A Breathless Search for the Most Evil Villain in ‘Dick Tracy’

In his July 1 letter, I suppose that Wil Simpson means well when he criticizes the movie “Dick Tracy” for featuring disfigured personalities as its villains (Pruneface, Flattop, Al Pacino’s hunchbacked Big Boy, etc.). He thinks that the film is telling kids that disfigured people are evil, while normal people are OK.

This kind of reminds me of how 20 years ago some complained about TV’s “The Fugitive” featuring the one-armed man as David Janssen’s nemesis.

There are several things wrong with Simpson’s complaint: (1) In the context of the movie, the villains are caricatures and not disfigurements--and frankly I thought that Flattop was rather good looking. (2) If better, more normal-looking people should have been the bad guys, then, by the same argument, should a less handsome man have played Dick Tracy? (How about Gene Hackman or James Woods?) (3) I really can’t believe that children are so impressionable that, after watching this movie, they will get the message that unusual-looking people are criminals. When I was a kid, it was always obvious to me that even though the bad-guy gunslinger in TV Westerns always wore a black hat and a black vest and shirt, this is not the case in real life. (4) Finally, the most gorgeous-looking person in “Dick Tracy,” Madonna’s Breathless Mahoney, ends up being the most evil, most greedy and most treacherous criminal.

MATTHEW OKADA

Pasadena