to catch my attention and I dutifully pay up to take in each extravaganza as it rolls along. It seems that, in Britain at least, this is something of a trend. Box office audiences are up. Films released in America, that once took months to reach audiences here, are now winging their way across the Atlantic without any delay.
But these films are almost always a disappointment. Why?
Perhaps its because there are such huge sums of money invested in them that the producers and directors are under enormous pressure to go for safe, and therefore inevitably simple, subjects, styles and characters. Ironically. despite the huge amounts of risk capital involved, risk is a factor almost always absent from the script.
Which is why bringing comic books to life is in vogue. It is a world inhabited by characters whose moral and personal codes are one-dimensional (Oh, alright, two then) and known in advance. The goodies are good, the baddies, bad. Anyone who doesn't fit into either of these categories will not survive the film. Witness the fate of Breathless Mahoney (Madonna). Let's face it, a temptress who engages in a spot of cross-dressing and role-reversal is hardly likely to make it in Dick's clean-shaven, straight 'n' proud America.
And clean it most certainly is! Part of the appeal of this type of fantasy is that it shows you a world where, even if the city is full of gangsters and crime, at Jeast the streets are clean. Its a world where you can career around in your car, guns blazing. without encountering traffic jams, and park without fear of clamping. And there's another, rather more disturbing, aspect to this fabled American city. There don't appear to be any black people in it!
Like Batman and the Schwarzeneggar films, Dick Tracy is testimony to the paucity of ideas emenating from the American film industry. A safe, smug, conservative morality tale, its box-office success is a depressing reminder of the comic strip agenda that neoliberals like Reagan, Bush and Thatcher have established as reality.
But that's another horror movie entirely. And thankfully a script which, we as the audience,
REVIEWS