Screen:

...A decent construction worker with a loving wife and mild ambitions learns that his background, memories, and attachments have been invented, and that his body-furnished with this fictitious identity-has been sent to earth on an evil mission by his real personality, a nefarious operator on Mars...

...she asks Tracy in a dress that both cantilevers her bosom and threatens to abandon it...

...Pacino's make-up twists his lips, pocks his face, broadens his nose, and renders him virtually unrecognizable except for the one Pacino feature that is indelible even when covered by contact lenses...

...The hero revolts against his mission but, in doing so, revolts against himself, the real Schwarzenegger back on Mars...

...Not beautiful yet strangely magnetic, Headly, like Maggie Smith, brings to mind the older, often forgotten meaning of the word, "homely...

...I get a lot of that"-but tempers it with something else: a bitterness that is willing to bide its time...

...Pauline Kael long ago remarked on the hint of slyness in Beatty...

...Warren Beatty isn't seduced by complex machinery or artistic pretensions...

...The former was meant to please the kids and rake in bucks...

...Altman worked so hard to make his live-action film look like a comic strip that he failed to give it dramatic propulsion...

...Arnold's amorous partner, Sharon Stone, seems to be exerting herself less like a passionate lover than like a mountain climber...

...This is a Monroe who has come back for vengeance on all those men who used her as a plush toy...

...The basic situation is actually rather compelling...

...But it is the next best thing: an ingenious, gleaming toy...

...Tracy himself is Cop as Superstar, his glorious deeds trumpeted by headlines and Winchellesque radio announcers...

...Nobody seems to care...

...Dick Tracy is trivial and lovely...

...Now that he is once again playing a clean-cut character (in excelsisl), he has kept that look of calculation but, during his love scenes, subtly transforms it to portray self-inhibiting scrupulousness...

...Fleeing Tracy's latest onslaught while tightly gripping the abducted Tess, Big Boy wails, "I don't know why I take the trouble to do some good in the world...

...SCREEN TRIVIAL PURSUITS TOTAL RECALL' & 'DICK TRACY' Watching the only bedroom scene in Total Recall (which must have received its R rating for violence, not sex), I understood why so many female friends have made disparaging remarks about Arnold Schwarzenegger's body...

...Batman was better in that it had a fairly straightforward script, great sets, and an enlivening performance by Jack Nicholson...

...While there are plenty of crimes in Dick Tracy, the movie itself doesn't mug you...

...Seeing Dick Tracy soon after Total Recall, I was reminded that it's worthwhile to discriminate- even among trivialities...

...But even Breathless's minimal complexity is rendered in cartoon terms, so determined is Beatty to keep his film consistent in scope and tone...

...She is piercingly plain, poignantly unpretentious...

...And I still like toys...

...Although Beatty keeps Tracy'% characterization to comic-strip dimensions, he has given the movie the pace, ambiance, and music of a Broadway show...

...Madonna's Breathless Mahoney was written in such a way as to allow the pop singer to do her latest variation on Marilyn Monroe's masochism-"you don't know whether to hit me or kiss me...

...What Madonna has done with Sondheim's songs, Beatty has done with the whole Dick Tracy ethos: he hasn't reproduced the strip's Grand Guignol excesses but has rendered the action as a pipe dream in which violence is nothing but ballet, and the Big City is a huge set for the biggest musical comedy that never was...

...Total Recall is trivial and disgusting...

...The results on screen are violent, mindless, scummy...

...None of the discoveries the hero makes about himself produces any noticeable emotional effect on him or, consequently, on us...

...Yes, those moist, pleading, Dog Day Afternoon eyes stare out at the world, begging it to be reasonable (even as he tries to corrupt it), beseeching everyone not to resist him (even as he plans the murder of anyone who does), and trying to instill guilt in anyone who does resist (so that he or she will die regretting having hurt Big Boy's feelings...

...It isn't even a great minor work of art...

...Twenty years ago, the infinitely angular Glenne Headly would never have played a heroine in an action film, but would have been cast as a librarian or schoolmarm...

...Schwarzenegger is allowed to show some bewilderment in the first half-hour but from then on is simply used by the filmmakers as a heroic killing machine...

...You want to come home to her and so you understand why Tracy eventually does...

...Aren't you going to frisk me...

...When Tracy is awkwardly working himself up to propose to Tess, he keeps darting appraising looks at her, tries to read how she reacts to what he says before he says it, gets flummoxed, gives up...

...the latter to hook the critics and earn the moviemakers respect for their artistry...

...Material Girl has become Varga Vision...

...Total Recall is one of those movies in which we not only see innocent bystanders picked off during gun battles but are treated to the sight of their bodies being used as shields-by the hero...

...Warren Beatty is producer, director, and star...

...The result was a basically simple-minded, sometimes kinky, often fuzzy movie that made a lot of money...

...Director Paul Verhoeven gives us close-ups of the dead bodies being stepped on by pursued and pursuers, making squishing sounds as they are trampled...

...Dick Tracy isn't a great new work of cinematic art...

...It is to Beatty's great credit that he could perceive how touching Headly might be even in the stalest of situations, such as the scene in which Tess catches Tracy allowing himself to be vamped by Breathless Mahoney...

...What damaged the sometimes interesting Batman and utterly destroyed Robert Altman's Popeye was the uncertainty of their makers about what they were doing...

...there seemed to be something going on in his mind, some kind of calculation...

...RICHARD ALLEVAe toys...

...She seems to be climbing past Schwarzenegger's muscles to get at a lither, more compact man dwelling within the pumped-up Austrian...

...that didn't fit the clean-cut juvenile roles...

...His Caped Crusader was vaguely drawn, a construct of incompatible concepts: gee-whiz good guy and neurotic vigilante...

...There were moments in Popeye when I felt that the camera had been left running between takes and that we were watching the actors amuse themselves while waiting for the director to return from a story conference...

...But Michael Keaton seemed dominated by his costume and gadgets...

...As the premier menace, Big Boy, Al Pacino pulls off an innovation: the villain as whiner, as handwringer, as nagger, as obsessive neurotic...

...When this Tracy knocks six villains off their feet with one sweeping punch, you believe it: how could an army of crooks stand up to a man so perseverant in whatever he undertakes that he hurries back to an interrupted performance of Wagner's Ring to see how the story turns out...

...Alas, the nonvocal music only shows that composer Danny Elfman has listened too many times to Nino Rota's score for La Strada...

...Stephen Sondheim has written good songs for Madonna and she sings them as Patti LaPone sang the Cole Porter score in the Lincoln Center revival of Anything Goes: not as an attempt to reproduce thirties vocalization but as an adaption, a glitterization (if you'll pardon the barbarism) of the old style for our times...

...But, moving against criminals, Tracy is liberated, the gleam in his eyes becomes manic, and his body moves forward in a dynamic line that is worthy of his magnificent yellow overcoat...

...This is a heavy who never gloats, who never enjoys himself, who is filled with self-pity...

...Big Boy, coaching his nightclub cronies, momentarily transforms himself into a cliche Broadway director ("Pick up the pace, girls...

...After a barrage of firefights, neck-breakings, throat-piercings, and eye-gougings, a little throw-away moment when Schwarzenegger turns to a rescuer and says with disarming simplicity, "Thank you, Tony," comes as balm in Gilead...

...something shrewdly private in those squeezed-up little non-actor's eyes...

...Vittorio Storaro photographs her in such a way that light and shadow seem to caress her curves, even when the virtuous Tracy abstains...

...In adapting a comic strip to the screen, he sets necessary stylistic limits for himself and then observes them...

...He knew exactly what he wanted to make and has achieved it: the glamorization of unmixed virtue and the juiciness of unadulterated vice...

...It charms you, sings to you, teases you, yet sends you out of the theater satisfied...

...it lets you know that its creators don't consider you to be a moron, a sadist, or a sucker...

...Similarly, within the bloated mass that is Total Recall, I sense a lithe, viable sci-fi thriller...

...RICHARD ALLEVA...