Quentin Tarantino (1992)

Going to see Reservoir Dogs in BFI’s ‘Nineties: Young Cinema Rebels’ season was dealing with unfinished business.  When we watched Quentin Tarantino’s debut feature on video at home some years ago, we didn’t get beyond the early stages of the most notoriously violent sequence – the torture of a police officer to the catchy accompaniment of Stealers Wheel’s ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’.  I thought I should have another go because of the reputation that Tarantino, like him or not, has developed over the years.  I made it through to the end this time, though the ordeal of the kidnapped cop Marvin Nash (Kirk Baltz) – Mr Blonde (Michael Madsen) slices off one of Nash’s ears with a razor, douses him in petrol and prepares to set him alight – remains exceptionally discomfiting.  I felt I’d be chicken to stop watching again but degraded that I declined to walk.

Although the sequence epitomises what makes Reservoir Dogs morally problematic, there are larger difficulties viewing it in long retrospect and in light of Tarantino’s subsequent work.  I remember reading, at the time of the film’s original release, about his five years of employment in a video store.  I inferred that his imagination had been fed largely by spending his days there watching crime thrillers and other screen pulp fiction.  That oversimplifies things.  According to his biography on Wikipedia, Tarantino had other jobs before his stint at the video store (in Manhattan Beach, California).  His first job in Hollywood – as a production assistant, at the age of twenty-three – was six years before Reservoir Dogs appeared.  Even so, the idea stayed in my mind that he was someone who, thanks to being cooped up day after day in a world of movies, had created a piece whose moral parameters were dictated by the limits of such experience.  At this distance in time, however, it’s hard not to see his first film as setting the pattern for Tarantino’s persisting order of priorities.  The world on screen is defined in terms of cinema history.  The imperative of film-making bravado subjugates content to style.

Their recurrence in later Tarantino movies has also deprived some details of Reservoir Dogs of the freshness they may have had in 1992.   The extended opening conversation in a Los Angeles breakfast diner includes competitive discussion among the men who’ll shortly carry out a jewel heist about the meaning of Madonna songs, and the principle of leaving a tip.  It’s not, of course, a fault that, when gang members talk about TV shows, their references to Pam Grier now feel like self-references (to Jackie Brown) on the director’s part.  This is hard to ignore, all the same:  the fetishising of pop culture that’s become a Tarantino trope muffles the novelty of his voice in this film.  That said, the dialogue still has more tang and variety than that of the nearly contemporary Goodfellas (1990), whose bravura depictions of (dis)organised crime violence encouraged comparisons between it and Reservoir Dogs.

The structure of Tarantino’s story doesn’t compare so well with Scorsese’s film, though.  The cut from the discursive though edgy breakfast chatter to the immediate aftermath of the heist gone wrong has startling impact, as Mr White (Harvey Keitel) drives away from the scene of the crime at breakneck speed, trying to persuade the badly injured, profusely bleeding Mr Orange (Tim Roth), sprawled in the back of the car, that he’s not going to die.  There are plenty of dynamic action sequences to follow but we soon know the gang includes a stool pigeon and who that is:  presupposing we’re fascinated by his characters, Tarantino spends plenty of time describing in flashbacks how the team of robbers was assembled by mob boss Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney).   The scenes involving the undercover training of Freddy Newandyke (Roth), the LAPD officer who infiltrates the gang and becomes Mr Orange, are welcome in supplying some respite from the physical and verbal violence that’s gone before.  Other sequences, like the one where Cabot assigns the gang’s coloured names for the operation, are more self-indulgent.

For a rookie director, Tarantino shows remarkable assurance in handling the cast, which also includes Steve Buscemi (Mr Pink), Edward Bunker (Mr Blue) and Chris Penn (as Eddie, Joe Cabot’s son).  Harvey Keitel manages to give Larry aka Mr White some emotional depth, not least in angrily distinguishing between professional criminals like himself and psychopaths like Mr Blonde.  Tim Roth is impressive too – interesting that he’s more convincing as the gang member Freddy is pretending to be than as the cop he really is.  Steve Buscemi shows his talent for making almost non-stop whining witty.  Tarantino himself plays Mr Brown.  It’s not a large role, which may be just as well.  He’s fine at a distance but, in this highly skilled company, seems too aware of the camera when it’s closer.

Mr Brown and Mr Blue are both reported killed in a showdown with police at the heist scene.  Mr Blonde, just as he’s about to light the petrol poured over Marvin Nash, is shot dead by Freddy.  Nash is eventually put out of his misery by an impulsive bullet to the head by Eddie Cabot.  The mixture of fresh and drying blood all over his white shirt means that, by the closing stages, Freddy really is Mr Orange:  about to die, he confesses to Larry, with whom he’s developed a bond of sorts, that he’s a cop.  Larry, who insisted that wasn’t the case in the climactic standoff with the mob boss, sobs and puts a gun to Freddy’s head.  When the police arrive, Larry is fatally shot too.  The taking out of the Cabots, père et fils, generated some applause in NFT3.  I couldn’t help thinking at the end that Tarantino had a nerve killing off all the people – except for Mr Pink, who’s arrested – by whom he’s expected us to be entertained throughout.

Much of the lethal action, including the torture of the officer, takes place in a warehouse.  The stark space and the speeches delivered there give the warehouse the quality of a stage set, and the impression that fundamental existential issues are being played out before us.  In a Sight & Sound interview with David Thomson in January 1993, Harvey Keitel said that he ‘felt Quentin was writing about mythological themes, universal themes of betrayal and redemption …’    Keitel’s interpretation may be welcome to admirers of Reservoir Dogs who don’t like the idea of commending an amoral technical feat but I don’t buy it.  This may, again, be a matter of looking at an apprentice piece through the lens of later Tarantino – through gore-tinted spectacles, in other words – but I think that Quentin, a film-maker turned on by mayhem, is showing off.

7 July 2019