True Romance (1993)

Love it quite a bit. Took me years to realize that the first act of the film is essentially Taxi Driver.

I think that was really the ghost of Elvis advising Clarence. Before the shoot out, Elvis picks up a gun, spins the chamber, flips it back in, and sets it down. How could he do that if he wasn't real?

Kilmer does a great job as Elvis.

It's my unofficial pick for best Tarantino film, and probably Tony Scott's best. Solid direction without all that hyperkinetic editing and camerawork (which by now is at parody level) that makes his later films such dreck.

Even though Quentin wrote it out of sequence, Scott's linear presentation was a much wiser choice. The first act courtship lures you into the story before turning into a bugfuck crazy chase.

And of course, the cast is unbelievable. Everything with Pitt is gold, especially when he's giving directions to the goons. "and... you keep drivin". Plus you've got Michael Rappaport as the sidekick.

And it doesn't seem to matter what side of table Sizemore is on; he's 0 for 2 as far as Tony Scott Mexican standoffs are concerned. He was probably offered a role in Domino, but even in a coke-addled state decided he had too much self-respect.

I love the shot of Bronson Pinchot (Elliot) laughing maniacally as he tears ass down the highway with a giant bag of coke some floosy working his knob. How quickly things go bad....

Love this film to death. Every role, no matter how minor, feels like an actual person instead of a movie "character" (with the possible exception of Drexel, but Oldman is so damn good he makes this over-the-top pimp into something believable.) Bronson Pinchot is golden; his breakdown in the elevator is terrific. And, the Hopper/Walken scene is as close to perfect as it gets.

No love for Pinchot or Sal Rubinek (who I think is supposed to be the son of Donnie from Inglorious Basterds), Spike?

I love this crazy movie. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is my favorite Val Kilmer performance, but I think this and Spartan are close second.

I like to imagine Rubinek's character, high as a kite, ranting to his employees about how his father was this crazy guy with a bat called The Bear Jew who scared the crap out of Nazi scum and personally killed Hitler.

The eggplant scene is one of the best written scenes in movies. So many great performaces to name.

Anybody here watch the Tarantino Cut? Makes the movie better imo, cuz it takes out that stupid rollercoaster scene that Scott put in to make things more "actiony" and it swtiches up the timeline Tarantino style. Also an extended Sameul L Jackson convo with Drexel.

I am glad Tarantino sold this script so he could make Reservoir Dogs though, I couldnt imagine Dogs being made by somebody else and being half as good as it is.

Whenever this movie is brought up around my dad he makes me do a Drexel impression.

"You thought it was white-boy day."

I'm really glad Tony Scott changed the ending. Quentin's one was way too bleak. I also have to bring up Chris Penn's turn as the frantic F.B.I. agent. So good. "COOODDY!"

Seconding the love for Saul Rubinek - one of our most underused character actors. His work here is tremendous. Every single line of dialog he delivers is peerless. He and Bronson Pinchot are actually the secret weapons in the movie. I love this line from Pinchot...

"You... Uh... You want me to uh... suck his dick?
Oh... Oh who the FUCK is Dick"

It's my favorite Tarantino because it's his most personal. It's also my introduction to Tarantino. I hadn't seen Reservoir Dogs. I rented this movie one night, watched it and spent the entire time wondering who was this brilliant man that had written a script that seemed to have been torn from my dreams. Everything is done on a level of absolute reality. Before Pulp Fiction or Dogs, I was marveling at Tarantino's voice. And how he was capturing the reality of how people talk as well as the mundane elements that make up most every day conversations.

And it's also Tony Scott's best film because it's probably the only one that is 100% true to the material. (Last Boy Scout maybe being a close second). Scott just puts himself into storyteller mode and lets the script come alive. The film is stylish but not distractingly so and Scott's directorial choices all serve to make it a better film.

One thing about True Romance is that it seems like the Tarantino script most influenced by Elmore Leonard. The small conversations, the juuuust slightly weird characters, the pop culture references. It feels like an un-published Leonard novel. That's not a knock on Tarantino, who also has a unique voice, but he's said Leonard is a major influence, so I find it interesting.

Agreed that it's Tony Scott's best film. It feels like an epic road trip fairy tale as a gonzo crime movie. That last shoot-out is great.

Fuck, I know what I'm watching tonight.

The Gandolfini beating up Arquette scene continues to be one of the most emotionally (And physically) brutal scenes I've ever seen due to how blase he is about the whole thing versus how emotionally invested she is. When I first saw it, I was convinced Slater would burst in in the nick of time up until it started cutting to him at the hamburger joint talking to some guy about whatever and I realized that no one was going to come to her rescue.

Overall the film is a whole whack of actors at their best. It feels like an ensemble cast who had been working together for years.

It's also important to remember that at the time it was released it was marketed as an action packed romance. A lot of my buddies were dragged to it against their wills by their girlfriends only to have every party's expectations inverted.

I do like that Scott had Clarence live.

I think the most important thing is that the movie lives up to its title. I watch it and I believe that Alabama and Clarence have a passionate, out of nowhere, true-love connection. Without it, it'd just be a cool action movie, but that bond makes it something special.

I am also glad that Michael Rapaport escapes the finale unscathed. He's like the only completely innocent dope in the whole movie.

"Do you know how much cocaine this is, Clarence?"
"No, how much is it, Dick?"
"Well....I don't know either, but it's a fuckin' LOT!"

Gold. What's great about this movie is that it's really, really funny. But Tarantino has that gift of putting great character-based humor into ALL his flicks.

The film is also stocked with terrific names: Drexl Spivey, Dick Ritchie, Nicholson & Dimes.

The Hopper/Walken scene is total ad lib though, or so I have always heard.

Arquette was dead sexy. You see her in the promos for whatever show she is in on CBS now and that seems hard to believe, but, man alive...I would have liked very much to have spent the better part of a three day weekend in a moderately priced hotel with her back in '93.

Now not so much.

No. It's completely scripted. The anecdote that Hopper tells Walken is something that one of Tarantino's uncles told him when he was a kid. Walken telling Hopper: "...You're a cantaloupe" is ad-libbed. And the laughter of everyone is apparently genuine because they were having such a good time. But the rest is exactly as scripted by Tarantino.

.......

I'm glad Tony Scott fudged with the structure. I don't know that the movie would play as well with Tarantino's usual back-and-forth structure.

What's interesting about the Hopper/Walken scene as originally scripted is that Walken's character isn't amused at all by the anecdote; he becomes enraged and blows Hopper away. There's no "I love this guy. Beautiful." He's especially pissed that he's forced to kill someone personally (instead of ordering someone killed, one assumes) for the first time in years. (Which is where "I haven't killed anybody *bang* since 1984 *bang bang*" comes from.)

So what the scene as filmed turns into is a weird sort of mercy on Walken's part. This guy, Clarence's dad, has serious balls and isn't anything like the bums Walken usually encounters. It's like Walken's character genuinely enjoys the exchange. But Sicilian mobsters are particularly nasty pricks. They would've tortured the fuck out of Hopper (think about the head-in-the-vise guy in Casino). So it's like Walken now doesn't want to see that happen. But he knows Hopper has to die. So he plays it off as saving face, and blows him away. In effect he willingly goes along with what Hopper wants him to do, which is to kill him before the information is tortured out of him.

The actors most likely elevated that scene on the day, and what results is much more interesting and odd than what QT actually wrote, which is Walken predictably getting pissed off and shooting Hopper. Walken, in the scene, doesn't seem all that angry except at the fact that he now has to keep looking for Clarence (until one of the goombahs finds Clarence's info on the fridge).

There was also another Walken scene in the script as I recall; don't know whether it was filmed and then dropped, but it seemed kind of extraneous.

It was shot and is in the deleted scenes on the DVD. It's not a very good scene. Just a conversation between Walken and his thugs when they're on their way to a wedding reception for his son. I think the scene was to have taken place after Alabama kills Virgil because they discuss his whereabouts. But it doesn't make sense because they would know he was killed. And the scene comes off as redundant.

Though it would have given us more of Victor Argo, and that's not a bad thing at all.

.....

Completely agree that the actors made that scene as special as it is. Though the dialog does crackle. But they made a good scene on the page into something for the history books on screen. They may not have ad-libbed the scene but it's a master class in exactly how important good actors are for a script to really work.

Yeah, up to a certain point the dialogue is all Tarantino. Walken can certainly do menacing, but he brings something more to it — a certain odd tenderness, almost. And the way Hopper plays it, his monologue doesn't even sound racist; you believe in his essential goodness, and you know he's just relating that story (with all the well-placed "niggers" to drive it home to the historically race-sensitive Sicilians) for the greater good, i.e. to save Clarence's ass.

I adore the movie, by the way; my review's here, if anyone cares.

Good call. Well-written piece. I like how you single out Saul Rubinek. His Joel Silver impersonation (that's gotta be who he's doing - essentially) is a thing of beauty.

Don't give me the finger! I'll fuckin' have you killed!

One of my favorite movies of all time. Love showing it to folks who have never heard of it (and there are a surprising amount of those).

I must be the only person here who's found this film suffers more and more with the passing years as Tony Scotts god-awful glitzy-crap direction gets in the way of Tarantinos story to the point that the smoke machine neon technicolour-vomit ethos the film seems to be shot with makes this almost unwatchable for me these days.

That said tho - the Hopper-Walken scene and Drexyl Spiveys ten minutes are still unmitigated greatness.

It's taken me a while to come around on this film. I've always found Scott's style flashy and empty (even then), but now I see the story as QT's most personal work-- undiluted geek wish-fulfillment, disguised only by changing the hero from a video store clerk to a comic store clerk.

You have lost your way. Come back into the light.

Pitt reveals on the scene-specific commentary that he turned down the Clarence role because Cliff Worley's self-sacrifice is never acknowledged in the remainder of the script. Clarence not only doesn't grieve, he doesn't seem to be aware of his father's murder or the mistake (leaving his driver's license at Drexl's) that would endanger Cliff. I had a little more respect for Pitt once he revealed this, partly because people seem to ignore or gloss over the son's (non) reaction to his father's fate, and also because it was enough for Pitt to turn down a leading role during a very shaky pre-superstar phase of his career.

To me the most interesting detail in Tarantino's commentary: the writer originally envisioned Robert Carradine and Joan Cusack as Clarence and Alabama!

It's a very good point that I hadn't really thought of before. On the one hand, it really cheapens Cliff's sacrifice and love for his son. On the other hand, the movie is such a rocket ride that there's probably no way you could gracefully insert a scene where Clarence finds out about his dad and mourns. At the very least, maybe a scene where he tries to call his dad and gets no answer. But a movie like this can't stop and grieve over a real death*; it's too much a nihilistic shooting gallery, and it would wreck the tone.

In later Tarantino films, it would've been acknowledged, I think. But this was early Tarantino, where death doesn't matter as much. It isn't structured in a way that would allow for Cliff's death being anything but a plot point.

Carradine and Cusack would've been perfect as real-world Clarence and Alabama. But it's clear the movie is meant to be a romanticized version.

* I mean "real" as in the sort of character death you're supposed to care about, rather than pretty much all the other deaths in the movie.

You've got it Martin.

It's never bothered me because the film isn't structured towards that at all. Everything really happens over a matter of days. It's entirely possible and believable that Clarence simply doesn't know what happened to his father.

A friend of mine was complaining, also, that it pisses him off that Christopher Walken doesn't get a comeuppance. As he always saw him as the chief heavy, so it's uncharacteristic of an action film for the lead villain to remain unscathed. But that's because he's making the mistake of interpreting True Romance as an action movie. It really isn't one. At least not in the traditional sense of the word. It wouldn't make sense for Walken to receive a comeuppance of any kind because the movie isn't built that way. And, as the movie is, the only way for this to happen would be for him to be there at the final showdown, which would be forced and out of character.

And that goes back to not acknowledging Cliff's death. If they had acknowledged it, then the audience would want and expect Clarence to extract his pound of flesh. It would change the nature of the movie.

Some of these things might have seemed more natural in Tarantino's original structure. But I still think Tony Scott made the right decision in using a linear approach.

It's the opposite for me. Was disappointed in it at a sneak preview in '93 (It just didn't blow me away like Reservoir Dogs. Plus the audio was too low. Which meant the Tony Scott visuals overwhelmed the great script.).


But watching it on video over the years, it's actually aged well. I think Tony did a good job. Great ensemble, with a real beating heart. It's worthy of it's cult movie status. As Quentin said on the commentary, there was nothing ironic about the title of the film. I think Tony got that.

A lot of actors at the time could have probably capably played Clarence, but with his jittery energy and not quite handsome(but not near ugly) looks, I can't imagine anyone but Christian Slater playing Clarence.

The film still holds up. There isn't really anything wrong with it. That crap about Cliff's death not being acknowledged is nonsense. As previously mentioned, it's entirely possible that Clarence simply doesn't know he was killed. Why would he?

Also, Walken's character was handled perfectly. It wouldn't make sense for Vincent to actually go on a cross country chase to get Clarence. He got the info he needed and sent out the heavies to TCB. It's made pretty clear he's not a hands on kinda guy for the most part.

What's most telling about how well this movie has held up is how well it's received by people that have never seen it before. One could easily claim many of us have seen it so many times we've grown used to and accepted its flaws. I show this movie to at least 3-4 people a year that have never even heard of it and they all love it. It's been that way for years and has continued to be.

He isn't, though. He works as counsel for Mr. Blue Lou Boyle. Whoever that is. So the chief heavy is someone we never even see.

Exactly Martin, that's my whole point. But I've been having this discussion with my friend for years. Good luck.

I'd almost say there IS no "chief" heavy; Drexel is the main villain - in that he's a lying, woman-beating double-crosser - the rest is just circumstance; Vincent and pre-Soprano Gandolfini seem to, for the most part, just be doing their jobs.


My take on the Walken/Hopper scene is that Vincent says he can TELL when someone is lying at the beginning. So the question for me always was does he kill Cliff because he IS lying about the Sicilian heritage....or because he isn't?*


* - obviously he kills him because lying or not Cliff is fucking with him

I'm pretty sure Vincent indicates "No."

Sicilians fear deep down that's where they came from, which is why many of them are virulent racists, whether or not it's true.

Floyd, by the way, is probably the least essential character in the movie, yet I wouldn't lose his scenes for anything.

Speaking of Robert Carradine a few posts back, I used to entertain myself by imagining him in the lead in Mr. Television, a Martin Scorsese film about the life of Milton Berle. Gangsters! Nazi sympathizers! Affairs with starlets! A son born out of wedlock! There's a scene in Berle's autobiography about his run-in with "Pretty" Amberg that's an obvious Joe Pesci cameo. Of course, now Carradine is too old to play the young Berle. But 15 or 20 years ago he would've been a fine Uncle Miltie.

In that totally awesome Pinchot interview from a year or two ago where he talks about Tom Cruise dropping random homophobic non sequiturs in conversations, he also mentions that very shot. He kind of ad-libbed that cackle, and apparently QT took him aside and thanked him for doing that, as it was the exact feeling he was trying to convey for the entire movie.

Floyd simply never gets old.

As Lee Donowitz is supposedly Donny Donowitz's grandson, so Floyd could be Aldo Raine's grandson.

This would be so awesome.

Actually... From this day forth, I will consider that to be the case.

Hmm, they DO like alot alike.

Re-watching this for the first time in a while yesterday I concluded that never fully showing Kilmer's face is my favorite decision that Scott made.

As you can tell from my name, I love this movie.

Raindog: Scott envisaged the movie as an escapist fairytale. His slick, glossy direction fits that, I think.

The special edition DVD is one of the best out there.

And anyone know if there is any truth to the 'nigger spawned Sicilian' thing?

Apparently not. Or at least not as simple as Cliff makes it sound.