Warren Beatty's latest Dick Tracy TV special is a new work of oddball genius
You haven't lived until you've watched Warren Beatty, in-character, ramble a 5-minute commentary about everything wrong in the 1990 Dick Tracy film
God, this is going to take some explaining.
So, okay: Last night, TCM aired a half-hour block of programming called Tracy Zooms In, with the “Tracy” in question being Dick Tracy, the old-school fictional pulp detective. Which is to say that it was Dick Tracy star (and director) Warren Beatty, dressed in his old, bright yellow Dick Tracy costume, and pretending to be Dick Tracy on a Zoom call with TCM personalities Ben Mankiewicz and Leonard Maltin. This, in turn, was a reference to a special that Beatty recorded, also with Maltin, and also for TCM, back in 2010, which basically everybody assumed then, and assumes now, was a fairly transparent (if also very weird) way for Beatty to retain the rights to the character, which he personally owns, so that he can make a sequel to his 1990 movie some day.
Deep breath!
The new Dick Tracy special is shot through with references to the old one, and Mankiewicz, especially, is trying to bring some fun ironic distance to the whole endeavor. But the thing is that he, and an also-game Maltin, are completely defeated by Warren Beatty, whose commitment to the bit here is sublime. In response to a compliment from Mankiewicz, Beatty responds—as no person on earth has, ever—by touching his headgear and saying “I tip it to you—my hat, that is.” Then he expansively declares “We’re all technocrats now!” while extolling the virtues of Zoom.
We then get to one of the strangest things this writer has ever personally seen broadcast on cable: A four-minute sequence in which Tracy-Beatty shows the trailer for the 1990 film, ostensibly to do commentary, but all he really does is mutter. Mostly about how nice it all looks (not incorrectly, as it happens; there’s a reason the look of Beatty’s Tracy is still heralded) but also a bunch of “Well, I wouldn’t have done that,” or “No, no no…” At one, point, he factchecks a line movie-Beatty delivers to Al Pacino: “Excuse me, walnuts are good for the brain.” It’s not clear how much of the special is scripted, but this part appears to be pure Beatty, and it’s beautifully incoherent.
Finally, it ends as it must: With Beatty also “dialing in” to the Zoom call as himself, getting into arguments with himself-as-Tracy. (First off: A good reminder that Beatty’s Dick Tracy voice is literally just his Warren Beatty voice.) Were you hoping to hear a several-minute rant from Dick Tracy about how people don’t love the sanctity of the cinema anymore today? Great news!
Anyway, it ends with the two of them promising to make a Dick Tracy 2 together, and then a shot of Beatty sitting with himself at a restaurant table, talking about nothing while a song from the movie plays. We don’t know if Beatty will ever get another movie actually off the ground, but god, we’d watch one of these once a decade, in perpetuity.