DICK TRACY
Warren Beatty's film from Chester Gould's strip cartoon
Identification Sheet:
1989, USA
Running time: 107 minutes
Direction: Warren Beaty
Main characters:
Warren Beatty as Dick Tracy
Dustin Hoffman playing Mumbles
Al Pacino and Paul Sorvino as the gangsters Big Boy Caprice and Lips Manlis
Madonna portrais the outlawed Breathless Mahoney, in love with Dick Tracy.
A claimed loyalty of the adaptation:
Warren Beatty has always brought out his loyalty to Chester Guold's strip cartoon so much that it became a selling point. Its results are obvious. The hard attempt to keep the style of the strip cartoon, reproduce characteristic faces, distorted features, almost expressionistic traits of certain characters, has been a success. In particular, bad guys' faces were really successful and Dustin Hoffman is, as usual, unrecognizable. The general view of the village where Dick Tracy works is also part of the film's success since it looks more like a drawing rather than a real scenario.
Chester Gould's cinematographic frames are reused by Beatty, mainly for the emblematic shot of the scene in which Dick Tracy, in touch with the police, answers to his watch-radio-micro by his face "I'm on my way". This loyalty and commitment to the original work is spread through Hollywood's production during this last decade. Thus you can name Coppola's Dracula, very close to Bram Stoker's book, or Brannagh's Frankenstein, which claims to represent Mary Shelley's work.
The TV series before the film
Like other popular comic heroes (Batman, Spiderman and many others) Dick Tracy began on television. Between 1937 and 1961, ten adaptations have followed one another. Over and over again, episodes have been produced.