His feature debut, Reservoir Dogs, blasted Sundance audiences’ faces off in January of 1992 before doing the same in Cannes, Toronto, and at your local multiplex exactly 25 years ago today. Quentin Tarantino is not one of those directors. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital, Travel and Autos, delivered to your inbox every Friday.Many directors come to the world’s attention gradually and quietly over the course of a few films. Īnd if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. His Reservoir Dogs aren’t goodfellas or wise guys, but boys who never grew up.
Consciously or not, Tarantino may have chosen this title because that is what the characters are. And perhaps that’s why, when Mr Orange recites a story about his stint as a drug dealer, his main complaint is that people kept ringing him while he was trying to watch The Lost Boys. Perhaps that’s why Tarantino chose to open the film with his riff on Madonna’s Like a Virgin the men around the diner table – juvenile, volatile, afraid of women – might as well be hormonal virgins themselves. None of them is mature enough to handle “that woman-man thing”. But at heart they are teenagers stuck in their parents’ basements. The characters like to view themselves as fearless gangsters. It’s true that Mr White reminisces about a female associate called Alabama (presumably the Alabama played by Patricia Arquette in the Tarantino-scripted True Romance), but he claims that their partnership couldn’t last: “You push that woman-man thing too long and it gets to you after a while.” That sums it up. And whenever women are mentioned - as in a sniggering anecdote about a waitress who glued her abusive husband’s penis to his stomach - it sounds like the misogynistic locker-room gossip of boys who have never plucked up the courage to speak to a real live girl. Tarantino would go onto write substantial roles for Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, and for Pam Grier in Jackie Brown, but in Reservoir Dogs there isn’t a single line of dialogue spoken by a woman. More specifically, it’s a film about male geeks. Black suits and snappy dialogue notwithstanding, Reservoir Dogs wastes no time in establishing that its characters are losers, one and all. Tarantino doesn’t glamourise his anti-heroes’ profession by showing them swaggering in and out of the jewellery store they’re sticking-up he only shows us the messy, painful and humiliating aftermath of their botched job. Even before Little Green Bag has finished, we start to hear agonised gasps and whimpers, and the next thing we see is a terrified Mr Orange (Tim Roth) bleeding all over the back seat of a car driven by his panicky colleague, Mr White (Harvey Keitel).
RESERVOIR DOGS FULL MOVIE CODE
With an iconic sequence that has inspired the dress code of a million stag nights, Tarantino persuades us that we’re about to see a heist being pulled off to perfection by the coolest dudes since the Rat Pack starred in Ocean’s Eleven.īut it’s all a trick. After seven minutes of this repartee, we see the criminals strolling in slow-motion through the Los Angeles sunshine, while The George Baker Selection’s finger-clicking Little Green Bag sets the mood. First, we see a group of sharp-suited career criminals sitting around a diner table and chatting about everything except the diamond robbery they’re planning to commit: an old address book the etiquette of tipping the meaning of Madonna’s Like a Virgin.
The film’s high-mindedness is apparent in its opening scenes.
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