Spider-Man

In 1997, Batman & Robin nearly killed off the comic book superhero movie. It was famously reviled by critics and underperformed at the box office. Blade (1998), however, came out the next year and proved that there was still interest in the genre. It wasn’t until the phenomenal success of X-Men (2000) and Spider-Man (2002), which managed to tap into the pop culture zeitgeist in a significant way, that the genre returned to prominence. Both movies were made by directors who grew up with these comic books and were fans. More importantly, they understood what made these iconic characters work and strongly identified with them.

Sam Raimi, in particular, was an inspired choice to direct Spider-Man. In many respects, his 1990 film Darkman was a comic book superhero movie not actually based on an existing title. It demonstrated that he had the innate storytelling instincts for the genre and the stylistic chops to transport the famous webslinger from page to screen. The end result was a loving homage to his humble beginnings at the hands of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko while still feeling contemporary.

Raimi immediately established Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) as a pasty-faced dweeb that admires his high school crush Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) from afar. It’s not like he’s invisible as the movie makes a point of having her stick up for him while others ridicule him. He is an outcast and is friends with another outsider, Harry Osborn (James Franco), a rich kid that flunked out of private school and is tired of living in the shadow of his brilliant scientist father, Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe). David Koepp’s screenplay efficiently introduces all the significant people in Peter’s life and establishes the relationships between each other. Raimi has fun introducing the core supporting characters in Spider-Man’s world, like the Daily Bugle’s publisher J. Jonah Jameson played with perfect bluster by J.K. Simmons who captures the essence of the notoriously cheap yellow journalist while also taking an instant dislike to the webslinger.

The movie soon establishes a parallel between Peter and Norman as they undergo physical enhancement that also affects them mentally. With Peter it happened accidentally but Norman made the choice to do it, which drives him insane. Initially, Peter’s newfound powers make him cocky and selfish as he uses them for profit. It is only when this behavior results in the death of his beloved Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson) that he learns to use his powers for the greater good.

Maguire has a memorable scene with Cliff Robertson when Uncle Ben has a heart-to-heart with Peter, telling him, “These are the years when a man changes into the man he’s gonna become for the rest of his life. Just be careful who you change into.” He then utters the movie’s most famous line, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Instead of listening, Peter foolishly chastises Ben for telling him what to do and to stop pretending to be his father, which visibly wounds the elder man. Robertson is excellent in this scene as he makes you care about him so that you feel bad when Peter dismisses him so callously. Maguire is quite strong in this scene as well, showing how Peter has become drunk with his newfound powers, believing that no one can relate to what he’s experiencing. He is also quite affecting in the aftermath of Ben’s death. Peter is in his room quietly crying, devastated by what happened and with the knowledge that it was his fault. He could have prevented it.

Kirsten Dunst brings a fresh-faced girl-next-door vibe to the role of M.J. She’s obviously beautiful but the actor isn’t afraid to act disarmingly goofy when posing for Peter’s pictures during their school field trip. She isn’t bored by the science stuff and actually looks interested in the tour guide’s spiel. The movie wisely has the relationship between her and Peter as its heart, establishing their friendship in scenes like when they tell each other their aspirations after they graduate from high school – she wants to be an actor and he wants to be a photographer, working his way through college. It a wonderful character building moment as Peter encourages M.J. to follow her dreams.

The two actors have fantastic chemistry together. We want to see Peter and M.J. get together yet it is always tantalizingly just out of reach. The scene where he saves her from would-be muggers as Spider-Man and she rewards him with a passionate kiss is a moment of intimacy that is missing from a lot of the current crop of comic book superhero movies, which are strangely asexual. What, superheroes don’t get to have love lives? The potential romance between Peter and M.J. is one of the best things about Spider-Man.

Willem Dafoe does a great job conveying Norman’s gradual transition to the dark side and the emergence of a split personality. It allows the actor to play two separate characters – Osborn, the victim, and the Green Goblin who wants to punish those that wronged him. The movie takes the time to show what motivated a decent man like Norman to go bad, transforming himself into the Goblin. He’s not a simple, world dominating baddie but a tortured soul driven mad by self-imposed pressures and corporate machinations. It was a quite a coup getting someone of Dafoe’s caliber to play the villain. He gives the role his own distinctive spin, like the Thanksgiving dinner he attends at Peter and Harry’s place. It looks like Norman but the way Dafoe plays it you can tell that the Goblin persona has taken over in the way he leers suggestively at M.J. and threateningly at Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) when she slaps his hand for touching the food before saying Grace.

As he demonstrated with Darkman, Raimi has a knack for kinetic camerawork and editing tailor-made for a comic book superhero movie, which he demonstrates during the Green Goblin’s attack on the Oscorp Unity Day Festival in downtown New York City. While trading blows with him, Spider-Man saves several innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire, most notably M.J. The CGI in this sequence is impressive, seamlessly showing off both combatants’ abilities. Technology had finally caught up to what the comic books had been doing all along and brought Spider-Man’s webslinging powers vividly to life.

At the end of Spider-Man, Peter sums up his lot in life best when he says, “No matter what I do no matter how hard I try, the ones I love will always be the ones that pay.” This movie shows the sacrifices a hero must make in order to keep the ones he loves safe. Spider-Man is about what it takes to become a hero and what it means to be one. All it takes is one fateful moment to change your life forever. For Peter it was refusing to stop and armed robber who goes on to kill Uncle Ben. At that moment Peter realizes that his actions have real consequences and that he must use his powers responsibly. Thus, Spider-Man is born. It is this moment that sets him on the path to becoming a superhero.

Carlito's Way

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“When I went to Berlin and I was watching it in Berlin after it opened and did okay in the United States, I remember watching in Berlin and said, ‘I can’t make – I can’t make a better picture than this.’” – Brian De Palma

He said these words with a heavy heart while recounting a story of seeing Carlito’s Way (1993) at the Berlin Film Festival, realizing he had poured his heart and soul into a film that received mixed reviews from critics and did well but not great at the box office. The start of the 1990s had not been good to Brian De Palma with the high-profile and costly failure that was The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990). It shook his filmmaking mojo so much that he second-guessed the narrative structure of Raising Cain (1992), a return to more familiar territory with the psychological thriller, which took a personal toll on the man.

He was in need of a hit to appease the studios and moved on to what he hoped would be a commercial hit by reteaming with Al Pacino in an effort to recreate the magic of Scarface (1983). If fans were expecting the same over-the-top bombast with Carlito’s Way they would be sorely disappointed as it took a more melancholic, introspective approach while still featuring De Palma’s virtuoso camerawork and masterful action set pieces, crafting a tragedy about how a criminal tries to go straight but is ultimately doomed from the get-go.

Carlito’s Way features one of the oldest chestnuts in the world. Narrating his story during the last moments of his life, Carlito Brigante (Pacino), a veteran criminal, has recently been released from prison, intent on leading a normal, law-abiding life. Of course it isn’t going to be that easy – when he returns to his old neighborhood, his reputation precedes him. Local gangster Benny Blanco from the Bronx (John Leguizamo), a cocky, up-and-comer, sets his sights on Carlito after being shamed by him in public. Carlito, however, barely notices him as he’s torn between reuniting with an old flame and a struggling Broadway dancer, Gail (Penelope Ann Miller), and keeping his lawyer and friend, David Kleinfeld (Sean Penn), out of trouble.

As a personal favor to David, Carlito runs a nightclub for the latter to raise enough money to move to the Bahamas and start his own business renting cars in a tropical paradise with Gail. However, Carlito’s loyalty to David will be his undoing – his friend has become so corrupt during the time that Carlito was in prison that he’s not only wanted by law enforcement but the mafia as well.

Carlito’s Way begins at the end (even though we don’t know it yet) with Carlito being shot and rushed to the hospital. While lying on the stretcher going through the train station, he flashes back to how he got there. De Palma lets it all play out over the opening credits, in dreamy slow motion, with somber classical music playing over it all. The entire sequence is shot in black and white save for a billboard that says, “Escape to Paradise,” with inviting tropical imagery symbolizing Carlito’s desire to escape a life of crime for a better one.

It is 1975 and Carlito has been released from prison after a five-year stint, reinvigorated and reborn. At his hearing he sticks it to the judge (a cameo by Paul Mazursky no less!) and the District Attorney (James Rebhorn) in classic Pacino style, delivering a speech like he’s accepting an Academy Award. It’s as close to Scarface as Pacino gets and, in a bit of irony, Carlito is actually sincere about going straight. Unlike Tony Montana, he doesn’t want to rise to the top of the criminal underworld – he wants to get out. He even tells both the local crime boss and David that he’s retired but they don’t believe him. An ex-con career criminal going straight? No way.

Sure enough, he gets roped into an “errand” with his young cousin (John Ortiz) that turns into a bloody shoot-out. As always, De Palma injects the film with his trademark bravura action sequences. One look at the set-up and, like Carlito, we know that something is not right. Pacino shows how his character survived for so long as he expertly sizes up the situation and takes stock of the room: how many guys and where they are in relation to each other and him. Carlito is calm, unruffled, while his eyes convey a readiness for anything.

De Palma thrives at orchestrating these kinds of set pieces, masterfully using editing to build anticipation and suspense as we wait for the inevitable explosion of violence, gradually building the tension as we feel Carlito’s apprehension. Despite his desire to go legit, he gets drawn back into a life of crime; he can’t escape.

Carlito is a role tailor-made for Al Pacino, allowing him to essay another larger-than-life character. Carlito is a smart guy who cannot escape what he is no matter how hard he tries and the actor conveys the melancholy that lurks behind the bravado of his character. For all of his street smarts, Carlito makes the fatal mistake of underestimating local small-time tough guy Benny Blanco (a perfectly cast motor-mouthed Leguizamo) who keeps trying to get an audience with the veteran crook only to be rebuffed every time.

Carlito also pines for Gail and goes up to the top of a neighboring building in the rain to watch her in a dance class. He is still in love with her and envisions being reunited with her as part of his dream of escaping a life of crime. Like James Caan’s safecracker in Thief (1981), Carlito is making up for lost time and wants to start his new life right now, but his old one won’t let him go.

The real scene-stealer, however, is Sean Penn’s sleazy, coked-up lawyer. The actor reportedly did the film to help finance his directorial debut, The Crossing Guard (1995). For a paycheck role, Penn does a great job immersing himself in the part, complete with a frizzy Afro and receding hairline. It’s as though Pacino’s presence inspired Penn to step up his game, making Penn’s memorable turn so much fun to watch. Even though David dresses in expensive clothes and smokes fancy cigarettes, he’s a cokehead that runs with a dangerous crowd who thinks he’s untouchable. His hubris is his undoing.

The rest of the cast is filled out by solid character actors like John Leguizamo, who plays Benny as a pushy little runt not to be underestimated, and the always-reliable Luis Guzman as Carlito’s right-hand man. There’s also Viggo Mortensen in a small role as a former contemporary of Carlito who has been let out of prison to get the dirt on his friend. Wheelchair-bound and wearing cheap, stained clothes, the actor isn’t afraid to portray a pathetic snitch, a shadow of his former self. He plays a sad figure that really gets under Carlito’s skin. It also shows how far the D.A. is willing to go to send him back to prison.

The only miscasting is Penelope Ann Miller as Pacino’s love interest. She looks out of place and just doesn’t have the acting chops to hold her own against Pacino. She does have a good scene with Pacino when, much to Carlito’s surprise, he discovers that Gail moonlights as a stripper to make ends meet. It is a continuation of his disillusionment in the sense that despite all of her talk of trying to make it as an actress, Gail gets naked for other men. Like Carlito, there is her dream and there is her reality. They have an interesting conversation as he awkwardly disapproves of her dancing for men, to which she unashamedly counters, “You ever kill anybody, Charlie?” Carlito realizes that he has no right to judge her as he’s done far worse for money.

Loyalty is both Carlito’s greatest attribute and vice. It is his loyalty to David that gets him in trouble with Benny Blanco and the Italian mobsters that go after in him in the film’s exciting climax. He has a personal code that he adheres to no matter what happens. However, it is the internal conflict that rages within him that ultimately clouds his judgment. It is his natural instinct to be the ruthless criminal he was versus the legit businessman he wants to be, which results in the sparing of Benny’s life when the smart play was to kill him, as he’ll be a problem later on.

Carlito knows that David is out of control and taking unnecessary risks, like ripping off a wiseguy for $1 million, but helps him break said crook out of Riker’s Prison out of friendship, a debt he feels he owes him. Ultimately, he can’t change who he is. The two men finally have it out and Carlito realizes what a true friend David is as the lawyer lays it out for him, tells him that he looks out for himself, while Carlito lives by an antiquated code. That’s all Carlito needs to hear and ends their friendship, leaving him at the mercy of a mob assassin.

New York State Supreme Court judge Edwin Torres wrote Carlito’s Way in 1975 and its sequel After Hours in 1979, both chronicling the rise and fall of Puerto Rico drug kingpin Carlito Brigante. Al Pacino came to producer Martin Bregman with these two novels and said that they could be made into a film. Screenwriter David Koepp was already working for Bregman when he was given the two novels and told to adapt them into a screenplay. He liked them but taking 800 pages and making them into a film was a daunting task. Koepp was also unfamiliar with Spanish Harlem in the 1970s. When it came to adapting the novels, he ended up using more of After Hours as it featured an older Carlito that Pacino could play.

Bregman felt that Brian De Palma was the best person to direct but he wasn’t interested in making another gangster film. At the time of making Carlito’s Way, De Palma’s personal life was in turmoil. He said, “In the space of two years, I got married; I had a child; and I got divorced!” He elaborated further: “I wasn’t able to reconcile my private life and my professional life.” Like Carlito loses Gail, De Palma lost his second wife, movie producer Gale Ann Hurd. To this end, De Palma was drawn to Koepp’s script as he recognized his own crisis in Carlito’s:

“A guy who just got assassinated and who thinks, ‘Shit, I’m dead! How did I end up here?’ And he reviews his life to understand the chain of events and to accept what has happened to him. That was my situation at the time. To make this film that conveyed what I was feeling, I had to lay myself bare.”

When De Palma called Sean Penn about Carlito’s Way he hadn’t acted in four years and needed money as his wife at the time, Robin Wright, was pregnant again. The actor said, “I certainly was interested in working with Al Pacino. And I’d had a very good relationship with Brian on Casualties of War.” When he initially talked to the director, Penn got the impression that the film was going to be very raw and his research uncovered a very gritty setting. When he arrived on the night club set during filming to find a very expensive-looking set with many extras and complex moving shots that took a long time to set up, which did not allow for multiple takes. Penn felt “a little duped. And that created tension.”

Torres gave Pacino and Penn a personal tour of the criminal justice system and Puerto Rican New York, taking them to the South Bronx, the barrio and to various clubs and bars. To prepare for the role he took Pacino to salsa clubs in Spanish Harlem. The actor said, “It was the Disney tour of the barrio: ‘So-and-so got shot here. So-and-so got shot right over there.’” According to De Palma, Pacino patterned his character’s cadences and speech patterns after Torres. The judge also arranged for Penn to watch Bruce Cutler sum up the Thomas Gambino racketeering case. The actor also talked to Albert J. Krieger who defended John Gotti. Penn looked through period articles on lawyers and came across a still photograph in Life magazine of a young law student that he based the look of David on.

There are several colorful anecdotes about the filming of Carlito’s Way. De Palma and Penn clashed over the scene in which David asks Carlito to break a mobster out of Riker’s. Penn had done ten takes with the director – happy with take three – but the actor wanted to do another 15 takes until he was happy with his performance. Incredulous, De Palma wanted to do Pacino’s side of the scene. After 25 takes, he insisted on shooting Pacino and Penn got upset as a result. Afterwards, Penn disrespectfully chewed out De Palma over the course of the rest of the day.

De Palma started filming the final chase sequence in the winter – and finished it in the middle of summer. They shot the train-to-train scene over and over again (in the blistering New York heat) with Pacino running up and down the train in a long, black leather coat and De Palma in another running parallel filming it. It was a complicated shot that took many hours. An exhausted Pacino finally had enough and took the train home at four in the morning without telling De Palma. The director recalls, his assistant director telling him, “Al took the train home. And he thinks you’re crazy. He doesn’t know what you’re doing.” When the studio first saw the pool scene they felt it was too long. De Palma interpreted that to mean it wasn’t long enough! He added more footage, setting up the action and building more suspense. Bizarrely, the studio saw the new version – and congratulated him on making it shorter.

Carlito’s Way received decidedly mixed reviews from critics. In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “Carlito’s Way is best watched as lively, colorful posturing and as a fine demonstration of this director’s bravura visual style.” Rolling Stone magazine’s Peter Travers gave it four stars and wrote, “The drug wars have raised brutality and betrayal to levels we see reflected on Pacino’s eloquently ravaged face. It’s that face that holds us even when Pacino’s ‘Rican’ accent slips into his Southern drawl from Scent of a Woman. It’s that face that cuts through De Palma’s erratic pacing and derivative shootouts.”

There were critics who wrote decidedly negative words about the film. Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman gave it a “B” rating and wrote, “Watching Carlito’s Way, I never really believed that a heroin dealer and coolly pragmatic killer could be such a simple, romantic guy.” In his review for the Washington Post, Hal Hinson wrote, “De Palma’s direction is alert but dispirited, and certainly for us there is a sense of drudgery in having to observe this gifted filmmaker run through his tired bag of tricks.” Finally, the Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan criticized Miller’s character: “Miller works hard to make the part believable, but finally the role fits too snugly into the traditional ‘exotic dancer with a heart of gold’ category to allow for much genuine impact.”

Despite the clichéd premise, Carlito’s Way works well because of the caliber of actors, David Koepp’s screenplay with memorable dialogue (“You think you’re big time?! You’re gonna fucking die big time!”), and De Palma’s stylish direction. The last 20 minutes plays out in an exciting chase as the director pulls out all the stops, like the impressively choreographed tracking shot, as Carlito tries to evade mobsters and make it in time to meet Gail at the train station; he is literally racing for his life. What makes the film’s ending so heartbreaking is that Carlito got so close to realizing his dream only for it to be cruelly ripped away at the last minute by someone he could’ve dealt with earlier on but chose not to, and therefore pays for this lapse in judgment dearly.

While De Palma did not originate this project, he certainly made it his own. He found something in Koepp’s script that he connected with on a personal level and transformed what could have easily been a paycheck gig into an artistic expression for what he was going through in his own life. This might explain why he seems crestfallen in the De Palma documentary when recounting watching Carlito’s Way at the Berlin Film Festival years ago. The film was a personal expression and its mixed critical reaction and decent but unremarkable box office was likely a bitter pill for De Palma to swallow at the time. His desire to stay in the game and enjoy the resources that a major studio could provide, coupled with his hunger for a commercial hit, drove him to team-up with Tom Cruise and direct the first movie in the Mission: Impossible franchise, which allowed him to fulfill this goal.

Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars and wrote, “Carlito’s Way, like Scarface, is first and last a character study, a portrait of a man who wants to be better than he is.” Much like Carlito, De Palma was also struggling to become a better man in his own life, not wanting to look back. Unlike, his cinematic alter ego, the director overcame his personal demons and triumphed in the end, thereby proving that he was able become a better filmmaker than he had been before, delivering a powerful, personal film that stands as one of the strongest efforts in his filmography.

SOURCES

De Palma. Dir. Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow. Empire Ward Pictures. 2015.

Feeney, Sheila Anne. “So New York…Yet So Hollywood.” Los Angeles Times. November 4, 1993.

Grimes, William. “His Honor Himself is Counselor to Pacino.” The New York Times. July 27, 1993.

Keesey, Douglas. Brian De Palma’s Split-Screen: A Life in Film. University Press of Mississippi. 2015.

Kelly, Richard T. Sean Penn: His Life and Times. Canongate U.S. 2004.

“The Making of Carlito’s Way.” Carlito’s Way Blu-Ray. Universal Pictures. 2010.

The Shadow

With the massive commercial success of Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) every studio in Hollywood wanted to replicate it and this kickstarted a feeding frenzy for a pulp story/comic book property that would connect with the mainstream movie-going public. The result was a string of lavish adaptations of Dick Tracy (1990), The Rocketeer (1991), and The Phantom (1996). The Shadow (1994) also came out of this same period and like the aforementioned movies failed to perform at the box office at the same level as Batman. In fact, The Shadow barely made back its budget but has since gone on to develop a cult following.

The Shadow was based on the pulp fiction character of the same name created in 1931 by Walter B. Gibson. The character got his start on the radio as an enigmatic narrator and when he became popular enough was given an identity by Gibson who developed the character and his world in a series of pulp novels that was soon adapted into an even more popular radio series (voiced by none other than Orson Welles for a short time). Over the years, the durable character was adapted in comic books, movie serials and B-movies but it wasn’t until 1994 that The Shadow would get big budget treatment from Hollywood.

We meet Lamont Cranston (Alec Baldwin, sporting horrible looking long hair) in Tibet. It is after the First World War and he is indulging in his darker impulses, becoming a warlord and opium kingpin known as Ying-Ko. One day, he is kidnapped by the servants of Tulku (Brady Tsurutani), a holy man with mystical powers. He is forced to face his dark side and use this knowledge to defeat evil in all of its various guises. Tulku also teaches Cranston all of his abilities and sends him back to his home in New York City where becomes a crime fighter known as the Shadow.

We meet his colorful alter ego in an impressively staged sequence where he prevents three gangsters from throwing a man off the Brooklyn Bridge. The Shadow uses fear as a weapon, scaring the men with echo-y laughter and his voice that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, tormenting the lead goon by revealing his past crimes. Initially, we only get vague glimpses of the Shadow as he appears and disappears with alarming speed. It is only until he dispatches the gangsters that we get a full reveal of the character and this is accompanied by Jerry Goldsmith’s rousing score.

Cranston switches back to himself and heads off to the Cobalt Club where he meets with police commissioner Wainwright Barth (Jonathan Winters) for dinner and proceeds to ignore him when he spots Margo Lane (Penelope Ann Miller), the beautiful daughter of a scientist (Ian McKellen) working for the War Department. We get a nice moment where Cranston uses his mental powers to cloud the commissioner’s mind to forget about creating a taskforce to stop the Shadow in a way that director Russell Mulcahy portrays as part film noir and part Jedi mind trick.

A silver sarcophagus arrives at the Museum of Natural History from Tibet housing Shiwan Khan (John Lone), a rogue protégé of Tulku and the last descendant of Genghis Khan. He possesses the same powers as Cranston but is obsessed with world domination. He plans on achieving this by kidnapping Margo’s father and use his work to build an atomic bomb. Cranston has to use all of the powers at his disposal in order to stop Khan.

Alec Baldwin impresses early on as the suave Cranston who not only uses his powers on his uncle but also to pick up Margo. They go on an impromptu date at a Chinese restaurant and he amazes her by ordering in Chinese. “You speak Chinese?” she asks him and without a missing a beat he replies, “Only Mandarin.” Baldwin exhibits good comic timing and his movie star looks are a great fit for the dashing millionaire. Watching him in The Shadow makes me realize what a good Bruce Wayne he would have been. The actor had the charisma, presence and a commanding voice that would have been so well-suited for the role.

With Awakenings (1990), Carlito’s Way (1993), and The Shadow, the early to mid-1990s saw Penelope Ann Miller at the height of her mainstream popularity. With her retro good looks she makes for a good Margo Lane and has nice chemistry with Baldwin. I was never a big fan of hers and so she doesn’t do much for me in the role but she certainly looks the part.

The always-reliable Ian McKellen has fun as the absent-minded professor too occupied with his work to notice that his daughter is being romanced by Cranston. Peter Boyle shows up as the Shadow’s most trusted ally and Jonathan Winters pops up in a mostly straight-faced role as the city’s clueless police commissioner and gets to criticize Cranston for his habitual tardiness. John Lone plays the movie’s ruthless, scenery-chewing villain and is suitably evil in the role, holding his own with Baldwin in their scenes together as they banter back and forth between getting down to serious issues.

Much like Batman and Dick Tracy, the world of The Shadow is created with a combination of soundstages and matte paintings, which gives it an intentionally stylized look – a 1930s inhabited by Art Deco nightclubs and sinister alleyways. The attention to period detail, down to the cars, clothing and advertisements that decorate buildings is fantastic. It is also great to see big city scenes populated by numerous living and breathing extras. Unlike the CGI worlds of today, the one in The Shadow feels tangible and real. It has depth and detail that we buy into and this is even more glaringly evident in the CGI-created Phurba, a mystical flying dagger, which is controlled by Khan. It looks awkward and out of place with the rest of the practical effects.

Journeyman director Russell Mulcahy provides the requisite stylistic flourishes without being too showy. He is savvy enough to know when to inject some style and orchestrates this big movie with skill but lacks the personal idiosyncrasies that Tim Burton brought to his Batman movies. As a result, there is a bit of generic complacency to The Shadow that was also evident in The Phantom.

After Batman everyone seemed content to ape Danny Elfman’s score (including himself) for their own comic book superhero movies and so it is refreshing to hear that Jerry Goldsmith avoids this with a score that has a classical feel while also a contemporary heroic vibe to it. His cues help propel the action and add atmosphere to the downtime between these sequences.

The Shadow has a nice streak of light-hearted humor that runs throughout and David Koepp’s screenplay picks the right moments to use it, like when Cranston and Khan meet for the first time and these two powerful men sniff each other out, even engaging in banter like the latter admiring the former’s tie before Khan reveals his true intentions:

Khan: In three days, the entire world will hear my roar, and willingly fall subject to the lost empire of Shiwan Khan. That is a lovely tie, by the way. May I ask where you acquired it?
Cranston: Brooks Brothers.
Khan: Is that mid-town?
Cranston: 45th and Madison. You are a barbarian. Khan: Thank you. We both are.

Remember when super hero movies didn’t take themselves too seriously? Obviously, they went too far by the end of the decade with Batman & Robin (1997), which is just out-and-out silly, but then with X-Men (2000) they got serious again and going darker with the genre has reached its apex with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016). Watching The Shadow again, with all of this in mind, I was struck at how well it gets the mix of humor and dramatic heroics that is sorely missing from most comic book superhero movies today.

For years, movie producer Martin Bregman had been trying to get The Shadow made. He had gone through numerous screenwriters but none of them could figure out the material to his satisfaction until he approached David Koepp, who started working on it in 1989. According to Bregman, “Thematically the earlier drafts didn’t work…No one really could get this guy and it never had the size it should have.” The writer was a fan of the old radio show and for research read The Shadow Scrapbook, The Duende History of the Shadow Magazine and many of the pulp novels featuring the character. He incorporated elements from all of these various sources into his script. For example, he took characters and villains from the pulp novels and took the tone of the radio show and made up his own story.

When it came to casting, Roy Scheider had been considered as the Shadow at some point as did Jeremy Irons. Bregman approached Alec Baldwin to play the Shadow and the actor loved Koepp’s script and agreed to take on the role. One of the challenges he faced was looking and acting like the Shadow: “You have to learn how to move with all that stuff on. You want to be graceful. It’s something you have to learn how to integrate into the performance you’re going to give, because the minute you get all the makeup on, everything changes.”

At the wrap party for Carlito’s Way (1993), which he was also producing, Bregman asked Penelope Ann Miller to read the script for The Shadow. She saw the character of Margo Lane as “reminiscent to me of the great characters that Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy and Joan Crawford played.”

Director Russell Mulcahy knew about the project ten years prior but when he heard people like Robert Zemeckis were being considered he assumed there was no chance despite being interested. While working on the Bregman-produced The Real McCoy (1993) its star Kim Basinger was so impressed with Mulcahy that she recommended to her then-husband Baldwin that the director should helm The Shadow.

For the look of the movie, production designer Joe Nemec III created a world that was set in the 1936-38 range. Since most of the movie takes place in New York City, he consulted a period era map in order to get an idea of where everything was located, like Cranston’s mansion, which was around East 52nd Street. Creating the city was the responsibility of visual FX supervisor Alison Savitch who was hired just before principal photography started when the producers realized they needed someone in charge of the increasing number of visual effects. She ended up using a combination of models, matte paintings and CGI to recreate late ‘30s New York.

Principal photography began in the summer of 1993 on the Universal Studios lot in Hollywood on five of their soundstages over 14 weeks on a $40 million budget. Filming went relatively smoothly with only one week lost when an earthquake struck, destroying the Hall of Mirrors set.

For the most part, the movie was ripped to shreds by mainstream critics. In her review for The New York Times, Caryn James wrote, “Such dark-hearted, cartoonish crime fighters are awfully familiar on screen right now, and this movie is too meek to set itself apart.” Entertainment Weekly gave the movie a “D” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Baldwin, a good actor who needs to start playing characters with an edge, looks puffy and smug in this cockeyed-hero role. Like Batman, the Shadow is meant to be a good guy with a touch of evil, but Baldwin just acts like James Bond’s smart-ass brother.” In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, “Baldwin, Lone and Penelope Ann Miller as the glamorous Margo Lane continually struggle for the right tone, while Tim Curry as a mad scientist gives up the fight and goes totally over the top. And what could have been a classic ends up yet another story of what might have been.” The Washington Post’s Desson Howe wrote, “But without a compelling story at the center, this is just a mediocre MTV-Wagnerian fantasy.”

However, Roger Ebert gave the movie three out of four stars and wrote, “The story itself may not be so mesmerizing, but who really cares? Style and tone are everything with a movie like this, which wants to bring to life a dark secret place in the lurid pulp imagination.” Finally, Jonathan Rosenbaum felt that the movie had “enough of the innocent exoticism and splendor of silent thrillers to suggest a continuity with the past missing from most other movies; all that’s required is a capacity to sit back and dream.”

Coming after Batman, The Shadow was accused of copying it when in fact Bob Kane’s creation is indebted to Gibson’s stories, which came first, but most moviegoers were unaware of this at the time and the movie did not perform well. No one has made another adaptation since with only Sam Raimi currently owning the movie rights but has so far done little with the property. The time is right for another take on this iconic character but whoever tackles it might want to contemporize it much like Howard Chaykin did with his controversial comic book adaptation in 1986 as audiences don’t seem to respond to retro pulp adventures (with a few notable exceptions, like The Mummy and Captain America: First Avenger).

While The Shadow may not be as visually dazzling as Dick Tracy, the characters are more fully realized than in Warren Beatty’s opus, which feels overstuffed. It is more successful translating its source material than The Phantom, but isn’t quite as satisfying or as distinctive as The Rocketeer, the best of the post-Batman crop of retro comic book adaptations. That being said, The Shadow is an entertaining and engaging effort that has a lot going for it, most notably an appealing performance by Baldwin, a terrific score by Goldsmith, and top notch production values.

SOURCES

Jones, Alan. “Me and My Shadow.” Starburst. November 1994.

Murray, Will. The Shadow: The Official Movie Magazine. 1994.

Peterson, Don E. “The Shadow Takes Shape.” Sci-Fi Entertainment. August 1994.

Snake Eyes

In the 1990s, filmmaker Brian De Palma struggled between making expensive, high profile failures like The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and pushing through personal projects like Raising Cain (1992) and commercial triumphs like Mission: Impossible (1996). Fresh from the success of the latter film, he rounded out the decade with conspiracy thriller Snake Eyes (1998) starring Nicolas Cage. De Palma employed his trademark stylistic bag of tricks to deliver a never dull thriller that was ultimately marred by a weak ending (infamously changed from the original) leaving most critics cold. The film was a modest commercial success and summed up the filmmaker’s performance during the ‘90s as it attempted to balance his personal touches with a commercial sensibility with uneven results.

Rick Santoro (Nicolas Cage) is a flashy, flamboyant, and very corrupt Atlantic City cop who attends a big-ticket prizefight where he meets Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise), a United States Navy Commander and his straight-laced best friend from childhood. Dunne is in charge of security for Secretary of Defense Charles Kirkland (Joel Fabiani). During the course of the fight Kirkland is subsequently shot and killed by an assassin with Santoro as a key witness to the incident.

As Santoro investigates the murder he begins to realize that there was a lot more going on during the fight than he initially thought. Who was the beautiful redhead (Jayne Heitmeyer) sitting by herself? What happened to the woman (Carla Gugino) dressed in white talking to Kirkland just before he was shot? Why did the supposedly invincible champ (Stan Shaw) lose the fight so easily? The rest of the film follows Santoro's attempts to answer these questions and piece everything together.

Nicolas Cage clearly relishes the role as it allows him to cut loose and have fun with the character. This performance sees him reverting back to his old manic self that you can see bouncing through films like Raising Arizona (1987) or Wild at Heart (1990). Cage seems to be gleefully going over the top in many of the early scenes and it suits his egotistical cop character. Rick’s personality is as ostentatious as his tacky attire. Cage also isn't afraid to play a character that, initially, isn't that nice of guy. He's a self-serving cop only out for himself. He's not your traditional hero. As Rick’s investigation continues, however, and he realizes that there is more going on, Cage modulates his performance as his character wises up and tones down the flash as Rick applies skills he hasn’t used in ages. Cage’s character becomes much more interesting as his life gets increasingly complicated.

Kevin is everything that Rick is not – restrained and responsible. We soon learn that this is all an elaborate façade while with Rick what you see is what you get. Gary Sinise is excellent as the intense Navy Commander that seems too good to be true. That’s because he is and the actor plays an unreliable witness very well. Initially, we don’t have any reason to doubt him but after Rick questions Kevin De Palma audaciously reveals his real agenda so that we now know more than Rick does and spend the rest of the film watching him trying to figure it out. The scenes between Cage and Sinise are a lot of fun to watch as we see two veteran actors play so well of each other, especially as more revelations come to light.

De Palma's choice in actresses with a captivating presence is readily evident in his casting of Carla Gugino as the alluring key figure in the mystery and the only voice of reason in the film – a whistleblower trying to do the right thing. Sadly, she’s largely wasted in a role that amounts to nothing more than relaying expositional dialogue and then reduced to a damsel in distress.

Snake Eyes is a great looking film. De Palma is in fine form and he's got longtime cinematographer Stephen H. Burum (The Untouchables) behind the camera. This makes for a visually interesting film as Burum employs De Palma’s entire bag of tricks: split screens, unusual P.O.V. shots, skewed angles, and starts things off with a bravura 10+minute-long take with no cuts that introduces all of the major characters and the world they inhabit. De Palma does it all while following Rick, which provides all kinds of insights into that man – what he does, his relationship to others and his larger than life personality. It gives Cage a chance to show off, which he does in typical flashy fashion. This long take also forces us to pay attention to not just the people Rick interacts with but also the background details. It is important to what happens later on. This opening sequence also establishes the most crucial relationship in the film – the one between Rick and Kevin, which is increasingly put to the test.

David Koepp’s screenplay presents the Kirkland assassination Rashomon-style as we see it repeatedly from the point-of-view of key figures so that we get more pieces of the puzzle, figuring it out as Rick does. It’s an interesting way to present a thriller of this kind and De Palma and Koepp keep things together for the most part, but one character delivers a monologue near the end of the film that seems like something a Bond villain would spout. For the most part, the director manages to keep us engaged after the show-stopping first ten minutes, but loses it at the film’s climax, which strains credulity.

Initially, Brian De Palma had Al Pacino in mind to play Rick Santoro with an older man-young man dynamic with the Kevin Dunne role. However, Pacino had just done that with Donnie Brasco (1997) and was hesitant to repeat himself. Then, Gary Sinise became available and De Palma went with him and Nicolas Cage, changing the dynamic to characters that were the same age. Sinise worked with De Palma, developing his character’s backstory and motivation for what he was doing while the director had Cage watch screwball comedies because he wanted the actor to say his dialogue at “that Howard Hawks-like speed.” Cage also came up with his character’s flashy attire.

De Palma decided to have the long take at the beginning of the film because he wanted to “show the whole universe that the Nick Cage character was in. I wanted to show HIS world, I wanted to show it really fast, and I wanted to show it whole, in an exciting venue.” He found shooting the actual sequence “akin to a high-wire act: you can get very exhilarated trying to pull it off. It’s also very energizing for the actors. There is a kind of excitement in their performance that you don’t get when you start shooting in master shots, then medium shots, then close-ups.” The opening tracking shot was actually compromised of four SteadiCam shots because 20-minute camera magazines did not exist.

Initially, De Palma had the idea that the ending was to involve Deus ex machine: “we were dealing with such a corrupt world that the only way to solve the problem is to have a hurricane come through and wipe it all away.” Test screening audiences did not like it and so De Palma shot another ending, “which I don’t think is as effective.” Screenwriter David Koepp remembers that in the original ending Rick saved Kevin but test audiences wanted the bad guy to get his comeuppance.

Snake Eyes received mostly mixed to negative reviews. Roger Ebert gave it out one out of four stars and wrote, “Then comes an ending so improbable it seems to have been fashioned as a film school exercise: Find the Mistakes in This Scene.” In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote, “If nothing else in Snake Eyes matches the opening sequence in adrenaline-pumping excitement, the movie never quite fizzles. It just gets sillier and more exaggerated in the self-parodying ways Mr. De Palma’s movies often do.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “D” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “The camera choreography is exquisite, but De Palma is so entranced with staging his purplish voyeuristic set pieces that we can hardly believe a minute of what we’re seeing. He’s become the masturbator of suspense.” The Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan wrote, “Both Koepp’s script and De Palma’s directing style encourage the actors to be over-emphatic, and macho posturing is high on the list of the film’s weaknesses.” Finally, in his review for the New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote, “Mr. De Palma and his collaborators have told a comparatively simple story with a very rich and resourceful mise en scene. This sort of mastery has become so rare in today’s mainstream movies that I find myself more bewitched and beguiled than perhaps I should be.”

Ever the consummate professional, De Palma orchestrates key sequences for maximum impact as he ratchets up the tension by placing certain characters in dangerous situations that they narrowly escape. At times, Snake Eyes seems like a film of two minds. On one hand, it wants to have the stylistic flourishes of De Palma’s more personal work while fulfilling the generic conventions of a thriller. That being said, the film is pure eye candy thanks to Burum’s virtuoso camerawork, which does most of the heavy lifting as does Cage’s deliciously manic performance. Snake Eyes may lack the depth of other De Palma films, like Blow Out (1981), but he seems content to deliver an entertaining thriller utilizing every stylistic trick in his impressive arsenal with the skill of a master filmmaker. The film may lack any kind of real substance but it is wonderful visual eye candy. There’s something enjoyable about letting an expert craftsman like De Palma manipulate us because he does it so well.

SOURCES

Behar, Henri. “Brian De Palma on Snake Eyes.” Film Scouts. August 1998.

Jones, Wil. “David Koepp Interview: Mortdecai, Jurassic Park, Indy 4.” Den of Geek! January 23, 2015.

Taylor, Drew. “Brian De Palma Talks Passion, Digital vs. Film, Psychosexual Thrillers and the Abandoned Ending of Snake Eyes.” The Playlist. July 30, 2013.