True Romance (1993) on Netflix
In Detroit, Clarence Worley meets Alabama Whitman at a kung fu movie. Hired as his birthday present, she has fallen for him, and a bag from her pimp holds stolen cocaine.
- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb7.9/10263,878 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes93%
Trailer
Plot summary
Clarence Worley, an Elvis Presley devotee in Detroit, marks his birthday at a movie house playing kung fu films, where Alabama Whitman drops her popcorn on him and starts a conversation. They share pie at a diner and spend the night together, and she admits she is a call girl his boss hired for the evening and that she has fallen in love with him. They marry the next morning at City Hall. An apparition of Elvis urges Clarence to kill Drexl Spivey, the pimp Alabama worked for, and Clarence leaves the brothel with a bag he believes holds her belongings; it is packed with cocaine the pimp took from dealers he murdered. Clarence takes Alabama to Los Angeles to sell the drug, and the mob that owns it wants it back.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about True Romance (1993)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- James Gandolfini landed the role of Tony Soprano on The Sopranos after casting director Susan Fitzgerald saw a short clip of his performance in True Romance and invited him to audition; he got the part ahead of several other actors, including Steven Van Zandt and Michael Rispoli.
SPOILER
Tarantino initially opposed director Tony Scott's decision to change the ending, which Scott maintained was of his own volition, not the studio's: "I just fell in love with these two characters and didn't want to see them die." Seeing the completed film, he realized the happy ending was more appropriate.- Tarantino has named the Sicilian speech as one of his proudest moments: he heard the whole speech long ago from a man living in his house, and when he retold it to a Sicilian friend he thought, "Wow, that is a great scene, I gotta remember that".
SPOILER
The MPAA cut the film for an R rating for its wide theatrical release, trimming most of the confrontation between Alabama and Virgil as well as the ending shootout; an alternative edit even has Detective Nicky Dimes shot not by Alabama but by the mafia hitman Toothpick Vic.- True Romance began as an early script by Tarantino, who sold the screenplay in order to finance his debut feature film, Reservoir Dogs.
- Brad Pitt's stoner character Floyd was the inspiration for Pineapple Express, according to producer Judd Apatow, who thought it would be funny to make a movie following that character out of his apartment and watching him get chased by bad guys.
- Tarantino had hoped to direct the film but lost interest and sold the script; apart from changing the nonlinear narrative he wrote into a more conventional linear structure, the film was largely faithful to his original screenplay.
