Word: cagney
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...told more than once, Carlito Brigante (Al Pacino) gained his education almost entirely on the streets of Spanish Harlem. That is too bad. If he had spent more time at home watching the old Late Show, he would have known from the early gangster movies (especially James Cagney's) that there comes a moment in any criminal career when it becomes impossible to go straight, no matter how much you want to. It's an image problem with tragic dimensions...
...Carlito needs more than a good woman to avoid recidivism. He needs Pat O'Brien. You remember Pat O'Brien, Cagney's superego, trying to keep his wayward pal on a righteous path. What Carlito has instead is his friend and shyster lawyer, Dave Kleinfeld (Sean Penn, in a terrific performance). He is in too far with the Mob, and he needs Carlito's muscular help in a cockamamie plan to avoid gangland's vengeance. It goes awry, naturally, and Carlito's subsequent flight brings out the best in De Palma -- breathless, bravura moviemaking, intricately designed, but playing like...
...staff sat through more than 100 American films, looking for a few seconds of classic footage that could blend into the new Elton John material. The script for "Nightclub" was fashioned around the final choices: Bogie in All Through the Night (1942), Satchmo in High Society (1956) and Cagney in snippets from Public Enemy (1931) and The Roaring Twenties (1939). Director Steve Horn shot the Elton John nightclub footage with the same lenses used during the classic film period, but with live stand-ins for Cagney and company. The footage was taken to R. Greenberg Associates, who edited Woody Allen...
...work was painstaking. Cagney was shorter than the modern blond actress with whom he is seen ordering a Diet Coke. So the editors blew up the image until his height matched that of his co-star. The Golden Age actors were carefully colorized frame by frame to match the hues of the fresh footage. In the stunning final product, Bogart wanders among the nightclub clientele, exchanging greetings with a patron probably not even born when Bogie died in 1957. Louis Armstrong blows away on his trumpet, sharing a knowing glance with Elton John...
...everyone is swept up in the excitement. A review in the trade publication Advertising Age, while admiring the special effects, argues that the commercial's hyperkinetic promotional jingle "obscures the lyrics and thus also the explanation for why -- apart from sheer gee-whizardry -- Cagney, Satchmo and Bogart are resurrected." In short, it's not enough for commercials to showcase creativity -- they've got to move the goods as well...