Bovie Movie

Warren Beatty directed and starred in this big-budget action comedy featuring Chester Gould’s square-jawed, two-dimensional comic strip detective. Ruthless gangster Big Boy Caprice (Al Pacino) touches off a gang war against underworld boss Lips Manlis (Paul Sorvino), with Big Boy and his minions rubbing out enough of Manlis’s goons (along with Manlis himself) to take over his nightclub, and a healthy percentage of the city’s criminal activities in the process. Caprice also gains proprietary rights to Manlis’s girlfriend, nightclub chanteuse Breathless Mahoney (Madonna). Big Boy’s next move to is unite the rest of the city’s crooks under his command; this wave of corruption attracts the attention of lawman Dick Tracy, who is determined to smash Caprice’s criminal network once and for all. As Tracy plots to put Big Boy behind bars where he belongs, Breathless uses her considerable charms in an attempt to sway Tracy from the path of righteousness; this causes no small amount of anxiety for Tracy’s long-suffering female companion, Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly), and the street-smart kid (Charlie Korsmo) they’ve been keeping an eye on. The various bad guys, heavily made up to resemble Gould’s cartoon characters (though Beatty is not made up to resemble Tracy), include Dustin Hoffman, James Caan, R.G. Armstrong, and William Forsythe.

One of a cluster of late-1970s films about the Vietnam War, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now adapts the Joseph Conrad novella Heart of Darkness to depict the war as a descent into primal madness. Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen), already on the edge, is assigned to find and deal with AWOL Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), rumored to have set himself up in the Cambodian jungle as a local, lethal godhead. Along the way Willard encounters napalm and Wagner fan Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall), draftees who prefer to surf and do drugs, a USO Playboy Bunny show turned into a riot by the raucous soldiers, and a jumpy photographer (Dennis Hopper) telling wild, reverent tales about Kurtz. By the time Willard sees the heads mounted on stakes near Kurtz’s compound, he knows Kurtz has gone over the deep end, but it is uncertain whether Willard himself now agrees with Kurtz’s insane dictum to “Drop the Bomb. Exterminate them all.” Coppola himself was not certain either, and he tried several different endings between the film’s early rough-cut screenings for the press, the Palme d’Or-winning “work-in-progress” shown at Cannes, and the final 35 mm U.S. release (also the ending on the video cassette). The chaotic production also experienced shut-downs when a typhoon destroyed the set and star Sheen suffered a heart attack; the budget ballooned and Coppola covered the overages himself. These production headaches, which Coppola characterized as being like the Vietnam War itself, have been superbly captured in the documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. Despite the studio’s fears and mixed reviews of the film’s ending, Apocalypse Now became a substantial hit and was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for Duvall’s psychotic Kilgore, and Best Screenplay. It won Oscars for sound and for Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography. This hallucinatory, Wagnerian project has produced admirers and detractors of equal ardor; it resembles no other film ever made, and its nightmarish aura and polarized reception aptly reflect the tensions and confusions of the Vietnam era.

A variation on the “buddy-cop” hybridized genre, 48 HRS. greatly bolstered the career of Nick Nolte and made comedian Eddie Murphy a bonafide box-office sensation. When a pair of reckless cop-killers break out of prison, grizzled detective Jack Cates (Nolte) is left no alternative but to spring fast-talking hustler Reggie Hammond (Murphy) from the penitentiary in order to find the criminals. The catch: the pair only have 48 hours to complete their assignment before Hammond must return to prison. Naturally, the two despise each other and even engage in fisticuffs, but eventually the danger facing them proves a strong enough common bond for them to play on the same team, and even achieve a little mutual admiration.