There’s a delirious touch of understatement in Orson Welles’ TOUCH OF EVIL/’58 that has old flame Marlene Dietrich commenting on seeing Welles’ corpulent, corrupt, rapidly aging Sheriff after many years, ‘You’re a mess, honey.’ A perfect description of Harvey Keitel’s downward spiraling NYPD Lieutenant Detective in Abel Ferrara’s perverse powerhouse of a police procedural. Mighty raw thirty years ago*, it no longer feels scandalous, just trying too hard. So too Keitel, who stepped in after Christopher Walken unexpectedly ankled,* The case is oddly incidental to the character study with Keitel bringing a touch of Walken’s offbeat stance & line delivery to his usual Robert De Niro manner, bravely going for broke as the flailing plainclothes cop investigates a touchy sexual assault/robbery of a fair-skinned nun by a couple of swarthy local punks in a Catholic Church. (The sequence so visually out of step with the rest of the film, you think someone has stepped into a movie-house playing Italian giallo.) What’s important to Ferrara is the haze of drugs & the weight of Keitel’s gambling debts as he hunts up a big enough stake to go double-or-nothing on his World Series baseball bet. (Ironically, featuring vice troubled ballplayers Darryl Strawberry & Dwight Gooden.) Impressive stuff, in its way, but also ‘a mess, honey.’
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *In Keitel’s infamous full-frontal nude scene (earning the film its NC-17 rating), he looks like some living Rodin statue. But who’s the second guy with Keitel & the sex worker?
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT; *Not seen here, so something of a gamble, but Ferrara’s previous film, KING OF NEW YORK/’90, works from a mob POV, retained Christopher Walken as its lead, and has Steve Bucsemi, Wesley Snipes, Laurence Fishburne & David Caruso as part of a dream cast for one of Ferrara’s indie projects.
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