Secondly, Beatty, as a life-long fan of the original strip, did a couple of interesting things with the production design of the film version. A simple color pallet of the six primary colors and black and white were used for all sets, props, and costumes, an unconscious nod to the limited color capabilities of 1930s newspaper printing.
Then, Beatty had make-up artists adapt the look of the various villain characters – Flattop, The Brow, Pruneface et al – to look exactly as they did when they were first drawn by Gould. Only Pacino’s Big Boy, at the suggestion of the actor himself, bears no resemblance to his comic strip counterpart. In all, 21 of Dick Tracy’s villains appeared in the film, which in a way belies the prevalent opinion that more than one villain in a comic book movie is too many.
The ingredients were all there for Disney to make the next, great summer blockbuster with children appeal: comic book origins, grotesque villains, elaborate world-building and big action scenes, but just because you have the same ingredients doesn’t mean you can make the same meal. The emphasis of Batman was the big moments, and the dueling banjos of insanity that were Batman and the Joker as Burton saw them.
Dick Tracy, on the other hand, had grander ambitions. In a sense, the script was a replay of The Untouchables with Tracy trying to put Big Boy in jail and by the book, while Big Boy consolidates his criminal empire. Complications abound Tracy caught between his longtime girlfriend Tess Trueheart and lounge singer “Breathless” Mahoney, while coping with a homeless kid that he takes under his wing.
It wasn’t exactly Memento, but by comparison, there was a lot more talk about police procedure in Dick Tracy from search warrants to confidential informants and the legality of wiretaps. Batman would just drive into Axis Chemical and blow it up, but Tracy had to do things right, by the book. To the kids that thrilled to Batman, the plot moved at a glacial pace. It was fights they wanted to see, not one of the frequent musical interludes or montages where Madonna belts out one of several original Stephen Sondheim songs, even though crossing over Madonna’s musical ambitions made more sense with Dick Tracy than it did with Prince in Batman.
For those that walked into Dick Tracy expecting to see Batman by another name were bound to leave disappointed. Even many who made it through to the grisly, yet appropriately bloodless for PG-13 Tommy gun shoot out would leave the theater less than thrilled. But a quarter of a century later, there must be appreciation for Beatty’s ambition, and for not buckling to demands to make something more commercial.
That’s not to say that Dick Tracy is inaccessible, but rather it was Beatty’s intention to make his comic book movie just look like a comic book movie, not sound or act like one. Really, Dick Tracy has more in common with the gangster movies of the era Chester Gould first started drawing his strip as opposed to a modern action spectacle. Ultimately, Dick Tracy wouldn’t be the last Hollywood movie to be sold wrong by the studio marketing department.
