| True Romance | |
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 Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | Tony Scott |
| Written by | Quentin Tarantino |
| Produced by |
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| Starring | |
| Cinematography | Jeffrey L. Kimball |
| Edited by | |
| Music by | Hans Zimmer |
Production companies | |
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Release date |
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Running time | 118 minutes[1] |
| Country | United States[2][3] |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $12.5 million[4] |
| Box office | $12.6 million[4] |
True Romance[a] is a 1993 Americanromanticcrime film directed byTony Scott and written byQuentin Tarantino. It features anensemble cast led byChristian Slater andPatricia Arquette, withDennis Hopper,Val Kilmer,Gary Oldman,Brad Pitt, andChristopher Walken in supporting roles. Slater and Arquette portray newlyweds on the run from theMafia after stealing a shipment of drugs.
True Romance began life as an early script by Tarantino; he sold the screenplay in order to finance his debut feature film,Reservoir Dogs (1992). It is regarded by proponents as a cross-section of writer Tarantino and director Scott's respective trademarks, including aSouthern California setting, pop cultural references, and stylized violence punctuated byslow motion.[6][7]
Though initially abox-office failure, the film's positive reviews, with critics praising the dialogue, characters, and offbeat style,[8] helped it earn acult following. It has come to be considered one of Scott's best films and one of the best American films of the 1990s.[9][10][11]
At a Detroit theater showingkung fu films, Alabama Whitman strikes up a conversation withElvis Presley fanatic Clarence Worley. They later have sex at hisdowntown apartment. Alabama tearfully confesses that she is acall girl hired by Clarence's boss as a birthday present but has fallen in love with him. The two get married the next day at City Hall. An apparition of Elvis visits Clarence and convinces him to kill Alabama's abusivepimp, Drexl Spivey. Going to the brothel where Alabama worked, he shoots and kills Drexl and takes a bag he assumes contains Alabama's belongings. Back at the apartment, he and Alabama discover it contains a large amount of cocaine that Drexl had stolen from two drug pushers.
The couple visits Clarence's estranged father Clifford, a retired police officer, for help. He tells Clarence the police assume Drexl's murder is a gang killing committed in revenge for the murdered dealers. After the couple leave for Los Angeles, Clifford is interrogated by Vincenzo Coccotti,consigliere to mobster "Blue Lou Boyle", who had hired Drexl to steal and distribute the cocaine on his behalf. He reveals that the mob knows about Clarence's theft since they found his driver's license near Drexl's body. Clifford, realizing he will die anyway, mockingly defies Coccotti, who shoots him dead. One of his men then finds a Los Angeles address taped to Clifford's refrigerator.
In Los Angeles, Clarence and Alabama meet Clarence's aspiring actor friend, Dick Ritchie, who introduces him to actor and production assistant Elliot Blitzer. He reluctantly agrees to broker the sale of the drugs to his boss,film producer Lee Donowitz. While Clarence is out buying lunch, Coccotti's enforcer Virgil finds Alabama in her motel room and beats her for information. Alabama fights back, stabbing him with a corkscrew, putting nail polish remover in his eyes and using hairspray to set fire to Virgil's face before grabbing hissawed-off shotgun and shooting him to death in a maniacal rage. Clarence tends to Alabama's wounds, and they discuss their future together.
Elliot is pulled over for speeding and gets charged when his mistress hits him with a bag of cocaine and spills it on him. To stay out of jail, he agrees to wear a wire and record the drug deal between Clarence and Donowitz for police detectives Dimes and Nicholson. Coccotti's men also learn about where the deal will take place from Dick's stoner roommate Floyd. Clarence, Alabama, Dick, and Elliot go to Donowitz's suite at theAmbassador Hotel with the drugs. In the elevator, a suspicious Clarence threatens Elliot at gunpoint but is persuaded by Elliot's pleading for mercy.
Clarence fabricates a story for Donowitz that the drugs were given to him by a corrupt police officer, and he agrees to the sale. Excusing himself to the bathroom, the vision of Elvis reassures him that things are going well. Donowitz and his bodyguards are ambushed by the police and the mobsters. Elliot reveals himself to be an informant by asking the officers if he could leave, whereupon a shootout erupts. Dick throws the suitcase of drugs into the air, where it gets shredded by gunfire, and flees. Donowitz, his bodyguards, Elliot, the officers, and the mobsters are all killed, and Clarence is wounded as he exits the bathroom. He and Alabama escape with Donowitz's money as more police arrive. They flee to Mexico, where Alabama gives birth to a son, whom they name Elvis.
Additionally, Arquette's son Enzo Rossi plays Elvis in the final scene of the film.
The title and plot are a play on the titles ofromance comic books such asTrue Life Secrets,True Stories of Romance,Romance Tales,Untamed Love andStrange Love.[12]
The film was a breakthrough for Quentin Tarantino. Released afterReservoir Dogs, it was his first screenplay for a major motion picture, and Tarantino contends that it is his most autobiographical film to date. He had hoped to direct the film, but lost interest in directing and sold the script. According to Tarantino's audio commentary on the DVD release, he was happy with the way it turned out. Apart from changing the nonlinear narrative he wrote to a more conventional linear structure, it was largely faithful to his original screenplay. He initially opposed director Tony Scott's decision to change the ending (which Scott maintained was of his own volition, not the studio's, saying "I just fell in love with these two characters and didn't want to see them die"). When seeing the completed film, he realized Scott's happy ending was more appropriate to the film as Scott directed it.[13] The film's first act, as well as some fragments of dialogue, were repurposed from Tarantino's 1987 amateur filmMy Best Friend's Birthday.[14]
The film's score byHans Zimmer is a theme based onGassenhauer fromCarl Orff'sSchulwerk.[15] This theme, combined with a voiceover spoken by Arquette, is an homage toTerrence Malick's 1973 crime filmBadlands, in whichSissy Spacek speaks the voiceover, and that also shares similar dramatic motifs.[16]
The movie was cut by the United StatesMPAA for an R rating for its wide theatrical release. The majority of the confrontation between Alabama and Virgil was cut, as well as the ending shootout scene. There was also an alternative edit where Detective Nicky Dimes is shot not by Alabama, but by Toothpick Vic, one of the mafia hitmen. This edit was the official 1993 rental VHS release, but subsequently all DVD and most Blu-ray releases are of the original unrated director's cut.[17] The 2022 4K release from Arrow, however, has both cuts of the film.
Although a critical success,True Romance was a box office failure. The film earned $4 million during its opening weekend, ranking in third place behindThe Fugitive andUndercover Blues.[18] It was given a domestic release and earned $12.3 million[4] on a $12.5 million budget. Despite this, the film developed acult following over the years.[13][19]
On thereview aggregator websiteRotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 93% based on 61 reviews, with an average rating of 7.6/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Fueled by Quentin Tarantino's savvy screenplay and a gallery of oddball performances, Tony Scott'sTrue Romance is a funny and violent action jaunt in the best sense."[8]Metacritic, which uses aweighted average, assigned the film a score of 59 out of 100 based on 19 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.[20] Audiences polled byCinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale.[21]
Phil Villarreal of theArizona Daily Star called it "one of the most dynamic action films of the 1990s".[22]Peter Travers ofRolling Stone gave it three stars, saying "it's Tarantino's gutter poetry that detonatesTrue Romance. This movie is dynamite."[23]
Roger Ebert gave the film a positive review remarking that "the energy and style of the movie are exhilarating", and that "the supporting cast is superb, a roll call of actors at home in these violent waters:Christopher Walken,Dennis Hopper, andBrad Pitt, for example".[24] A negative review byThe Washington Post's Richard Harrington claimed the film was "stylistically visceral" yet "aesthetically corrupt".[25]
Janet Maslin ofThe New York Times wrote, "True Romance, a vibrant, grisly, gleefully amoral road movie directed by Tony Scott and dominated by the machismo of Quentin Tarantino (who wrote this screenplay before he directedReservoir Dogs), is sure to offend a good-sized segment of the moviegoing population".[26]
Empire rankedTrue Romance the 83rd greatest film of all time in 2017, writing: "Tony Scott's handling of Quentin Tarantino's script came off like the cinematic equivalent of cocaine-flavoured bubble-gum: a bright, flavoursome confection that had an intoxicatingly violent kick. It also drew some tremendous big names to its supporting cast."[9]
The Hopper/Walken scene, colloquially named "The Sicilian scene", was praised by Oliver Lyttelton ofIndieWire, who called it "one of the most beautifultête-à-têtes in contemporary cinema, wonderfully written and made utterly iconic by the twovirtuoso actors".[27] Tarantino himself has named it as one of his proudest moments. "I had heard that whole speech about the Sicilians a long time ago, from a black guy living in my house. One day I was talking with a friend who was Sicilian and I just started telling that speech. And I thought: 'Wow, that is a great scene, I gotta remember that'."[28]
Oldman's villain also garnered acclaim.MSN Movies wrote: "With just a few minutes of screen time, Gary Oldman crafts one of cinema's most memorable villains: the brutal, dreadlocked pimp Drexl Spivey. Even in a movie jammed with memorable cameos from screen luminaries [...] Oldman's scar-faced, dead-eyed, lethal gangster stood out."[29] Jason Serafino ofComplex magazine named Spivey as one of the top five coolest drug dealers in movie history, writing: "He's not in the film for a long time, but the few scant moments that Gary Oldman plays the psychopathic dealer Drexl Spivey makeTrue Romance a classic ... Oldman gave us a glimpse at one of cinema's most unfiltered sociopaths."[30]Maxim journalist Thomas Freeman ranked Spivey as the greatest performance of Oldman's career.[31]
"Robbers", a song by the English indie rock bandthe 1975 fromtheir 2013 debut album, was inspired by the film. Vocalist Matthew Healy explained: "I got really obsessed with the idea behind Patricia Arquette's character inTrue Romance when I was about eighteen. That craving for the bad boy in that film [is] so sexualized."[32]
True Romance, the 2013 debut album from English pop starCharli XCX, was named after the film.[33]
Brad Pitt's stoner character inTrue Romance, Floyd, was the inspiration for making the filmPineapple Express, according to producerJudd Apatow, who "thought it would be funny to make a movie in which you follow that character out of his apartment and watch him get chased by bad guys".[34]
James Gandolfini landed his role ofTony Soprano onThe Sopranos when he was invited to audition for the role after casting director Susan Fitzgerald saw a short clip of his performance inTrue Romance. Gandolfini ultimately received the role ahead of several other actors, includingSteven Van Zandt andMichael Rispoli.[35]
In the trance song "Solarcoaster" bySolarstone, a sample is used from the film. The sample includes the line spoken by Alabama, "That three words went through my mind endlessly. Repeating themselves like a broken record. You're so cool. You're so cool. You're so cool."[36]
True Romance was originally released byWarner Home Video onVHS on September 12, 1994. This release contains only the director's cut, however the theatrical cut was released on an R rated rental VHS.
TheDVD was released on September 24, 2002, as a two-disc set.[37] It was later released onBlu-ray on May 26, 2009.[38] Again, these releases only contain the director's cut, and the theatrical cut remained excluded.
The 4K UHD Blu-ray was released on June 28, 2022, byArrow Video.[39] Unlike the previous DVD and Blu-ray releases, this release contains the theatrical cut for the first time since the original VHS release, it also includes the director's cut from past DVD and Blu-ray releases.[40]
Next from Tarantino were scripts that led toTrue Romance (recently shown here in a chopped-up edition and retitledBreakaway)...
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