The Big Easy (1987)
Directed by Jim McBride
Written by Daniel Petrie Jr.
Starring Dennis Quaid, Ellen Barkin, Ned Beatty
Release Date August 21st, 1987
Published August 21st, 2017
This week in 1987 The Big Easy starring Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin and directed by Jim McBride was released nationwide following a brief run on the awards circuit in late 1986. The film tells the story of a corrupt New Orleans Police Detective named Remy McSwain, played by Quaid, who’s about to learn that corruption doesn’t really pay. Ellen Barkin is a District Attorney tasked with investigating Remy’s corruption and that of his fellow New Orleans brothers in Blue.
Director Jim McBride is best remembered for his 1982 remake of Jean Luc Godard’s iconic Breathless, with Richard Gere in the Jean Paul Belmondo role, Valerie Kaprisky in the Jean Seberg role and Las Vegas standing in for Paris. McBride, it seems, had a longstanding fascination with the French New Wave as not only did he remake Breathless, but in The Big Easy he tells the kind of American crime story that directors like Godard, Truffaut and Melville cite as their earliest influences.
Does that make The Big Easy good? Eh, it gives it a perspective, I guess. The problem with The Big Easy isn’t necessarily the movie, it’s time. Time has not been kind to movies in the crime genre. In the last 30 years’ dozens of films have trod upon similar ground, enough to make The Big Easy feel like just another copycat. That McBride may have been attempting an homage to his French New Wave influences is nice, but the only thing French about The Big Easy is its locational relation to the French Quarter.
Mr. McBride directs The Big Easy not like the dispassionate French crime stories but rather exactly like the old 40’s Hollywood pictures that the New Wave ate up. When the New Wave remade those pictures their French-ness made the stories feel fresh and innovative. In 1987 when McBride crafted his crime movie homage his only innovation was R-Rated sex and violence. Nothing about The Big Easy feels fresh anymore as a zillion other pictures have come along and were better at portraying corruption, sex, and violence.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media
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