Quentin Tarantino’s excellent screenplay for his violent thriller True Romance (now on rerelease) was given a glossy, high-energy, if conventional treatment by Tony Scott in 1993, a year after Tarantino’s debut as a fully fledged writer-director with Reservoir Dogs. Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette play Clarence and Alabama, two sexy young lovers who hit the road with cocaine belonging to Alabama’s pimp.
Many of the familiar tropes are already there: funkily off-topic pop culture conversations, Mexican stand-offs, martial arts cinephilia and crooked Hollywood producers who show the influence of Elmore Leonard, later to resurface in Tarantino’s superlative work on Jackie Brown. But Scott doesn’t have the angular and hard-edged comic-book clarity of Tarantino’s style, and the choices of music here aren’t as bold. Using the Delibes’ Flower Duet four years after the British Airways ad is a little off.
Patricia Arquette is great, although Christian Slater is comprehensively out-acted and out-charismad by everyone else on screen: by Arquette, by smouldering supporting turns such as Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken, and by the soon-to-be stars such as Brad Pitt and James Gandolfini. There is some superbly off-the-wall misheard dialogue. (“Who the fuck is Dick?” – “You … want to suck his dick?”) and the whole thing rattles along like that pink Cadillac they’re driving.
