Older readers may well recall the great Tarantino gold-rush of 1992, a heady time, just after Reservoir Dogs premiered at Sundance, when studios came a' clambering for more-more-more.
Suddenly, every producer and suited executive wanted a Tarantino screenplay, or at least a Tarantino-alike screenplay, to call their own. Inevitably, the feeding frenzy threw up wildly mixed results. Nobody much cared for the unhappy marriage between Oliver Stone and the script for Natural Born Killers. Yet even Tarantino purists – not to mention the man himself – were delighted by Tony Scott's interpretation of the screenplay Tarantino has described as his "most autobiographical".
Certainly, one can see the former video-store clerk in Clarence (Christian Slater), True Romance's accidental hero. But in other respects the film offers a yummy pick'n'mix of movie tropes: the happy hooker, the suitcase of drugs, double-crosses, cops and mobsters. Many have tried to hammer such old chestnuts into a pleasing cinematic shape to no avail. But Tarantino's alchemy, a superb ensemble and Tony Scott's high-octane pizzazz would make for anti-canonical canonical cinema.
The late Scott and his trusty DOP Jeffrey L Kimball brought a palette of colour and feathers and slow-motion and dry ice to every action sequence. There is, additionally, something unendingly adorable about the implausibly cutesy-pie puppy love between Alabama (Patricia Arquette) and Clarence. Many smaller turns – notably Val Kilmer’s Elvis ersatz spirit guide (and shorter stand-offs - see Hopper and Walken in ‘the Sicilian scene’) – are as iconic as anything in modern cinema.
True Romance was a box office flop on release in 1993. There’s no accounting for taste. Still a firecracker of a movie after all these years.
