Let's Talk About Dick...And By That I Mean Tracy Of Course.

Dick Tracy, the movie was a colossal miscalculation. When the public, spurned on by an unprecedented at the time marketing blitz, made Batman one of the top-grossing movies in 1989, the lesson was not to trot out 1930's era newspaper strip heores out of the moth balls and build wannabe blockbusters around them. The people who liked Batman wanted cool, moody comic book action, and instead in the following years got the pulp hero , newspaper-serial antics of Dick Tracy, The Phantom, The Rocketeer and The Shadow - none of 'em characters that would talk to a young or even semi-young person in 1990. If your target audience in 1990 were senior citizens, that strategy might make sense, but, uh, I'm not sure that was the idea, so most of these flopped pretty hard. Sure, Dick Tracy got the hype and made a ton of money (unlike those other three 'comic book movies'), but not like 'crazy money', and it didn't become a phenomenon like Batman a year before. 

Instead it will mainly be remembered as Warren Beatty's folly, a triumph of art direction, costumes and make up, but with an empty, hollow middle - one-dimensional characters in a one-dimensional, boring narrative. The crazy art direction and impressive costume and set design, as well as the elaborate latex make-up effects, and the idea to at least partly turn Dick Tracy into a musical - there are some bold and commendably crzy choices being made by director and star Warren Beatty - its was a bold swing, but a miss. Every time I watch the movie (which isn't often) I want to like it more than I do, and every time I lose interest once the unique setting and look has settled in. Dick Tracy is a bore. An expensive, elaborate, lovingly assembled bore, but a bore nonetheless. 

The maximalism and miscalculation on display in and with the film, also manifests in its peripherals. Like the music. Trying to be a carbon copy of the preceding year's blockbuster, the Dick Tracy filmmakers hired the very same composer to try and write a very familiar theme and score. There was an official soundtrack album, an exercise in overkill typical of early 90s CDs: a huge amount of bloat, notably by including a number of songs in several versions, despite none of those songs actually making it into the movie. And then of course, we needed a tie-in album from a big pop star, here obviously Beatty's paramour and film co-star Madonna.. If Prince gets to do an entire From And Inspired By' album for Batman, then goshdammit, Madonna will not settle for less. She won't get upstaged by that dwarf from Minnesota! 

And so we get the companion album I'm Breathless, which has a grand total of three songs that were featured in the movie and a nother batcch of 30's-era music pastiches (and, totally unrelated, top notch single "Vogue" attached at the end). So all in all you had to buy three Cds in 1990 for the full Monty Dick experience...and you'd still not get all the music played in the film. So, what about being more humble and condensing all this gigantism into one neat and tidy package, that could have come out in 1990 and might have beeen a better listen than the bloated, too-fat-too-float triple whammy that was proposed? Our One Buck Album will graciously try to fulfill that mission and bring you all you'll arguably need from the film in a tidy 42 minute (well, about 47 with the bonus tracks). 

That means some selections from Danny Elfman's score that is, well, an immediately identifiable Elfman score, whose "Main Title" tries hard to remind people of that other main title for that other comic book character, you know, the one who dresses up like a bat. You'd get the three Madonna songs from I'm Breathless, including "What Can You Lose", a duet with Mandy Patinkin. All of these mixed in with the songs from the soundtrack album that actually feature in the film, all of them more or less chronically arranged. That's what Dick Tracy - Motion Picture Soundtrack is. 

The musical director for the sound track was Andy Paley, once one half of teeniebopper-baiting power pop duo the Paley Brothers with, wait for it, his brother Jonathan. (who might show up on this blog, sooner or later). Afterwards he turned to producing, first turning heads with his work on Brian Wilson's self-titled debut solo album. Dick Tracy project was his biggest and most high-profile gig at the time. On top of producing and assembling the cast, Paley also wrote most of the songs in a faux-1930s style, though of course the big coup of the film's music department was getting Stephen Sondheim for the torch songs Madonna got to sing. Getting back to that cast for a second: There's some relative young guns here in k.d. lang and Erasure, but mostly Paley has assembled heroes and veterans like Brenda Lee, Jerry Lee Lewis and Al Jarreau. And it is fun hearing all of them croon their way through these faux-30s numbers. 

A word on the bonus tracks: These two are from the half dozen or so songs that weren't featured in the movie. LaVern Baker's "Slow Rollin' Mama" uses the old Blues trick of seemingly innocently talking about, in this case, rolling dough, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that she might not only talking about patisserie, if you know what I mean ("I need a big long rollin' pin, to get it ready and right, for my red hot oven"). Fabulously saucy stuff. Darlene Love's "Mr. Fix-It" is in the same pastiche mode as the ret of the tracks for the film, but is one of the best, so highly deserving of being included here, even if there's no trace of it in the film itself. 

And that is that. A single disc, 'has all you need' stop for a fun diversion, that in some ways is a better time than the movie itself. So check out Dick Tracy - Motion Picture Soundtrack (OBG edit) and see if you'll agree...

This is the first in a series of reworked soundtracks coming your way in the next months, often mixing songs and score for a more immersive film flashback experience...