After winning the Academy Award for Best Director in 1981
for his still enduring historical epic drama Reds which chronicled the
life and work of journalist John Reed the author of the October Revolution
nonfiction book Ten Days That Shook the World,
writer-producer-actor-director Warren Beatty took a long hiatus from both before
and behind the camera. Aside from
producing and starring in the 1987 failure Ishtar from Reds co-writer
Elaine May, Beatty shied away from calling the shots on set for about nine years. However, the leading man and mad obsessive
creative genius behind Heaven Can Wait was pondering a project as far
back as the mid-1970s that he’d circle back on in the late 1980s to unveil
perhaps the actor-director’s most commercially successful achievement yet: the surrealistic
fantastical adaptation of the 1931 comic-strip superhero detective character Dick
Tracy.
Created by Chester Gould and lasting until 1977, the Detroit
Mirror based fictional police detective donned in a yellow trench coat and
fedora sporting a high-tech walkie-talkie watch battling criminals became so
popular both a live-action television iteration of the character aired in 1950
for two seasons with Ralph Byrd as the character followed ten years later by
the animated The Dick Tracy Show with Everett Sloane voicing the titular
hero. While Beatty envisioned a Dick
Tracy film as far back as 1975, the film’s journey to the screen kept
changing hands from rightsholders to Chester Gould insisting upon total
creative control. Initially slated for
John Landis to direct before the Twilight Zone: The Movie accident and trial
forced him to drop out while Walter Hill came in with Warren Beatty as his
first choice, the film dissolved over creative differences between Hill and
Beatty before the actor ultimately purchased the rights to the project
outright. After failing to find a
director for the project seemingly slated for Beatty to act in, the wunderkind
filmmaker decided to produce, star in and direct Dick Tracy himself.
The plot of Dick Tracy is the stuff cartoons are made
of with its closest analogue being Tim Burton’s Batman released just a
year before: the 1930s era crimefighting detective Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty)
is singlehandedly taking on the criminal empire of Alphones “Big Boy” Caprice
(Al Pacino) and his bevy of henchmen. On
the way he finds himself caught between a hamstrung police system unable to
take on the cartoon Capone while hastily navigating romantic relations with
good girlfriend Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly) and sultry seductress Breathless
Mahoney (Madonna). While taking a scrappy
ten-year-old hoodlum under his wing only known as The Kid (Charlie Korsmo from What
About Bob?), the war between Tracy’s police force and Big Boy Caprice’s
gaggle of absurdly comical grotesques intensifies with various attempts on
Tracy’s life, a frame job and finally an all-out grandiose ballet of bullets,
1930s cars and Tommy guns.
A work of painstaking perfectionism, grand ambition and old-fashioned Silver Screen escapism, the other Who Framed Roger Rabbit? of its day loaded with wild special effects, stunning imagery by legendary cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and wealth of original music by Danny Elfman, Stephen Sondheim and Madonna, Dick Tracy is a wonderment of action-fantasy comic book cinema. A film whose production design, primary colors, intricate intentionally artificial matte paintings and heavy makeup laid upon all of Big Boy’s henchmen to create characters who don’t exist in any kind of reality but the comic strip, the film is sensorily overwhelming without becoming gaudy or garish. All of which is anchored by the strength and leading-man manner of Warren Beatty who elevates the character of Dick Tracy into an almost mythic hero.
--Andrew Kotwicki