Word: gangsterisms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Well, so what? Before Kevin Costner's smash Dances with Wolves opened, the town's grumble bunnies were calling it Kevin's Gate. Which is not to predict that Billy B. will be a hit; it lacks, by design, the grapefruit-in-your-face impact of most gangster classics. But this is superior filmmaking, as handsomely conceived and realized as Dick Tracy, but darker, more resonant. It has a grace and a gravity rare just now in American films. Oh, and Willis, as a high-living hoodlum, is one dandy dandy...
This movie respects the viewer, and what pleasures that affords! In the first scene, look closely as Billy (Loren Dean, a find) stares at an older gangster, and imagine in their facial resemblance the kind of dead-end foot soldier the boy could become in 10 years, if he were not as lucky as he proves to be. Catch the cool stare of society dame Drew Preston (Nicole Kidman), the captive, then mistress, of Dutch (Hoffman); her eyes don't move from his as he submits her face to the indignity of a first caress. Listen to the whisper...
Loesser the Hollywood lyricist was Mr. Do-It-All. He wrote torchy stuff for gangster dramas and sarong songs for Dorothy Lamour. When collaborating, Loesser usually devised the lyric first, along with a "dummy tune" to suggest tempo and rhythm. Jimmy McHugh could compose a long, languid melodic line for Let's Get Lost because Loesser had compressed the intensity of new passion into the narrowest meter: "Let's defrost/ In a romantic mist./ Let's get crossed/ Off everybody's list...
...Coens' earlier films, like those of many young filmmakers, worked out of, and off of, the American genre tradition. Blood Simple was a film noir, Raising Arizona a screwball comedy of sorts and Miller's Crossing, which was probably 1990's best movie, a reanimation of the classic gangster dramas of the 1930s. But these movies were not send-ups, rip-offs or slavish homages. Each was, instead, a dark, devious and witty reinvention of whatever inspired it. Barton Fink is, in this context, a logical next step. Evoking no particular genre, it is nothing less than a shrewdly perverse...
...Black City pictures dance lightly around searing social dilemmas. Bill Duke's A Rage in Harlem is an old-fashioned gangster movie, content to showcase Robin Givens' pert charms. And Michael Schultz's Livin' Large!, a kind of Homeboy Alone, hatches broad but pointed comedy from the perspective of a black street reporter (Terrence (("T.C.")) Carson) who lands a job with an all-white news team. But most of the films sketch, in furious strokes, a portrait of the ghetto and of its most feared and hopeless denizen, the black male...