Random 'Dick Tracy' Was A Prestige Comic Book Movie That Came Out 25 Years Too Early (14 items)

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  (#7) It's Surprisingly Violent - And Risque - For A Movie Rated PG

  The first dialogue we hear in Dick Tracy is radio announcers talking about broken limbs and a mother "left to expire in a pool of blood." Sounds pretty grim for a piece of PG-rated pop art released by Disney in the '90s, doesn't it? That's all off-camera, though. The film also boasts a surprisingly high body count, as well as a lethal poker game within its opening frames. There's not much of the red stuff to be seen anywhere, but there's plenty of Tommy guns going off, and lots of bodies hitting the floor before all is said and done.

  It isn't just in the action department that Dick Tracy pushes the PG envelope, either. Madonna's Breathless Mahoney utters plenty of indelicate double entendres, including one about peach ice cream that is particularly graphic. In the first scene where she meets Tracy, she shows up leaving little to the imagination, wearing a completely sheer nighty. "No grief for Lips?" Tracy asks, referring to her former boss Lips Manlis, who's just been rubbed out by the film's villain. "I'm wearing black underwear," she replies.
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  (#1) The World Of 'Dick Tracy' Looks Like A Comic Book

  Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who had previously worked on the likes of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Apocalypse Now, Reds, and The Last Emperor, already had three Academy Awards under his belt by the time he received his fourth nomination for Dick Tracy. Meanwhile, production designer Richard Sylbert and set decorator Rick Simpson won an Oscar for their work on the film. Utilizing only seven primary colors, always in the same shade, the film strived to ape the look of its comic strip roots.

  Years before films like 300 or Sin City, Dick Tracy relied on real-life sets accompanied by lavish matte paintings to recreate the look of a comic strip on film in a way that no other comic book movie had ever attempted. However, doing so also pushed the movie way over budget.
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  (#5) It Features An All-Star Cast - And A 'Godfather' Reunion

  At the time Dick Tracy was released, Warren Beatty was something of a powerhouse. While his previous starring role Ishtar may have been a notorious box office flop, his name still carried serious cachet, and he knew a lot of people in Hollywood. How else could you explain the roster of Hollywood legends - some long-established, others up-and-coming - who appear, often under extravagant makeup, in Dick Tracy?

  Al Pacino earned an Oscar nomination for his role as Big Boy Caprice, and the film's other mobsters are almost all played by Hollywood heavy hitters. Where else can you see Dustin Hoffman play a character named Mumbles who literally mumbles all of his lines? Or see James Caan and Pacino face off across a table as rivals in an unlikely Godfather reunion? (Caan also played opposite Kathy Bates, who appears in Dick Tracy in a brief role as a stenographer, in Misery, which came out the same year and earned Bates an Academy Award for best actress.)

  Other cast members include Dick Van Dyke, Charles Durning, Paul Sorvino, William Forsythe, Mandy Patinkin as a piano player, Star Trek's Colm Meaney, Henry Silva, Michael J. Pollard, and even cult actress Mary Woronov in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it role. And overshadowing them all is Madonna as the film's femme fatale, Breathless Mahoney.
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  (#6) It's As Much A Musical As It Is An Action Film

  When it comes to the look of the film, Dick Tracy does more than ape comic strip colors. The filmmakers adopted old Hollywood techniques, filming on sound stages and backlots, and filling in backgrounds with elaborate matte paintings. It's a film set in the '30s that is, in many ways, created like a film in the '30s would have been made. This same theatrical staginess is part of why Dick Tracy is as much a musical as an action movie.

  The dramatic score by Danny Elfman - who did Batman just the year before - is accompanied by five songs written by legendary Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim and performed by Madonna (with accompaniment, on one song, by Mandy Patinkin, who plays the piano player in the film's Club Ritz). "Sooner or Later" won Sondheim an Oscar for best original song.

  Generally, the film's musical sequences, which involve song-and-dance numbers being performed at the club by Madonna's Breathless Mahoney, play over action and narrative montages. In "Back in Business," for example, Sondheim uses lyrics to punctuate action sequences, with words like "boom" accompanying actual pyrotechnics.

  "Not only was it for a movie based on a cartoon I had grown up with," Sondheim wrote about the experience of working on the film, "it was set in the 1930s and thus invited pastiche, something I loved writing."
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  (#8) Roger Ebert Thought It Looked Better Than Tim Burton's 'Batman'

  "Dick Tracy," Roger Ebert wrote in his glowing four-star review of the film, "outdoes even Batman in the visual departments." Hard to get much more direct than that. Ebert elaborates, "An entire world has been built here, away from the daylight and the realism of ordinary city streets."

  More from Ebert: "Dick Tracy is a masterpiece of studio artificiality, of matte drawings and miniatures and optical effects. It creates a world that never could be."
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  (#11) It Was Nominated For Seven Oscars And Won Three

  Back when Dick Tracy came out, comic book movies - which were relatively rare anyway - didn't generally get Oscar nominations. When they did, the noms were pretty much always in technical categories. (Tim Burton's Batman won for best art direction the year before.)

  Dick Tracy's whopping seven Oscar nominations make it one of the most nominated comic book films to this day, tying with Black Panther. Those two are narrowly edged by Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, which secured eight nominations, but took home just a pair of trophies.

  At the time, Dick Tracy was also the first comic book movie to receive what is known as an "above-the-line" nomination, which Al Pacino nabbed for best supporting actor. In fact, comic book movies wouldn't win an above-the-line award (which includes acting categories, director, picture, and screenplay) until Heath Ledger's posthumous best supporting actor win for The Dark Knight.

  In addition to Pacino's acting nod, Dick Tracy also received nominations for cinematography, costume, and sound design, and won in the categories of best art direction, best makeup, and best original song, which went to Stephen Sondheim's "Sooner or Later," as performed by Madonna both in the movie and at the Oscar ceremony.

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