy Patinkin, R.G. Armstrong, James Caan, Paul Sorvino, they’re all here playing colourful bastards and in an especially inspired touch, they even cast Dustin Hoffman as the near incomprehensible Mumbles with a killer gag concerning his garbled testimony being slowed down on tape in order to be usable.

Of course, the old school style also adds greatly to the film with expansive matte paintings and striking costume work creating a comic book accurate world that straddles both noir and fantasy before adaptions like Sin City were greenlit and Joel Schumacher got his hands on the camp/neon/gothic of Batman Forever. Is there hefty issues concerning character work, pacing and tone? You’re darn tootin’ there is, but when you have Warren Beatty blasting unlimited bullets at fleeing, deformed gangsters as his banana-yellow trench coat billows in the wins, it’s genuinely tough to gripe too much. Essentially The Untouchables for a family audience, Dick Tracy may not have hit the legendary heights of other summer blockbusters (for all the bragging, neither it or Days Of Thunder ultimately made into the top ten list of top grossing movies of 1990 worldwide), but it’s a fascinating look back to a time when studios would take wilder swings with their material.
In many ways, the ultimate Dick pic.
🌟🌟🌟