Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

Gary The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Curt Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Prismark10 Splitface is the first of four Dick Tracy films from RKO. Morgan Conway is dull as the square jawed comic strip police hero. The film is really a noirish police thriller than a comic strip movie.Only the casting of Mike Mazurki as the scarred Splitface gives it a comic strip menace, a man who can stab people in a brutal fashion as he goes after the people who put him behind bars. There is also another villain, astrologer and hypnotist Professor Starling who can mesmerise people with his gaze.The film is pacy, we get Tess Trueheart waiting for a date with Tracy but really it comes across as creaky. It just goes to show that Warren Beatty really did an excellent job in his film version many decades later.

gorf The movie from the 90s has a lot of good in it, but it doesn't come close to the 1945 version. The 90s version is a bit slow in some parts. The 40s movie is just an hour long, and fast- paced. The 90s version is too weird for people who are not familiar with the comic strip. The 40s version is like a classic Sherlock Holmes movie. The 90s version had some unnecessary sexual content (rated PG) in it. In the 40s version it is nonexistent. The main villain in the 90s version is annoying. The 40s villain is frightening. And best of all, Madonna isn't in the 40s version! For an old movie, it is a bit gruesome. Splitface (the serial killer) is like a "modern" day Jack the Ripper. While there's not a lot of blood, there's a scene where he kills another criminal that is pretty horrific. We never directly see the knife enter the body, just some slashing motions...but we know very well what happened to him. In some ways, Dick Tracy feels almost like a horror movie. The scariest part is that Splitface seems like someone you could actually meet in the park at night. He's disfigured, but doesn't growl or scream like Leatherface. And he's not invincible like Jason Vorhees either. He acts like a regular human...except for the killings. The movie's light-hearted humor stops it from becoming too dark, and in the end, the good guys win. But I don't think it's a good idea to let small children watch this movie.

MartinHafer Years ago, I bought a wonderful book entitled "The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made and How They Got to be That Way". I agreed with most of the inclusions but I have found that a few of the films were definitely NOT bad enough to make the book (such as THAT HAGAN GIRL and DICK TRACY VS. CUEBALL). Because of the inclusion of the Dick Tracy film, I avoided watching the films for years--thinking they stank. And, when I did see my first (DICK TRACY'S DILEMMA), it was pretty bad. But today I sat down and watched the first film from the series as well as DICK TRACY VS. CUEBALL and found both of them to be decent B-movies--average, yes, but far from "50 Worst" territory.Now that I've seen all four of the RKO Tracy films, I realize that this first one is the best. Part of it might be because "Splitface" (Mike Mazurky) was a pretty good villain and NOT as silly as some of the ones in later films. He was a big goon who killed his victims by slashing them repeatedly with a mortician's knife. Also, there were actually some decent plot twists and the action was pretty horrific towards the end--with some amazingly graphic murders for the time period in which they were made. Decent and entertaining--this is a good bet for fans of B-detective films (like me).By the way, the mortician who is brutally killed in this movie appears again in the next film, DICK TRACY VS. CUEBALL and he showed no signs of being a zombie. So much for continuity.

Neil Doyle DICK TRACY has the film noir look of the '40s and some interesting plot devices involving a slasher out for revenge. With its brief running time and low-budget values, it's strictly the kind of fare that used to play the lower half of double bills for the Saturday matinee crowds.Still, it's not bad as far as these B-pics go (some excellent B&W photography)--but MORGAN CONWAY is nobody's idea of what the famous sleuth should look like. RALPH BYRD was a much better choice in those Tracy serials--he must have been busy when they got to making this one. Anne Jeffreys is pert and pretty as Tess but has little to do. (Did Hollywood ever give her a substantial role?) Little Mickey Kuhn (he was Beau Wilkes in GWTW and the young man Vivien Leigh flirted with in A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE) is delightful as the boy detective who helps solve the case.For the villain of the piece, we have Mike Mazurki wearing a scar that looks like a decent make-up job and hulking in the shadows whenever the next murder takes place. Not bad, and certainly one of the better entries in the DICK TRACY films of the '40s--but what it needed was square-jawed RALPH BYRD in the title role.Summing up: a good programmer.