Madonna
After the Who’s That Girl Tour, Madonna was feeling a bit artistically exhausted. Who can blame her? Three movies, 2 tours, 4 albums in just a handful of years. This woman was working her ass off.
Meanwhile, in 1987, Madonna and Penn’s marriage had hit rough patches. In 1987, they filed for the first time for divorce annulment. By January 1989, they filed again, for the final time, for divorce proceedings. Penn had been sentenced to prison time for assaulting a paparazzo, whom he allegedly found in his hotel room. Penn had also pled guilty to misdemeanor domestic violence against Madonna. Their fights were tabloid fodder at the time.
In 1989, Madonna was done with the romance that spawned both True Blue and Shanghai Surprise. And, now it was time for the next Madonna phase: Faithful Madonna. This was marked by the release of the album Like a Prayer and the singles Like a Prayer and Cherish. Madonna was also continuing her Classic Classy Madonna phase, as depicted in the David Fincher-directed video for Express Yourself.
Madonna still wanted to act dammit, and this video, inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, is further proof. Express Yourself tells a story about a woman who is disrupting the workforce due to her love of the worker, even though she is married to the owner of a factory. Many of her movies were mini-movies, and the ones from Like a Prayer were especially cinematic.
But, acting in a music video is not acting in a movie. At this point, Madonna had 1 good movie and 3 bad movies under her belt. 3? That terrible movie she did when she was poor had surfaced, and she had been suing to get it to go underground, but lost the lawsuit.
How best to get back into acting? Well, if you’re Madonna, you lean on your friends. She spent most of 1988 starring in the initial Broadway run of David Mamet’s 3-person play Speed-the-Plow, a satire of Hollywood and it’s ideals. Her reception was widely mixed with some critics saying she embodied the character of Karen, while others said she was flat and affectless. I imagine while connecting with the theater community, Madonna made the connection with Howard Brookner, who had directed Burroughs: The Movie about William S. Burroughs, as well as a documentary about experimental theater director Robert Wilson.
Thus, she was cast in Bloodhounds of Broadway, a short cheap ode to the 1920s. Bloodhounds‘ style matches the image Madonna was trying to cultivate. While Metropolis is German, and Bloodhounds is extremely American, the music video and movie are complimentary to Madonna’s classic Hollywood image. Her part in the movie fits her toeing her way back into movies. This is, by far, the most cautious bit part I think she has been cast in, but it shows the anxiety toward her acting.
Julius
This is the second-to-last movie of Madonna’s that I ever saw. It should be of no surprise, because Bloodhounds of Broadway is a small movie made on a medium-small ($4m), but it made no money ($43k). It scored negative reviews, was buried, and is generally considered just barely outside the Madonna canon for reasons we get to later.
The thing is, I hate this movie. I had to buy it to see it, and…it’s fucking awful. Bloodhounds of Broadway was a movie made by American Playhouse, perhaps their only theatrical release. Bloodhounds is the first and only fiction movie by documentarian and photographer Howard Brookner, who was afflicted with AIDS while making it. He went off AZT in order to maintain the energy to direct the movie, and the whole movie was rushed. He died before post-production was finished. Bloodhounds of Broadway was finished by the studio, who redid the final cut and added in a voiceover that doesn’t help the movie at all.
The movie is based on four Damon Runyon crime stories and they all happen simultaneously on New Years Eve. One story has a mob boss being stabbed, and seeking refuge at his various girlfriends’ apartments that he pays for, but they all refuse him. Another story is about a socialite who falls in love with an accountant who poses as a cold heartless murderer. A third story has somebody getting shot for some reason but is given short shrift. And, a fourth story is about the worst gambler falling in unrequited love with a showgirl, while another guy finally finds good luck and falls in requited love with another showgirl.
There’s a lot going on in Bloodhounds of Broadway, and it all has such potential, but it all is awful. I don’t have much personal to say other than I own it, and I hate it with every ounce of my being.
Madonna as Hortense Hathaway
Bloodhounds of Broadway opens with a first act set in a single diner. All of the stories start at this diner, where they are all intercut. Madonna appears for 10 seconds in this first act, but is kicked out because she can’t act for being an unsavory character. She is actively pushed out of the scene, and out of the movie for the first half hour.
She doesn’t make another appearance until 27 minutes into the movie, and then she only gets clipped scenes, with a good portion of her remaining screen time taken up by her singing a duet with Jennifer Grey. This is especially of note because this is the first time since her cameo in Vision Quest where she’s actively performed as a singer in a movie.
The summation of her scenes is that she’s actively courted by old rich bastards whom she doesn’t like nevertheless love. They give her necklaces and bracelets and jewels, but she doesn’t actually want them in love. The ones she loves are generally broke as a joke.
In walks Feet Samuels (Randy Quaid), a poor guy who hits it big while gambling. He is able to shower her with jewels for one night, but is going to kill himself by the end of the evening because he was prepaid by a doctor for his body; specifically his feet. Hortense must convince Feet she loves him by the end of the movie so that he doesn’t kill himself, and she can find true love.
For those who keep track, this is also the plot of the music video for Material Girl. In that video, Madonna is a singer who is showered with jewels, but doesn’t love the guys who give them. Then, at the end of the video, after she has finished making a video within a video posing as Marilyn Monroe being showered with jewels, she goes home with a guy in a dirty old truck. Madonna has said that had she known that she would be labeled as the Material Girl for decades, she never would have sang the song, and that she didn’t even write it. Her role as Hortense fits with that ideology perfectly.
There are two elements of note in the above scenes. The first is that they’re ungodly short. Anybody in these scenes barely has time to express themselves before they’re shooed out of the way for the next scene. The second is that Madonna isn’t given much an emotional range. In fact, for most of the movie, she’s meant to be depressed and jaded to the world. She conveys this with a flatness and her voice is somehow deepened but still using her nasal “acting” voice. It actually kind of works.
Whatever movie she’s in, Madonna is seems to be only as good as the movie. That is to say, she doesn’t actively bring Bloodhounds of Broadway down. That isn’t to say that she’s good in it, but I can’t tell if she’s actively terrible in it because the rest of the movie is just so bad. Randy Quaid and Matt Dillon can’t even survive in this slop.
Case in point: This is her big climactic scene, which is chopped into a big song number by Anita Morris. The big flashy song is the closest that Bloodhounds of Broadway comes to a shining moment, but Brookner even chops that off at the nuts.
Notice that Madonna is perfectly acceptable at holding her own against Randy Quaid…but neither of them are being particularly spectacular. They’re not given the room to let the scene breathe with life. The life is supposed to be given by the song, but that song seems like a glaring contrast to the romantic ideals being espoused by Madonna and Quaid.
Because this movie both doesn’t give her a chance and kind of sucks outside of her actual performance, I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and give her a mediocre rating.
Julius
I almost didn’t include this movie in the retrospective because of how little screen time Madonna gets in this movie. It’s the first movie in the series where she isn’t a lead star of the movie. Her name is on the cover, and her role is a key role in the story, but it almost isn’t fair to include it in Madonna movies. I found it really hard to say much about her performance, because I can’t even tell how much is her and how much is the director and how much is the editor.
The thing I do know is that no other movie in the series is as terrible as this one, and it is all downhill from here!
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