IN A WORLD THAT NEVER COULD BE
Warren Beatty’s big- screen adaptation of the long- running comic strip screens at 7 p. m. Monday at the Music Box Theatre, a presentation of the Chicago Film Society.
There always was something inbred about the Dick Tracy comic strip, some suggestion that all of its characters had been mutated by the same cosmic rays, and then locked together in a bizarre loony bin of crime.
Tracy was the first comic strip I encountered after I outgrew funny animals, and what struck me was that the physical appearance of the characters always mirrored their souls, or occupations. They looked like what they were, and what you saw was what you got, from the square- jawed Tracy barking into his wrist radio, to Pruneface, Flattop and the others.
Warren Beatty’s production of “Dick Tracy” approaches the material with the same fetishistic glee I felt when I was reading the strip. The Tracy stories didn’t depend really on plot — they were too spun- out for that — and of course they didn’t depend on suspense. Tracy always won.
What they were about was the interaction of these grotesque people, doomed by nature to wear their souls on their faces. We see this process at work in one of the film’s first scenes, where a poker game is in progress, and everyone around the table looks like a sideshow attraction, from Little Face, whose features are at the middle of a sea of dissipation, to the Brow, always deep in shallow thought.
Another of the movie’s opening shots establishes, with glorious excess, the Tracy universe. The camera begins on a window, and pulls back, and moves up until we see the skyline of the city, and then it seems to fly through the air, turning as it moves so that we sweep above an endless urban vista. Skyscrapers and bridges and tenements and elevated railways crowd each other all the way to the distant horizon, until we realize this is the grandest and most squalid city that ever was.
And then the camera moves in on one of those buildings, and as we see people again, we realize that everything we have seen before — every skyscraper, every bridge — was created in a movie studio. “Dick Tracy” is a masterpiece of studio artificiality, of matte drawings and miniatures and optical effects. It creates a world that never could be.
Into this theater of the night comes striding the peculiar figure of a man in a yellow hat and a yellow raincoat: Dick Tracy. When Chester Gould first conceived him all those years ago, did it seem unlikely that a police detective would wear yellow? Maybe not, since Tracy didn’t live in a city but in a comic strip, and the primary colors had to jump off the page. Beatty’s decision to shoot “Dick Tracy” only in the seven basic colors of comic strips is a good one, because this is a movie about creatures of the imagination, about people who live in rooms where every table lamp looks like a Table Lamp and every picture on the wall represents only a Picture on the Wall.
Tracy in the comics always was an enigma, a figure without emotion or complexity. Warren Beatty plays his Tracy as a slightly more human figure, a cop who does have a personality, however slight. To the degree that the human side of Tracy peeks through, I believe, the character is diminished; the critics who have described Tracy as too shallow have missed the entire point, which is that we are not talking about real people here, but about archetypes. Tracy should be as square as his jaw.
Last summer’s “Batman,” a movie I found disappointing, was at least a triumph of special effects — of set design and art direction.
“Dick Tracy,” which is a sweeter, more optimistic movie, outdoes even “Batman” in the visual departments. This is a movie in which every frame contains some kind of artificial effect. An entire world has been built here, away from the daylight and the realism of ordinary city streets. And “Dick Tracy” also reflects the innocence of the comic strip that inspired it. Unlike the movie version of “Batman,” which hyped up the level of its violence to a degree that could have been truly disturbing to younger viewers, the PGrated “Dick Tracy” contains no obscenity, no blood, and no “realistic” violence. It is one of the most original and visionary fantasies I’ve seen on a screen.