Dick Tracy (film)

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Yeah.

I'm on my way.

In 1990, Walt Disney Pictures took Chester Gould's relatively simple crime-drama comic strip and re-imagined it as a big-budget extravaganza with big-name actors, colorful costumes, special effects and plenty of music. Warren Beatty both directed the film and starred in the title role.

The setting of Dick Tracy is a Chicago-like city sometime in the early 1930s. Detective Dick Tracy (Beatty) is the most dogged plainclothes cop on the street, dividing his time between punching out mooks and making sure young delinquents get sent to the orphanage. A new challenge to his authority soon emerges in the form of up-and-coming gang boss Big Boy Caprice (Al Pacino), who unites all his former rivals into a citywide gangland coalition. Now Tracy's only hope in foiling Big Boy's schemes lies with nightclub singer Breathless Mahoney (Madonna), who is prepared to help the detective....for a price.

The movie also starred Glenne Headley as Tess Trueheart and Charlie Korsmo as the nameless "Kid." It won Academy Awards for Best Art Direction, Best Makeup, and Best Original Song (Stephen Sondheim's "Sooner or Later"). Pacino was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor (in a Playboy interview, he actually listed it among his top 5 performances).

One of the striking features of the film was its attempt to replicate, in live action, the flat colors and limited palette of the comic strip. Every yellow thing was the same bright yellow as Dick Tracy's trademark outfit, every blue thing was the same blue, every red thing the same red, and so on. And unlike, say, Sin City, which did it with computer tinting, Dick Tracy did it by actually painting and dyeing the physical objects those colors.


Tropes used in Dick Tracy (film) include:
  • Award Bait Song: All five of the songs written for the film by Stephen Sondheim. "Sooner Or Later" took home the Oscar for Best Original Song.
  • Awesome McCoolname: Largely inverted. The gangster's villainous monikers are all actually rather unflattering; Pruneface, Itchy, etc. There are some exceptions, like Big Boy Caprice.
  • Badass in a Nice Suit: The majority of the bad guys, the good guys too.
  • Badass Longcoat: Being about the same color as a banana does nothing to make it any less badass.
  • Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: The Blank (also good example of Villainous Rescue).
  • Big Eater: The Kid. Justified, of course, as he's a vagrant who clearly hasn't had a decent meal in a long time. One early scene shows that he's hungry enough to eat food he finds in a trash can.
  • The Blank: Trope namer, in this case a faceless (literally) mystery man who undermines Big Boy's operation.
  • Bloodless Carnage: While the movie doesn't shy away from the fact that when a character good or bad dies, they stay dead; The movie however in a unique surprise doesn't show a single drop of blood, fracture, wound or bruise from any character that has gotten shot or even punched. Most of the latter mainly being the result of almost every character being Made Of Iron. With prime examples including Dick Tracy himself taking many strikes from Big Boy whacking him with a metal pipe. Yet all that does is slow him down briefly.
  • Bluff the Imposter: The villains do this to Tracy.
  • Boomerang Bigot:

Kid: I don't like dames.
Tess Trueheart: Neither do I.

  • Bully Hunter:
    • Tracy, when attacking a hobo who's been abusing the Kid.
    • The Blank as well, although perhaps more of a Vigilante Man.
  • Catch Phrase: "I'm on my way."
  • Cement Shoes: In this case, it's an entire cement suit.
  • Co-Dragons: Itchy and Flattop. This is a big change from the comics, in which Flattop was probably Tracy's Arch Enemy.
  • Comm Links
  • Cool and Unusual Punishment: How Mumbles is interrogated at the police station.
  • Cowboy Cop: And how!
  • Da Chief: Actually the District Attorney, but he fills the same role of breaking Tracy's balls.
  • Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangster!
  • Dark Is Not Evil: Played with. The Blank is indeed evil, but may qualify as an Anti-Villain.
  • Death Trap
  • Determinator: Tracy embodies this trope in two ways. The first way is when he chases The Kid, he managed to across town, from the Diner to a rail way without having to catch his breath and while he lost the kid after a passing train covered his tracks, he still managed to track him down to Steve The Tramp's shack. The other way is throughout the entire film. He's so determined to get Big Boy one way or another that getting framed and sent to jail only serves to slow him down rather than stop him.
  • Dirty Coward: Big Boy instructs all his men to gather in their cars and drive out into the street in front of the Club Ritz to meet the police in a final showdown - but himself chickens out at the last minute, attempting to flee across the river with Tess as his hostage.
  • Disney Villain Death: Subverted, as Big Boy is pushed over a ledge.
  • The Don: Big Boy Caprice.
  • Dude in Distress: Tracy winds up as this on more than one occasion.
  • Enemy Mine: Ultimately subverted in the case of The Blank.
    • "The enemy of my enemy is my enemy." But....if the first enemy is the enemy of his second enemy, then that makes his second enemy his friend. But he can't be his friend, because he's his enemy. But that means....
  • Exact Words: Dick Tracy's threat to make Breathless Mahoney sweat out the truth under the lights was not a euphemism. As Mumbles knows for certain. What Tracy means, is that during interrogation he can subject any suspect of interest to sitting in a room, with a huge spotlight pointed at them. A light close enough that not only does it nearly blind them, but the heat from it will cause one to sweat profusely. To add an especially well timed insult to injury, Tracy tempts mumbles into talking by offering Mumbles water, teasing him with it and drinking it in front of him. All while Mumbles is sweating and desperate for a drink.
  • The Fagin: "Steve The Tramp" has "Kid" steal for him. Dick Tracy tracks Kid back to Steve's shack and beats Steve up, freeing Kid.
  • Femme Fatale: Breathless loves playing with this trope.
  • Five-Bad Band:
    • Big Bad: Alphonse "Big Boy" Caprice.
    • The Dragon: Flattop.
    • The Evil Genius: Numbers.
    • The Brute: Pruneface.
      • Before aligning with Big Boy, had his own Dragon, "Influence".
    • The Dark Chick: Itchy (high squeaky voice).
      • A better candidate for The Dark Chick might be Texie Garcia, who seems to be more or less the social equal of the male gangsters and is the only woman in the movie Big Boy doesn't make a point of treating like dirt.
    • The Sixth Ranger Traitor: 88 Keys (helps The Blank frame Big Boy for Tess' kidnapping).
  • Follow the Leader: Although Beatty's development of the film had been in the works as long as Tim Burton's Batman, it still retained a lot of elements that drew comparisons since Batman was released a year earlier. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone noted that they both contained: "a loner hero, a grotesque villain, a blond bombshell, a marketable pop soundtrack and a no-mercy merchandising campaign." That also didn't factor in the Art Deco-inspired set design, the original working script being worked on by Tom Mankiewicz (both films would basically discard them), and Danny Elfman as composer (and Travers noted that his Tracy score was incredibly similar to his one for Batman).
    • There's also the fact that the traits Tavers cited could probably be used to describe a ridiculous number of films. That's like saying RoboCop is a ripoff of Friday the 13th because both feature "a tormented man given a powerful new body to take revenge on the element responsible for his death".
  • Foreshadowing: In the movie's opening action sequence, we see five hoodlums playing poker in a warehouse. One of them draws aces and eights - the "Dead Man's Hand" - just before a car crashes into the warehouse and all five men are violently shot to death.
  • Frame-Up: Tracy is framed for murder.
  • Genre Savvy: Tess didn't even have to look at The Kid, to know that he was gonna swipe the money Tracy left to pay for dinner.

 The Kid: You two married?
Tess: No, would you like a broken arm? -The Kid puts the dollar bill back where he found it.-

  • Getting Crap Past the Radar: Holy crap, for a PG film you have Breathless in a sheer nightdress, wearing barely anything at all bordering on Nipple-and-Dimed.
    • Not to mention the Polar Bear water cooler with the faucet placed in the obvious place.
  • Gold Digger: The nightclub song "More" pretty much says it all: "Got my diamonds/Got my yacht/Got a guy I adore/....Something's better than nothing, yes/But nothing's better than more, more, more!"
  • Gonk: Kind of a tradition for Dick Tracy villains. So many of the criminals seen in this film are literally inhumanly grotesque. But not only do they not feel shunned or isolated from "normal" humans; they actually are quite proud of themselves, and even consider themselves pillars of the community! An especially striking example is when Tracy busts into the Club Ritz in an attempt to arrest Big Boy Caprice for illegal gambling: Pruneface acts offended, and swears that he would never set foot inside any establishment that allowed such a thing!
  • Good Old Fisticuffs / Rapid Fire Fisticuffs: In Beatty's attempt to portray the fight scenes in the comics, Tracy's fighting style consists of different varieties of punching combos that mix between these two tropes. With the former being used on Steve the Tramp, when Tracy rescues The Kid from him and the latter being used on Big Boy himself when he's trying to rescue Tess from him.
  • Good Is Not Soft: Tracy, his line of work aside is pretty much a Nice Guy, but when it comes to organized crime he relies on brutal methods to get the truth out. Such as ripping the phone cord out before handing Flattop the phone and writing it off as him waving his One Phone Call right. As well as making Mumbles sweat under the lights, while deliberately drinking water in front of him to make him confess. The latter of which comes in handy later on when it turns out there's a hidden recorder inside the water cooler.

 Tracy: Make a note Patton, they waved their right to a phone call.

Big Boy Caprice: Around me, if a woman don't wear mink, she don't wear nuttin'.
Breathless Mahoney: Well, I look good both ways.

  • Redemption Equals Death: The Blank.
  • Red Right Hand: Every criminal in the city.
  • The Reveal: Turns out the Blank is really...wait, who was he again? I forgot...
  • The Roaring Twenties: The Club Ritz is stuck in this era (since it's technically supposed to be the Thirties), with Charleston-dancing flappers and illegal booz - er, gambling.
  • Samus Is a Girl: The Blank.
  • Scenery Porn: Virtually every one of the reviews for the film, positive and negative, heaped a lot of praise on the art direction, set design, and color scheme, with some like Roger Ebert even saying it outdid Tim Burton's Batman in the eye-candy department.
  • Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You: Or rather, Warren Beatty is shooting at you with a tommy gun. See the movie poster above.
  • The Starscream: The Blank, to Big Boy Caprice. And, ironically, Big Boy himself: he betrayed his former friend and mentor Lips Manlis and took over his criminal empire.
  • Take a Third Option: Dick Tracy desperately wants Breathless Mahoney to take the witness stand when they bring Big Boy Caprice to trial, although she points out that this will probably result in her death. Caprice, meanwhile, fully expects Mahoney to stay silent, if for no other reason than sheer terror. Mahoney ultimately decides to become The Blank and set both Tracy and Caprice up for a fall.
  • Tempting Fate: When Tess and Tracy discuss the latter taking a desk job, he says he's as likely to get a new girlfriend than he would a desk job. Cue every scene after of Breathless Mahoney trying to seduce Dick Tracy.
  • The Adventure Continues: Tracy manages to propose to Tess at the end, but has to rush off to deal with a robbery in progress, proving he'll never truly be off-duty.
  • Those Two Bad Guys: Itchy and Flattop.
  • Trademark Favorite Food: A few characters have had prominence in this trope. Big Boy has an affinity for Walnuts which Tracy tries to use against him as evidence of Lips' death. Tracy himself likes chili, even cooking some in his office hotplate before interrogating Flattop. Lips Manlis likes oysters and was first seen eating a platter full, before Flattop captures him and Breathless.
  • Train Escape: The Kid pulls one to lose Tracy during The Chase.
  • The Trope Kid: Kid.
  • The Unintelligible: Mumbles.
  • The Vamp: Breathless Mahoney.
  • Vasquez Always Dies: Played with. Breathless Mahoney is a lot tougher than Tess Trueheart, but she's prettier as well.
  • Villainous Breakdown When Tracy interrogates Mumbles a second time, he reveals the water cooler he offered him while sweating him earlier has a hidden recorder in it. Mumbles at first was shocked, but then laughs smugly confident that his incoherent speaking wouldn't work. When Tracy slows the tape down however, Mumbles realizes that he left some coherent evidence on it. Specifically, him saying "Big Boy did it." He goes from smug to breaking down in tears, begging Tracy, while still maintaining his speech impediment. When Tracy threatens to send the tape to Big Boy, he talks normally revealing what he knew about Tracy's Frame-up.

Mumbles: Wait, waitwaitwait. 88 keys, the Piano man, set you up. Big Boy paid him to get you out of the way.

  • The Voiceless: Played with. Mumbles can talk, but since no one can understand him it doesn't matter. He actually intentionally screws with people in this way, at one point giving a full confession to the cops, gleefully certain that they have no idea what he's saying.
  • We Can Rule Together: But Tracy will have none of it.
    • The first time this gets invoked is when Big Boy Caprice tries to bribe him. It seems to work as Tracy seems to accept the money. Only to show he was only gathering the bills to throw them back at Big Boy's face. Which is the closest one will ever see to Tracy flipping Big Boy off.
    • The second time is when the Blank tries to negotiate with Tracy. Tempting him to kill Big Boy by offering to own the town with Tracy together. Unlike with Big Boy, The Blank's offer doesn't work not just because Dick Tracy is incorruptible; but because he figured out The Blank was Breathless Mahoney and was counting on her hesitation to kill him to stop her.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: Poor officer Pat Patton. After Dick Tracy has him jump down into the Club Ritz attic to catapult Tracy out of the locked room and back onto the roof, he's never mentioned again. We never see Tracy tell any fellow officers to go get him, so for all we know he's still trapped there.
  • Would Hurt a Child: Steve the Tramp would, and Tracy shows him exactly how he feels about guys who hurt kids. Nor does Steve seem all-too good against someone who can fight back.
  • Wounded Gazelle Gambit: While The Blank and 88 Keys are framing Tracy for D.A. Fletcher's murder, 88 Keys loudly protests that Tracy (actually The Blank in Tracy's yellow coat) is threatening to shoot him.
  • Wretched Hive
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