Cash movie sex

YOU DON'T LIKE comic strips? Neither do I. You particularly question the value of turning them into movies? Same here. You think that, after Reds and Ishtar, you've had it with Warren Beatty.? Put it here, partner. You think you'll skip Dick Tracy? You're dead wrong.

I can't say I ever read Dick Tracy, if read" is the word for ingesting a comic strip. There is something very curious about this hybrid genre, part book, part movie. But it isn't a book, because it comes in snippets, snippets that go on forever, even after the author's death; and because it lacks description and reflection. And it isn't a movie because, among other things, it can move only by hops and skips. What, then, is its neither-fish-nor-fowl fascination? I suppose it's that it is both fish and fowl: enough like reading to make its devotees feel that they are reading, but without the effort; and enough like a movie to allow children and others lacking discrimination or the price of admission to enjoy a sort of cinema des pauvres.

You will recall that that French phrase is a metaphor for sex, the inexpensive substitute for moviegoing. Such, too, is the comic strip, which is, moreover, a surrogate for imagination. For it is the imagination that must body forth the images an author evokes in words; once the author supplies the pictures as well, the imagination can safely go to sleep. And yet the lowly form has attracted genuine artists: Frans Masereel, for one, the Belgian whose novels in woodcuts were extended comic strips. Also, in a lesser way, Alex Raymond, the creator of two remarkably drawn comic strips, Flash Gordon and Secret Agent X-9. Chester Gould, the author of Dick Tracy, was something else. The ideal comic-stripper would have the novelist's mastery of plot, the playwright's mastery of dialogue, and the artist's mastery of drawing. Gould had none of these, but he was a smart sociologist: he knew what Americans in 1931 wanted. This was the Depression, made even more depressing by the prevalence of crime syndicates, in which matter Chicago, where the action was laid, was anything but the Second City. To meet Depression needs, the hero had to be the detective as common man; honest as the day, night, year are long; clean as a whistle; and, though pitted against the world's most vicious and clever criminals, invincible. Always in mortal danger from his adversaries, our stalwart, smart as all getout, would get out of any predicament and, finally, get them. But because even the crudest clientele can't take nonstop invincibility, the cartoonist had to devise ways of letting the bad guys gain control at times, either by saddling his hero with a secondary, less powerful identity (as in Superman and Batman), or by creating a large enough number of colorful scoundrels so that they could temporarily usurp center stage. Thus Dick Tracy came by its rogue's gallery of funny-repellent, grisly-ludicrous caricatures: Flattop, Lips Manlis, the Rodent, the Brow, Pruneface, Little Face, No Face (i.e., the Blank), and whatever permutations face and its lack can undergo. Not every beloved monster of the strip could make it to the Strip: Hollywood's version is bereft of, for instance, that unholy family, B. 0. Plenty, Gravel Gertie, and Sparkle Plenty.

But what a chance for makeup and trick photography to become merry bedfellows! Which brings me to the subject of sex, whereof, in the comic strip, there had to be very little. Even Dick's girl, Tess Truehart, existed mostly to show that Dick was a real man, the kind that has a loving woman, but not, surely, sex. Not even conjugal sex, which is for breeding, and we know that family life interferes with crime busting. As it is, whenever Dick gets the least bit cozy with Tess, the sound of the two-way wrist radio (gadgets, America's true passion) is heard, summoning him to make war against crime instead, the archetypal case of noncoitus interruptus.

Still, purity, like any other cake, is most enjoyable when we can eat it and, have it, too. (Digression: m our ignorant times, one keeps hearing "have your cake and eat it, too," which is nonsense, like "I could care less." Anyone can have a cake in the fridge and, at a propitious time, eat it, too; but actual eating utterly precludes any kind of having.) So, for the strip to have it both ways, there had to be an impure woman as well, to tease with wicked possibilities.

That vamp, Breathless Mahoney, is played by Madonna, but the relationship with Tracy doesn't go beyond exchanges of highly suggestive oneliners and a single, passionate kiss. Now, when you consider how well informed we are about Madonna and Warren's offscreen romance (I am tempted to think that it is their press agents who are in bed together), you have a perfect example of having your cake both ways. But even in the movie, Madonna gets to wear the sexiest imaginable outfits, have a comehither look in every part of her largely visible anatomy, and sing some pretty terrific Sondheim songs. Any second, the viewer expects, the breasts will fall out of the gown, or else she andBeatty will fall into bed together. The former, we read, actually happened on the set. And these fall-out costumes, by the way, are by Milena Canonero, probably the best costume designer in movies today.

Clearly, Beatty was not about to deprive us, for the sake of mere faithfulness to the Urtext, of the comely countenances of Madonna, Glenne Headly (Tess), and Warren Beatty. So these are allowed to look like themselves; similarly pristine, but for a few adscititious freckles, is Charlie Korsmo, the child actor who plays the Kid, that immaculately conceived (because adopted) offspring of Dick and Tess's. Known at first only as the Kid, the sole name he answers to, he saves Dick's life in the crime wars and is rewarded with a police badge and a certificate proclaiming him Dick Tracy Jr. For the youngsters in the audience, the wish-fulfillment progression from Kid to Tracy Jr. to becoming the future adult Dick Tracy is as inevitable as it is pleasurable.

For adult audiences, there is the ingenious fusion of animation and live action, a device the Disney people, who produced Dick Tracy, pioneered. Its previous high point was Roger Rabbit; but there it was merely a matter of mixing cartoon characters and live actors. Here the fusion extends rapturously to the sets. Bits of real city well, seemingly real city, for it was all shot in the studio) are combined with manifestly cartoon backgrounds, so as to have them blend and yet not wholly blend, thereby not only abolishing the difference between cartoon and reality, but also reminding us that that is what's being done-another specimen of the aforementioned cake.

Again, though Beatty wears the yellow fedora and topcoat of the cartoon Tracy, they are now more elegant, unrumpled, casually unbuttoned-the coat, anyway. This is a Tracy for the Nineties, which is also why his profile cannot be that famous meat cleaver with a small, square bump on it (an epicleaver?). Further, the mostly primary colors of the comic strip are preserved, but deployed with supreme artfulness cinematography by Vittorio Storaro, no less). These hallooing colors caress more than they grate, and expand into symbolism well beyond the technical and intellectual limits of Thirties newspepper publishing. The submachine guns, which spray away like loose salt shakers, at one point spell out a message in bullet holes. We have heard of the camerastylo; this is the mitrailleuse-stylo.

And then the fun of the rat-tat-tat dialogue, especially between Dick and Breathless. It is credited to Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. (Top Gun, Legal Eagles, Turner & Hooch), but sounds too good for them; Bo Goldman is said to have lent a hand. To quote only what other spoilsports have already made public, here's Breathless to Tracy, who calls her in for questioning: "Thanks for calling. I was wondering what a girl had to do to get arrested." Tracy: Wearing a dress like that is a step in the right direction." Or: No grief for Lips Lit slain boyfriend]?" I'm wearing black underwear." Or our Circe's Parthian shot: I know how you feel: You want to hit me or kiss me. I get a lot of that."

Equally funny are some of the monologues of the supreme crime boss, Big Boy Caprice, spectacularly played by Al Pacino. His game is to drop absurd apothegms, then ascribe them to the likes of Nietzsche, e.g., If you aren't for the people, you can't buy the people. Lincoln." A fellow who covers his victims with cement before nailing them into a pine box, or turns them into mincemeat via the gears of a drawbridge, he promises the following menu to Tracy: You're going to have chopped sweetheart." Tess, too, gets her sparklers, e.g., as she is about to rush to the greenhouse where she works, "I have those new delphiniums coming in."