Dick Tracy (1990) on Netflix
Detective Dick Tracy hunts crime boss Big Boy Caprice, who is uniting the city's criminals behind him. The singer Breathless Mahoney pursues Tracy while he takes in a street kid.
- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb6.2/1070,761 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes62%
Trailer
Plot summary
Flattop and Itchy, gunmen paid by Big Boy Caprice, shoot a group of mobsters and leave behind a message full of bullet holes for detective Dick Tracy. A street kid witnesses the killing. Tracy catches the boy in a petty theft and saves him from a tramp, and he and his girlfriend, Tess Trueheart, take him in. Big Boy forces the rival mobster Lips Manlis to sign over Club Ritz, then kills him and takes up with the club's singer, Breathless Mahoney. Tracy arrests Big Boy, but the evidence is inconclusive and Big Boy goes free; the district attorney warns Tracy about his job. Breathless witnessed Lips's death but will not testify, and she keeps pursuing Tracy. At Club Ritz, Big Boy lays out a plan to unite the city's criminals under his leadership.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Dick Tracy (1990)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Madonna pursued the part of Breathless Mahoney in Dick Tracy and offered to work for scale; her paycheck for playing the Club Ritz singer came to just $35,000.
- Al Pacino improvised his own makeup as crime boss Big Boy Caprice instead of following Chester Gould's overweight version of the character in the strip; applying it took 3½ hours.
- Sean Young says she was forced out of the role of Tess Trueheart, which went to Glenne Headly, after rebuffing sexual advances from Warren Beatty; Beatty said in 1989 that casting her was a mistake he felt badly about.
- Warren Beatty's reputation for spending, notably on Reds, worried Disney, so Beatty and the studio agreed that any budget overruns on Dick Tracy would be deducted from his fee as producer, director and star.
- The making of Dick Tracy marks the last known use of the sodium vapor process, sometimes called yellowscreen, a compositing technique for combining actors with painted backgrounds.
- "Sooner or Later" and "Back in Business", two of Stephen Sondheim's songs for Dick Tracy, were used in the 1992 Oxford production of his revue Putting It Together, and four of his five songs from the film appeared in the 1999 Broadway version.
- Stations in Los Angeles and New York pulled and edited reruns of The Dick Tracy Show timed to the film's release after Asian and Hispanic groups protested the characters Joe Jitsu and Go Go Gomez as offensive stereotypes.
