True Romance

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For other uses, see True Romance (disambiguation).
True Romance

Theatrical release poster
Directed by Tony Scott
Produced by Gary Barber
Samuel Hadida
James G. Robinson
Written by Quentin Tarantino
Starring Christian Slater
Patricia Arquette
Dennis Hopper
Val Kilmer
Gary Oldman
Brad Pitt
Christopher Walken
Music by Hans Zimmer
Cinematography Jeffrey L. Kimball
Editing by Michael Tronick
Christian Wagner
Studio Morgan Creek Productions
Davis Films
A Band Apart
Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures
Release dates
  • September 10, 1993 (1993-09-10)
Running time 118 minutes[1]
Country United States
France
Language English
Italian
Budget $13 million[2]
Box office $12,281,551[3]

True Romance is a 1993 American romantic crime film directed by Tony Scott and written by Quentin Tarantino. The film stars Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette with a supporting cast featuring Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer, Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt, and Christopher Walken.

Plot

Clarence Worley watches a Sonny Chiba triple feature at a Detroit movie theater on his birthday where he meets Alabama Whitman. They go to a diner and flirt with each other. At Clarence's apartment they have sex. She confesses that she is a call girl hired by Clarence's boss as his birthday present. Each claims to have fallen in love and they marry.

Clarence visits Alabama's pimp, Drexl Spivey, who makes Clarence uneasy. An apparition of Elvis Presley tells him that killing Drexl will make the world a better place. Clarence tells Drexl that he has married Alabama and she has no additional business with him. Drexl and Clarence fight, Clarence draws a gun and kills Drexl. He grabs a bag that he assumes belongs to Alabama. When he tells Alabama he killed Drexl, she sobs and finds this "so romantic". They open the suitcase, and find it is full of cocaine. Clarence and Alabama decide to leave for California immediately. First they pay a visit to Clarence's estranged father, Clifford Worley, a former cop. Clifford tells Clarence that the police assume Drexl's murder is a drug-related killing.

In Los Angeles, the young couple plan to meet Clarence's old friend, Dick Ritchie, an aspiring actor. Back in Detroit, Clifford is confronted in his home by gangster Vincenzo Coccotti, who wants the drugs taken from Drexl. Clifford refuses to reveal where his son has gone. Accepting that he is going to die anyway, he insults Coccotti by claiming that Sicilians are "niggers" descended from the Moors. Coccotti shoots Clifford in the head and then finds a note on the fridge giving Clarence's address in L.A.

Clarence plans to use Ritchie's contacts with an actor named Elliot Blitzer to sell the drugs to film producer Lee Donowitz. Elliot, who has some of the cocaine, is stopped for speeding and is arrested for drug possession. Believing Clarence's story of getting the drugs from a dirty cop, he informs on Donowitz.

Alabama is found in the motel room and brutally interrogated by Coccotti's henchman, Virgil. In the subsequent fight, Alabama kills Virgil. She and Clarence talk of moving to Cancún with the money from the drug deal. Knowing that the cocaine was uncut, and with Elliot "confessing" in order to avoid prison, detectives Nicholson and Dimes conclude that a sizable drug deal is about to go down. Promising him that he can avoid prison in return for cooperation, the two detectives have Elliot wear a wire. Coccotti's men learn where the deal is going down from Ritchie's roommate, Floyd.

Clarence, Alabama, Ritchie, and Elliot, with the drugs, visit Donowitz's suite at the Ambassador Hotel. In the elevator, Clarence confronts Elliot at gunpoint, thinking that Elliot is trying to set him up. But Elliot reassures Clarence that there is no setup. Clarence makes a good impression on Donowitz, then excuses himself to the bathroom, where he has another conversation with Elvis. Meanwhile, Donowitz and his bodyguards are ambushed by both the cops and gangsters who break in at almost the same time. Realizing that Elliot is an informant, Donowitz throws a pot of coffee on him. Nicholson then shoots Donowitz, and a shootout begins. Ritchie abandons the drugs and flees. Almost everyone is killed in the crossfire. Clarence is shot as he exits the bathroom. Dimes, who survived the shoot-out, kills one of Donowitz's wounded bodyguards for shooting Nicholson. Alabama then shoots Dimes. Clarence is alive but loses an eye. They escape with Donowitz's money while more police set a perimeter around the hotel. Clarence and Alabama are shown on a beach in Cancún, with their son, Elvis.

Cast

Production

The title and plot are a play on the titles of romance comic books with their overwrought love stories—very popular in earlier decades—such as "True Life Secrets", "True Stories of Romance", "Romance Tales", "Untamed Love" and "Strange Love".

True Romance was a breakthrough of sorts for Tarantino. Released after Reservoir Dogs, it was his first screenplay for a major motion picture, and Tarantino contends that it is his most autobiographical film to date. He had initially hoped to serve as the film's director, but he ended up losing interest in directing and sold the script. According to Tarantino's audio commentary on the DVD release, he was happy with the way it turned out as, apart from changing the nonlinear narrative he wrote to a more conventional linear structure, it was largely faithful to his original screenplay and, although he initially opposed director Tony Scott's decision to change the ending (which Scott maintained was of his own volition, not the studio's, saying "I just fell in love with these two characters and didn’t want to see them die") he realized when seeing the completed film that Scott's happy ending was more appropriate to the film as he had directed it, whereas the originally scripted ending would have been more suited to Tarantino's directorial style.[4]

The film's score by Hans Zimmer is a theme based on Gassenhauer from Carl Orff's Schulwerk. This theme combined with a voiceover spoken by Arquette is an homage to Terrence Malick's 1973 crime film Badlands, in which Sissy Spacek speaks the voiceover, and that also shares similar dramatic motifs.

Release

Critical reception

Reviews for the film were largely positive. It holds a "fresh" rating of 92% based on 47 reviews collected from notable publications by review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, with the consensus, "Fueled by Quentin Tarantino's savvy screenplay and a gallery of oddball performances, Tony Scott's True Romance is a funny and violent action jaunt in the best sense".[5]

Phil Villarreal of the Arizona Daily Star called it "one of the most dynamic action films of the 1990s".[6] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave it three stars, saying "it's Tarantino's gutter poetry that detonates True Romance. This movie is dynamite."[7]

Roger Ebert gave the film a positive review remarking that "the energy and style of the movie are exhilarating", and that "the supporting cast is superb, a roll call of actors at home in these violent waters: Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, and Brad Pitt, for example".[8] A negative review by The Washington Post's Richard Harrington claimed the film was "stylistically visceral" yet "aesthetically corrupt".[9]

Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, "True Romance, a vibrant, grisly, gleefully amoral road movie directed by Tony Scott and dominated by the machismo of Quentin Tarantino (who wrote this screenplay before he directed Reservoir Dogs), is sure to offend a good-sized segment of the moviegoing population".[10]

Box office performance

Although a critical success, True Romance was a box office failure. It was given a domestic release and earned $12,281,551[3] on an estimated $13 million budget.[2] Despite this, the film developed a cult following over the years.[11]

Legacy

Empire ranked True Romance the 157th greatest film of all time in 2008.[12]

The Hopper/Walken scene, colloquially named "The Sicilian scene", has been praised.[13] Tarantino himself has named it as one of his proudest moments. "I had heard that whole speech about the Sicilians a long time ago, from a black guy living in my house. One day I was talking with a friend who was Sicilian and I just started telling that speech. And I thought: 'Wow, that is a great scene, I gotta remember that'."[14] The dialogue from the scene can be found at wikiquote.

Oldman's villain also garnered acclaim. MSN Movies wrote, "With just a few minutes of screen time, Gary Oldman crafts one of cinema's most memorable villains: the brutal, dreadlocked pimp Drexl Spivey. Even in a movie jammed with memorable cameos from screen luminaries [...] Oldman's scar-faced, dead-eyed, lethal gangster stood out."[15] Jason Serafino of Complex named Spivey as one of the top five coolest drug dealers in movie history, writing, "He's not in the film for a long time, but the few scant moments that Gary Oldman plays the psychotic dealer Drexl Spivey make True Romance a classic ... Oldman gave us a glimpse at one of cinema's most unfiltered sociopaths."[16]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "TRUE ROMANCE (18)". British Board of Film Classification. 1993-10-08. Retrieved 2012-11-16. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "True Romance (1993) - Box office / business". Internet Movie Database. Amazon.com. Retrieved 2012-11-16. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 "True Romance (1993)". boxofficemojo.com. Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 2011-08-18. 
  4. ↑ Spitz, Marc (25 April 2008). "True Romance: 15 Years Later". maxim.com. Maxim. Retrieved 16 January 2012. 
  5. ↑ "True Romance". Rotten Tomatoes. Flixster. Retrieved 2011-08-18. 
  6. ↑ Villarreal, Phil. "Review: True Romance". Arizona Daily Star. 
  7. ↑ Travers, Peter (10 September 1993). "True Romance: Movie Review". rollingstone.com. Rolling Stone. Retrieved 16 January 2012. 
  8. ↑ "True Romance". rogerebert.com. 10 September 1993. Retrieved 2011-01-17. 
  9. ↑ Harrington, Richard (10 September 1993). "True Romance". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2011-01-17. 
  10. ↑ Maslin, Janet (10 September 1993). "True Romance: Desperadoes, Young at Heart With Gun in Hand". The New York Times. Retrieved 2011-01-17. 
  11. ↑ Spitz, Marc. "True Romance: 15 Years Later". Maxim. Retrieved 23 April 2013. 
  12. ↑ Empire's 500 Greatest Movies Of All Time
  13. ↑ Lyttelton, Oliver. The 10 Best Dennis Hopper Performances, On What Would Have Been His 76th Birthday. IndieWire. May 17, 2012. Retrieved December 5, 2012.
  14. ↑ True Romance Unrated Director's Cut DVD commentary
  15. ↑ True Romance (1993) - Drexl Spivey. MSN Movies. 2011. Retrieved December 17, 2012.
  16. ↑ Serafino, Jason. The 25 Coolest Drug Dealers In Movies. Complex. October 24, 2012. Retrieved December 21, 2012.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: True Romance
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