Reservoir Dogs still barking

Tim Roth and Harvey Keitel do battle

Reservoir Dogs turned up out of nowhere 10 years ago, scared the wits out of people, and subverted an entire movie genre with delinquent skill. Only Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch ever made the same impact.

And, like them, Quentin Tarantino's "take" on the Hollywood B-picture changed film-goers' expectations for good - or the worse.

The film's opening is now a classic of titillating unexpectedness. Around a lunch table in a tacky diner sits a bunch of jewel robbers. What's the talk about? The heist, the modus operandi, the odds for and against getting away with the loot? None of these. It's a furious wrangle over how much of a tip (if any) the waitress deserves; then, in a jocularly obscene jumble of views, what the words of Madonna's lyric Like a Virgin really mean.

These are criminals? Yes, and worse: they are killers who'll soon wallow in floods of gore that made ordinary filmgoers in 1992 feel faint, and seasoned critics at the Cannes Film Festival simultaneously wince with empathetic pain and crack up with laughter.

With his debut film, Tarantino certainly let the dogs of invention off the leash. His greatest innovation was revitalising the speech of criminals, and hence our conventional view of them. He made the most malevolent of them sound devastatingly ordinary with their banter about tips, pop lyrics or, in later films, the name for a quarter-pounder Big Mac in France and America.

The "banality of evil" was a phrase used with much effect by Hannah Arendt (and other historians) about Eichmann and the monsters of the Third Reich. Tarantino inverted it: the "evil of banality" became the cult mark of his movies' dialogue.

Proof of how permanent his revolution has been is the enormous success of a series like The Sopranos. In speech and deeds, the kith and kin of that eponymous crime clan are house-broken "dogs", clearly bred from Tarantino's feral pack - Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Steve Buscemi, Eddie Bunker and Tarantino himself.

But Tarantino did something else that defines this 30-year-old as a child of the pop-video generation. He made crime look "cool". His six robbers are styled like a pop group, wearing identical shades, suits of undertaker's black, white shirts and thin ties. As they pay the bill and go out to kill, they parade in slow motion across the screen under the credits as if in a fashion show - "dogs" on the catwalk.

Within months, this visual preamble in all its stately uniformity was copied or parodied in dozens of telly commercials, poster lay-outs, record covers and movie satires.

Except for the two masterminds, crime king Joe Cabot and his hulking son Nice Guy Eddie, none of the gang has proper names; they're all colour-coded for security, "Mr Blue", "Mr Blond", "Mr Orange" and so on, like a rainbow coalition - and if that phrase carries a teeny hint of gayness, it's appropriate, too, since "Mr Pink" is distinctly unhappy about the pastel hue assigned him.

But the film-maker's prime colour was "noir"; his template, Stanley Kubrick's innovative 1956 thriller, The Killing, also about a heist going fatally wrong. Yet even Kubrick warmed his petty criminals to sympathetic blood-heat; Tarantino, in a compassion-weary era, kept his mob cold-blooded to the last. Another way he subverted expectations was showing nothing except fragmented flashbacks of the raid on the diamond exchange. Maybe his frugal $1.5 million budget moulded such formal minimalism; but it turned pulp culture into elliptical style.

The immediate aftermath shows the now-dishevelled gang has met with a "bullets festival", courtesy of waiting cops; there's a suspicion of a tip-off. Who was the betrayer? The bloodied stragglers, now including a badly wounded Tim Roth as "Mr Orange", regroup in a warehouse to collect their wits and review the catastrophe. Contradictory accounts of what happened add a Rashomon dimension to the tensions of imminent slaughter.

It's rumoured that Tarantino first wrote Reservoir Dogs as a stage play. That sounds likely. A film, which begins by looking like a violent actioner, turns from this point on into a hermetic psychodrama of shifting loyalties and alliances. The empty shed becomes a performance space for the comic grotesque - and the grimly visceral.

"I love scenes that come on you and just ring your bell, so you stop breathing," Tarantino boasted, apropos the torture of a cop who's been taken hostage. The pinioned man has his ear cut off by a psychotically jokey gangster, flourishing the cut-throat razor while he boogies to the jaunty Stealer's Wheel tune Stuck in the Middle With You.

The scene ratcheted up the shock value of films. It set a new high for the kind of violence, real or suggested, that gets inside film-goers - and at the time drove a lot of them outside, unable to bear the threat of a severed ear, never mind the sight of Tim Roth's bullet-riddled pelvis leaking like an hour-glass as the last oozings of his life-blood pace the plot right up to the surprise ending that reveals the betrayer. The buzz about such gory highlights made many folk queasy about watching it in a cinema and made it an even bigger hit on home video.

The British censors delayed certificating the video until the results of research into media violence were in. Quentin Tarantino protested that what he'd written was basically a black comedy. And there's evidence for that, too. Reservoir Dogs ends by pushing the violence to such a cathartic extreme that it becomes the stuff of comic-strip absurdity.

Two of the surviving gang draw guns - on each other, simultaneously, with a check-mate finality that threatens to clear every last living piece off the board. This Mexican standoff became an instant classic, possibly the most copied scene in recent cinema history. But the whole film has travelled like a booster shot in the veins of the commercial system, abhorred by the anti-violence lobby, championed by cinephiles, emulated everywhere by film-makers who are unafraid of excess.

It is the most influential work of our time. Ten years later, the "dogs" are barking still.

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