The Talkies/Tricky Dick
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES TRICKY DICK by James Bowman when William Randolph Hearst introduced America to color comics in the New York Journal he described them as "eight pages of polychromatic effulgence that...
...Of course the bad guys don't get up again after they have been mowed down by Tracy's Tommy gun...
...Tracy is the better movie—better acted, better constructed, better photographed, and with some great Stephen Sondheim songs sung by Madonna...
...Beatty can be the relentless, unforgiving cop of whom his character was once the victim because his victims invite no sympathy: if they bled they might associate themselves with a humanity to which they can never in fact aspire...
...Like them, Tracy and the bad guys are eternal, Sisyphean types—and Tracy, like the Roadrunner, is by definition the victor...
...It was Batman which blazed this particular trail and introduced us to what we might call generic reality...
...But this nod in the direction of verisimilitude is compensated for by their sheer abundance which, like that of crows in a cornfield, is matched only by their dispensability...
...In Dick Tracy the (unnamed) city is like a thousand cinematic representations of Depression-era Chicago—and maybe even a little like Depression-era Chicago itself—but it glories in being self-evidently a movie set, where there are no people except the actors...
...When Roger Rabbit is shot full of holes in the prelude, he is up and after Baby Herman again in no time—because we know that this is how things work in cartoons...
...Al Pacino as the villain-in-chief, Big Boy Caprice, is given to mouthing garbled aphorisms and attributing them to various defunct quotemeisters...
...And maybe that's how we feel in late twentieth-century America, where mere bourgeois respectability has come to seem an impossible dream...
...This was as true of the melodramatic chiaroscuro of the cinema in Hollywood's great days as it is of "the funnies," which enjoyed their heyday at about the same time...
...THE TALKIES TRICKY DICK by James Bowman when William Randolph Hearst introduced America to color comics in the New York Journal he described them as "eight pages of polychromatic effulgence that make the rainbow look like a lead pipe...
...And this time there is no blood...
...We are invited into the world of the movies craftsmen with a knowing wink, and made to feel more at home than we would in anything more closely resembling the "real world...
...There is no doubt that we prefer the world as we want it to be: one in which villains recognizable by their ugliness are invariably destroyed by the guardians of decency...
...In last summer's blockbuster we were given a nightmare cityscape which is like every city that we know without its being, even conceivably, any actual city...
...Which is emphatically in Hollywood —a Hollywood where truth to life, having become too problematical, has been replaced by truth to genre...
...These are the people who brought together animation and parodic film noir in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and, in fact, a new Roger Rabbit cartoon, complete with interaction between the 'toon characters and "real" actors, is used as a curtain-raiser for Dick Tracy—just to let us know where we are...
...What is most remarkable is that this film shows how even Hollywood's political exoticism yields to nostalgia for that better world...
...Even the docks are signed in neon as "Seaport...
...It is only to be told that bourgeois respectability, whose highest values are sexual fidelity, official incorruptibility, and relentless extirpation of criminal elements, is the only eternal verity...
...And to what end are we invited into this make-believe realm of heroic archetypes...
...Wallowing in film cliches, far from being a vice, is made the virtue of Dick Tracy...
...There is what is and there is what we want it to be—Plato," says Big Boy when he is finally brought to the point where he must face the music...
...For always they are cartoon villains, translated into cinema with the help of the make-up artist only in order that the cinema might remind itself of its own cartoon quality...
...He was on to something...
...Last summer it was Batman...
...And it is in the nature of the cartoon to purge reality of its heartless irrevocability...
...It is a technique which can only work, however, in a context as highly stylized as that of Dick Tracy...
...These distinctive American art forms still come together periodically in a great flash of light, color, and T-shirts...
...Each star comes with a filmic tag: Dustin Hoffman in the role of Mumbles recalls his role in Rain Man...
...If the purpose of "magical realism" is to introduce the almost believably miraculous into a setting of gritty mundanity, that of generic reality is something like its opposite: a planting of the morally unremarkable into the soil of an almost earthly Never-neverland...
...James Caan and Al Pacino remind us of The Godfather, James Bowman is American correspondent for the Spectator of London...
...and Warren Beatty himself quotes from Bonnie and Clyde, not only in the use of Michael J. Pollard and Estelle Parsons in supporting roles but also in the unforgettable image of bullet-riddled 1930s cars—only now it is Beatty who is doing the riddling...
...He's got to appear again at our breakfast tables next Sunday, so nothing really final can ever happen to him...
...Like other cartoon characters, Tracy has promises to keep...
...Tracy's playing fast and loose with criminals' "rights," his use of illegal wiretaps and even third-degree techniques with Mumbles are apparently unproblematic for even such a celebrated liberal as Warren Beatty—because he has abstracted himself from the world as it is, where guilt must be proven and where criminals are human, and allowed himself a holiday in the world as he too would like it to be: where evildoers oblige our sense of moral fitness by offering themselves up for target practice...
...this summer it is Dick Tracy...
...It is also more aware of what it is doing —which is what we might have expected when this fusion of comics and cinema proceeds from the latter-day Disney studios...
...American popular (and not so popular) taste has always found mere nature rather drab and in need of some of the glamour imparted by art...
...Here the generic reality is underscored by the unmodulated primary colors of a cartoon strip and by unidentifiable periodcars, a can of chili labeled "Chili," a shop called "Dress Shop," and a newspaper called "The Daily Paper...
...Even the death of his creator seems to have left him unfazed...
...This is heroic soap opera, archetypal sitcom, recalling the titanic and similarly unending struggles between Tom and Jerry, Sylvester and Tweety, Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner...
...These are mythic characters whose epic world requires them to confront every problem of humanity and superhumanity except that of their own mortality...
...They constitute an end-less procession of grotesques queuing up to be smitten by the hero, like the Saracens in the Chanson de Roland, and their skillfully executed prostheses —preliminary sketches by Chester Gould—are the principal means by which they are dehumanized...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1990 31...
Vol. 23 • September 1990 • No. 9
