When Comics Click on Film : Success of Comic Heroes on the Big Screen Depends on Casting, Conception, Humor

Into the glare of the police line-up strides Dick Tracy, fearless as ever. Ready to take it on the chin in the tradition of such comics heroes as Superman, Batman, Popeye, Conan, Prince Valiant, Li’l Abner, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, the Ninja Turtles and Howard the Duck, as one Who Dared Make the Leap.

And we should not forget the heroines: Barbarella, Blondie, Modesty Blaise, Little Orphan Annie, Wonder Woman, Supergirl and Sheena; plus Brenda Starr, Reporter, who will reportedly make it out of video-rights hell and onto the screen at last this fall.

You might make a modest bet on Tracy’s chances. But just what makes some comic book characters click as they move from the flatness of the page to the seductiveness of flesh on film? What made Superman and Batman soar, while Howard the Duck waddled to a watery death?

Studios would kill to know. You might think a man in a duck suit would have signaled disaster from the first floating feather; then again, four kids in turtle drag didn’t sound very promising either.

For filmmakers, a firestorm of anxiety begins with what style to use to move from the everything-is-possible world of the cartoonist to the sets-and-actors reality of a movie. Campy realism? (“Sheena”). Old-fashioned theatricality? (“Annie”). Older-fashioned Saturday matinee heroics? (“Prince Valiant”). Or, as Warren Beatty has gambled, a highly stylized look that seems to engulf audiences for two hours without a murmur.

Casting, conception, humor: for a comic strip movie to soar, it can’t stint on humor. It must be there in the screenplay, in the playfully exaggerated look of the film, and it has to exist in the chemical makeup of the actors. When actors suggest a hint of wit, everything seems possible. Without that--an element as crucial as oxygen to life--it’s simply biff, bam, zowie!, and we’re hard put to give a damn.

But even with those elements in place--or NOT in place--you cannot predict how well the trip from page to movie picture will work. Paramount’s 1980 “Popeye” had a script by Jules Feiffer, who knows comics as well as anyone, and at least one star--Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl--who seemed the physical incarnation of her comic strip character. But director Robert Altman couldn’t hold it all together and the picture sank in a sea of muttered dialogue (from poor Robin Williams, spitting his lines through the pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth).

On the other hand, John Milius’ “Conan the Barbarian” had the makings of a Steve Reeves howler. But the script, co-written by Milius and up-and-coming Oliver Stone, nicely brought to life the bloody, pagan never-never land, and Arnold Schwarzenegger easily filled the role of the muscular pulp hero.

“Conan” was eight years ago, and the gap between the style of comics and movies is getting smaller every summer. Just like the best comics, the most popular movies of the last 15 years are studded with characters who are already larger than life: “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Rocky,” “Jaws,” “Star Wars.” It’s not hard to imagine an artist’s hand drawing “Back to the Future”; it’s no surprise that ‘RoboCop” is already between the pages of a comic book.

The first comics, which propelled the most outrageous fantasies straight into our receptive unconscious, brought with them enormous freedom. With these heroes we could soar above the city, become the master of 1,000 disguises, impenetrable by even our closest associates, and live in a simpler world in which outward appearance matched inner character. Evil villains looked evil or diabolically weird--like Pruneface or the Joker, or Ming the Merciless--not like corporate raiders in three-piece suits.

For a while back then, the movies had to struggle to keep up. Even their techniques were no match for a bottle of ink and an unbridled imagination. Watching low-rent serials like “Buck Rogers” was almost an invitation to giggle over lumpy tights and space machines made from a colander and a wire coat hanger.

But “Barbarella” and “Flash Gordon” and “Superman” changed all that, and not simply with dumb muscles. With precious few heroes left in real life, audiences could look upon this trio of do-gooders (or in Barbarella’s case, feel-gooders), as surrogate heroes without too much mortification. These movies were smart, sexy and, blessedly, written with a sense of humor; sometimes even with a sense of the ridiculous. Spandex had smoothed out those lumpy tights and wiped the snicker off our rotten faces in the process. Casting, special effects and towering production design took care of the rest.

“Barbarella” worked not only because of our hope that Jane Fonda would feel the need to get out of that constricting old space suit, again, but because of Fonda’s whole wide-eyed take on the character. In the French comic strip, Barbarella was more of a dim pushover than Fonda’s incarnation of her; Fonda’s space kitten some how managed to be party to the most impolite--and repeated--assaults on her person without losing her playfulness or her naivete. Or, her upper hand.

“Flash Gordon” proved the absolute necessity of stocking a picture with serene old pros in the supporting roles. It gave the audience somewhere else to look when the principals are on screen and out to lunch, simultaneously. The peroxided Flash (Sam J. Jones) and his Dale Arden (Melody Anderson) were, to put it kindly, dim bulbs, but while Ornella Muti’s savage sister to the Emperor Ming was on-screen, audiences tended to feel more forgiving. And while--by “Star Wars” standards--the special effects weren’t breathtaking, the script was nicely ironic and the sound and fury of Brian Blessed’s hawk-like Prince Vultan and Max von Sydow’s quintessentially villainous Ming were just what were needed to keep the exaggerated comics quality alive on the screen.

But “Superman” was the watershed film: Richard Donner’s visionary production not only had the scope and the magnificence that the Siegel and Shuster strip could only hint at, but none of the fun was lost in the spectacle. And the flying duets between a perfectly-realized Superman and Lois Lane carried a fantastic erotic jolt. We’d watched heroes fly, from Tarzan with his jungle vines on up, but before this, no movie had let us fly too, with all the sexuality that soaring in tandem implied. From its screenplay to its cinematography “Superman” was that meld of the sophisticated and the simple that had been missing from comics-movies until now.

Visually, the comics and the movies had fed off each other for decades. As Jules Feiffer tells it in “The Great Comic Book Heroes,” “Citizen Kane” got extra-scrupulous study from cartoonists in the early 1940s after the rumor circulated that Orson Welles read and learned from comic books.

Welles’ camera angles, and when and how he used them, became part of the cartoonists’ vocabulary, which had already absorbed the futuristic fantasies of German Expressionism. The looming factory gears and super-modernistic city of “Metropolis,” the tortured perspectives of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” had not gone unnoticed by the artists who created “Batman” or “The Spirit.” In the comic book heyday of the ‘30s and ‘40s, every visual style was fair game for the pulp mill and a “swipe” was the highest form of flattery.

Tim Burton’s “Batman,” with its lowering vision of Gotham City gone rotten, put the comics’ style of Expressionism back on the screen again, as it let the dark side of the comics have their day. Not sinister enough for fans of Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight,” an inky ‘80s re-telling of the Batman story, but quite dark enough for some. What worked best was the film’s mood and its extraordinary design; but there was a punishing quality to Jack Nicholson’s Joker that gave “Batman” a comic strip intensity of a difficult kind.

For its part, “Dick Tracy” seems to have been built around actors with nicely ironic sensibilities: Al Pacino, delivering his lines in machine-gun bursts of energy, might be sending-up his own roles in “The Godfathers” or in “Scarface.” Dustin Hoffman, already drollest of the droll, is Mumbles, a character whose mumble is as famous as Hoffman’s own. Glenne Headley, keeps Tess Trueheart from fading into Good Girl limbo by sheer exercise of deadpan wit. Seymour Cassel can’t be unaware of his hilarious resemblance to Sam Catchem. Then of course there is Warren Beatty’s Tracy, whose probity in the face of Madonna’s torchy come-on has to be the deepest irony of all.

Obviously Dick Tracy is intrinsically different from Batman or Superman. Although Beatty has worked to make the rugged Tracy dynamic and even--in the scenes with Charlie Korsmo’s extraordinary Kid--compassionate, in his own, choked, manly way, his hero is a dogged gumshoe, not a caped avenger. It remains to be seen if the deliciousness of the production and Tracy’s rogue’s gallery of grand and goofy characters will carry such heresy.

Wit, elegant production design, a deft screenplay, a well-stocked larder of actors who are in on the joke of the film and a legendary hero/heroine. That’s what has made the barn burners of the past and it’s a pretty good thumbnail sketch of “Dick Tracy.” And after being caught in the cross-fire of the bloodiest opening season yet, some families may even find “Dick Tracy’s” relatively stylized gunplay and Tracy’s own foursquare morality a beacon in this summer of total recoil. Time will very shortly tell.

Charles Solomon contributed to this article.

* CHANNEL 9 ADS MAY HAVE BROKEN RULES

Disney-owned station pulled ads for ‘Dick Tracy’ toys that aired during a ‘Tracy’ cartoon. The ads appeared to be a violation of FCC policy. F16