Batman’s influence: Pulp Comic Films of the early 1990s
Imagine the year is 1989, and Tim Burton’s adaptation of DC Comics’ Batman has just made massive money for Warner Bros. and even won an Academy Award for Best Art Direction. Batman had a massive impact on the industry, changing comic book movies forever, but a smaller impact it had on the industry can be found in the trend of pulp comic-style movies being made in the years following Batman.
You may be asking yourself, what is a pulp comic-style movie? This is a film based on a comic strip like Batman, except grounded in reality, containing less fantastical elements; they also usually have their origins in the 1930s and a direct connection to the gangster films of the era. For example, the Dick Tracy newspaper run was adapted into Dick Tracy (1990), and The Shadow comic book series was adapted as The Shadow (1994).
Dick Tracy was in production for several years before Batman was released, with a revolving door of directors being attached, such as Steven Spielberg, John Landis, Walter Hill, and Richard Benjamin, before Warren Beatty was assigned to produce, direct, and star as Dick Tracy. Following Batman’s immense success, Disney, who owned Touchstone Pictures, modeled their marketing campaign for the film after Batman’s, with a tie-in album by Madonna, which would feature Vogue, a series of 14 action figures, and a traditional score by Batman composer Danny Elfman.
Dick Tracy follows the crusade against crime by the eponymous square-jawed detective against gangster Big Boy Caprice (Al Pacino) while facing the decision of settling down with Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly) or living a life with lounge singer Breathless Mahoney (Madonna). While Dick Tracy, on the surface, may seem like a good match for the marketing campaign modeled after Batman (1989), it was not a real fit for the hyper-stylized experiment that Warren Beatty had made. The film looks gorgeous, thanks to the magnificent cinematography captured by Vittorio Storaro, best known for Apocalypse Now (1979) and The Last Emperor (1987), but the plot itself has little substance. You never quite learn why Dick Tracy fights crime. To him, busting grotesque gangsters is just a job he’s very passionate about, so the audience doesn’t have much stake in the character to cause them to care about him. Dick Tracy is an alright film, it only becomes interesting when taken into the context of Warren Beatty’s life and career - which YouTuber Patrick H. Willems has made an interesting analysis of.
Four years after Dick Tracy, Universal Pictures released one of the more well-known films made off the back of Batman. Based on the character from pulp radio plays and magazines that inspired Batman, The Shadow had been in development throughout the 1980s, with directors like Robert Zemeckis attached, and a pitch by Sam Raimi rejected - later becoming the superb film Darkman - before the success of Batman jump-started production. Alec Baldwin, who was one of many actors considered for the title role in Batman (1989), was cast as The Shadow: A former WWI pilot and drug kingpin who is offered a chance to fight for a righteous cause, capable of manipulating people’s perceptions of him, having only his shadow visible.
The film goes for a more noir-inspired tone than Dick Tracy but again fails in terms of character depth and consistency. The Shadow never learns a valuable lesson or skill to defeat the film’s antagonist, Shiwan Khan, the last descendant of Genghis Khan - I don't even want to get into the accuracy of that backstory - instead, he just is better at controlling his vague psychic abilities. The film doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be a slightly darker screwball comedy, as evident by several fast-paced quippy exchanges between Baldwin and his co-star Penelope Ann Miller, or a darker Batman-like pulp comic fantasy film, with a dream sequence where Alec Baldwin tears his face off, and a flying angry knife. As clearly evident, The Shadow is unfocused and fails to connect to audiences as Batman (1989) does.
Though flawed, these films are interesting in some way or another. Dick Tracy has astonishing art direction, cinematography, and grotesque makeup effects for the gangster characters, as well as some good original songs by Stephen Sondheim, a rarity for a film. While The Shadow is remembered as the lesser film of the two, it remains known for its excellent costume design and the brief few minutes where it decides to be a screwball comedy; the dialogue is witty and fun to listen to, with shades of Baldwin’s future as a comedic straight man.
This situation, where a film has an impact on films already in production and begins production on a film to capitalize on its success, still happens today. Many failed or underwhelming cinematic universes have come and gone following the peak of the Marvel Cinematic Universes’ popularity and quality, such as the one-film-long Dark Universe and the hit-or-miss DC Extended Universe. Though these films are of little significance when considering the film landscape, they serve as a fascinating time capsule to the short-lived era in the early 1990s, when people thought that pulp comic heroes were the next big thing.