Carlito's Way (1993) on Netflix
Freed from prison after five years, Carlito Brigante vows to go straight and buys a stake in a nightclub, saving toward a Caribbean retirement while his criminal past presses in.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.9/10250,953 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes84%
Trailer
Plot summary
Carlito Brigante is released from jail after serving five years of a much longer stretch. He vows to go straight and to live life as a fine, upstanding citizen. He even rekindles a romance with his ex-lover. However, Carlito's associates cannot seem to leave him in peace...his nephew involves him a pool-room gunfight, his lawyer asks him for "favors" which spiral out of control, and even an old friend tries to get him into trouble with the law. Carlito decides to make a run for Florida and the promise of a new life, but has one final dramatic escape to make from some hoods who believe (wrongly) that he was behind the murder of their boss.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Carlito's Way (1993)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Alan Dershowitz believed that Sean Penn was attempting to look like him on screen, and threatened the filmmakers with a defamation lawsuit over the resemblance.
- In 1989, years before this film was made, Al Pacino faced a $6 million lawsuit from producer Elliott Kastner, who claimed Pacino had reneged on an agreement to star in his version of a Carlito movie with Marlon Brando as criminal lawyer David Kleinfeld.
- Brian De Palma correctly predicted his own reviews: that Pacino, having just won an Academy Award, would be criticized; that Koepp, having just done Jurassic Park, would "suck"; that Penn would be "brilliant" because he had not done anything for a while; and that De Palma himself, unforgiven for The Bonfire of the Vanities, would not quite be embraced.
- More recent appreciation of the film was highlighted when the French publication Cahiers du Cinema named it one of the three best films of the 1990s, alongside The Bridges of Madison County and Goodbye South, Goodbye.
- Studio executives sent a note to the crew after an early cut of the pool hall sequence, complaining that the scene ran too long, but De Palma responded by having editor Bill Pankow spend even more time adding to it rather than trimming it down.
- Filming began on 22 March 1993, but the first scheduled shoot, the Grand Central Station climax, had to be changed when Al Pacino arrived on crutches.
- For Kleinfeld's escape the production used a Brooklyn shipyard, lowering Sean Penn's boat into an empty lock into which river water was pumped, with smoke machines and towers of space lights installed around it.
SPOILER
Kleinfeld does not die in the novels, but Brian De Palma has a strong sense of justice and retribution: he could not stand to see Carlito killed and let Kleinfeld live, so he changed the ending for the film.
