Review of True Romance (1993) by Kyle S — 30 May 2016

This film is shot through with a tender, sentimental, romantic vein that is very out of touch with our age but mixed in with gangsters and pimps it somehow works. It starts out in savage Detroit, a post-industrial wasteland where Sonny Chiba movies and comic books pass for culture and art.

Clarence falls in love with Alabama, a whore with a heart of gold, and, in killing her pimp, he finds himself in possession of a suitcase of cocaine. While gangsters chase them, they race to Hollywood to find a buyer for the drugs amidst wealthy film producers.

Quentin Tarantino wrote the screenplay and it includes many of his obsessions like kung fu movies, pulp paperback criminals, and brilliant dialogue. The Detroit setting is purely literary, an homage to one of Tarantino's biggest influences, Elmore Leonard, who set many of his crime novels there including The Switch, a copy of which a young Tarantino was once apprehended stealing from a Kmart.

When the film moves to Los Angeles the setting is equally vividly portrayed with a cast of stoners and wannabe actors and rich film producers. There's a tremendous amount of acting talent from Patricia Arquette to Samuel L.

Jackson, Dennis Hopper to Christopher Walken. But ultimately it's the romanticism of the two lovers on the run that make this such a great film, particularly as expressed through the eloquent voice over of the young woman, Alabama.