Part of Midnight Movies
Hard-boiled detective Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty) is searching for evidence that proves Alphonse Big Boy Caprice (Al Pacino) is the city’s most dangerous crime boss. He may have found the key to unraveling the crimelord’s illegal empire in Breathless Mahoney (Madonna), an enigmatic barroom singer who has witnessed some of Caprice’s crimes firsthand. However, she seems more set on stealing Dick away from his girlfriend, Tess (Glenne Headly), than helping him solve the case of his career. With the aid of a young street urchin known simply as Kid (Charlie Korsmo) and his handy-dandy 2-way wrist radio, the square-jawed lawman takes on the underground organized crime ring bringing the city to its knees.
Warren Beatty’s loving and eccentric star-studded adaptation of Chester Gould’s long-running comic strip shines thanks to its vivid, hand-crafted comic strip aesthetic, pop art stylings and over-the-top (but appropriately cartoonish) performances which put most modern comic adaptations to shame.
“Warren Beatty‘s production of DICK TRACY approaches the material with the same fetishistic glee I felt when I was reading the strip…. A masterpiece of studio artificiality, of matte drawings and miniatures and optical effects. It creates a world that never could be.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (Jun 15, 1990)
“A hard-core Tracy fan, Beatty was committed to making his film more of an homage to the comic strip than a singular adaptation. He didn’t go for the dark and gritty; he wanted something that looked like what it was, and Beatty’s desire to do just that turned Dick Tracy into one of modern cinema’s best adaptations of the two-dimensional storytelling form.” —Kate Erbland, Vanity Fair
