Dick Tracy (1990)

[The Deadman]

This movie might not be the greatest but I certainly enjoy it.

[oldmanwinters]

The cast is certainly impressive, considering it's 1990 and a lot of those folks were near their peak name-recognition.

I love the cinematography and set-design, and how the whole thing feels like it's trying to turn a newspaper comic strip into real movie.

[IMJ]

This movie is like Robin Williams Popeye - flawed but only because they literally put the source material directly on the screen. And it shouldn't be any other way.

[Sumac]

Amazing movie.
Takes all tropes and tone of original and shamelessly adapts it "as is".

I can understand why its not for everyone, but whether you like it or not, it has a strong vision.

[Leo656]

Love it. One of my all-time favorites. It's not 1:1 with the comic strips, but is one of the single greatest examples of what it means to be "spiritually faithful" - streamlining and otherwise making mostly-innocuous changes when it's all but absolutely necessary but never going into "just change things for the sake of changing things" as too many adaptations do.

It definitely borrows a bit heavily from Burton's Batman, but I think a strong case could be made that in a vacuum it's a "better", or at least more straightforward and less self-indulgent movie. As filmmakers go, Burton and Beatty could not have been any more different in their approach to each film, so the general idea that Beatty was "mimicking" Burton is most likely false. Some similarities were unavoidable once the decision was made to have most of the action scenes at night, as well as have Danny Elfman do the score, but whereas Burton's production of Batman was infamously messy behind the scenes with Burton himself making up a lot of things on the fly, and subsequently scenes like the museum and cathedral feeling a bit tacked-on just to let Nicholson vamp - because they were, essentially, done that way for that reason - Beatty on Dick Tracy was slavishly devoted to the idea that everything in the movie make sense and not just be there to be there. They're both great, but over the years the idea has persisted that Dick Tracy was a "rip-off" of Burton's Batman and I feel like that's over-simplifying and not entirely accurate, nor fair.

They really put a ton of work into that movie, especially the costumes and make-up. When I was a kid I bought a book about the making-of and I must have read it a hundred times over the years. One of my favorite things is how they used so many matte paintings for backgrounds; between that and a strict color palette for the entire film, they totally nailed the comic strip aesthetic perfectly. To ensure maximum fidelity, every single color in the film is represented by only one specific shade no matter the context. Only one shade of red, blue, orange, etc., throughout the entire film as a way to replicate how it would have been done in a vintage Sunday strip. It seems like a small thing but it affected the entire film in a big way.

A couple of my friends and I were practically obsessed with the movie and everything that went with it. We had tons of the toys, books, and other miscellaneous collectibles. I still have all of it. Although the battery for my Two-Way Wrist Radio died some time around 1992 and I never replaced it. I doubt it would even work now, anyway, but I still have it. I was recently able to collect all the missing action figures from the line that I'd missed as a kid, except for The Blank which I doubt I'll ever own as it's over $2000 now.

As a side-effect, the movie brought with it a resurgence of the old comic strips, as various companies put out multiple reprint collections in both color and black & white throughout the early and mid-1990s. I very quickly amassed quite a collection of comic books, softcover collected editions, and even a few hardcover collections. I'd have to check but I *think* I have all of the strips in some form from the original through the 1980s Max Allan Collins stuff. But if I don't have everything I definitely have MOST of it. Regardless, it goes without saying that without the movie - itself only a modest success - most of those reprints never would have been made, or at least not been so ubiquitous.

The biggest "flaw" the movie has is simply that by necessity, if all the iconic villains were to be represented on-screen then they had to be broken down to basically one-dimensional representations of themselves, distinguished only by their respective physical abnormalities. It's admittedly a huge shame, BUT it was the only way to get them all in there. If you left any of them out, hardcore fans would complain they were left out; as it is, many of those same fans hate that their favorite villains like Itchy or Flattop are altogether different from their "real" characters, since nobody besides Big Boy gets anything to do except crack wise and shoot guns. But most people concede that at least everyone was in there and that in itself is mostly good enough.

There was simply no way at all to faithfully recreate all the bad guys and their arcs, as in the strip each of them had their own epic saga that would easily have taken up the entire running time of its own movie. So they were stuck with either doing one villain and one arc and making that the entire movie - which wouldn't have been very satisfying - OR they could do the "jambalaya" approach and just stick every character in there just so they all got face time, which is what they did. I have to say that was probably for the best. Just seeing every single one of the iconic villains together in one place more than makes up for the fact that they're all "In Name Only" versions, in my opinion anyway. It loses points for fidelity but makes up for it by being a blast.

So, yeah, huge fan. Big, huge fan. To say it changed my life would be accurate, considering how much Tracy stuff I've amassed since then. I'd never heard of the character before the movie but I've been a huge fan ever since.

[TigerClaw]

I saw it at the theater when it first came out, It was quite a unique movie for its time.

Here's a video that does a deep dive about the making of this movie.