Reservoir Dogs (1992) Low Budget Neo Noir Masterpiece

Not much new or original can be said of Reservoir Dogs.

It premiered during that Neo Noir renaissance that ignited in the 90's after smouldering and building up nicely during the 80's. The 80's gave us memorable and visual gems like De Palma's Dressed to Kill (1980)  Kathleen Turner's Body Heat (1981), SyFy Noir Blade Runner (1982), period piece Hammett (1982), Vice Squad (1982), the Coen's Blood Simple (1984), Wim Wenders  Paris, Texas (1984), Eastwood's Tightrope (1984), Smog Noir To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), Supernatural Noir's Angel Heart (1987) and little seen Siesta (1987), and John Dahl's Kill Me Again (1989). Sleeper period noir Union City (1980) with Debra Harry, and Martin Scorsese's New York City Screwball Ensemble Noir After Hours (1985)

The 90's caught a breeze and Neo Noir flared up with The Grifters (1990), The Hot Spot (1990), Wild At Heart (1990), Impulse (1990), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), Red Rock West (1993), Romeo Is Bleeding (1993), True Romance (1993), The Wrong Man (1993), The Last Seduction (1994), Pulp Fiction (1994), Natural Born Killers (1994), Se7en (1995), Fargo (1996), Hard Eight (1996), Mulholland Falls (1996), Hit Me (1996), Jackie Brown (1997), L.A. Confidential (1997), Lost Highway (1997), This World, Then the Fireworks (1997), and Dark City (1998) and Screwball Ensemble Noir The Big Lebowski (1998). There were even more that I haven't mentioned, and cable TV's Showtime had a period Film Noir anthology series called Fallen Angels beginning in 1993 . Neo Noir was going through a very creative period.

In Reservoir Dogs Quentin Tarantino earned his Neo Noir punch card. It's an exceptionally stylistic  film. You can see Sergio Leone's influences in the fractured storylines (Once Upon A Time In America), the picaresque humor (For A Few Dollars More) and the three way Mexican Standoff (The Good The Bad And The Ugly) in a low rent brick warehouse in Highland Park, City Of Angels. You can hear the brilliance of Tarantino's organic sounding dialogue and enjoy the audio punctuations that accompany the interesting camera movements and angles. It's a hoot.

The cast can boast six Classic Film Noir veteran actor Lawrence Tierney and Neo Noir vets Harvey Keitel, Michael Madsen, Steve Buscemi. Of the rest Chris Penn, and Tim Roth's careers really took off, Randy Brooks and Kirk Blatz are still pretty active and only real excon Edward Bunker sort of stayed on the back burner (and probably out of trouble) careerwise. All the actors in the film are intense and compelling.

Michael Madsen and Edward Bunker

Harvey Keitel

Lawrence Tierney    

Steve Buscemi 

Bunker has quite the story. He started his crime spree at age 3 with destruction of private property. He took a claw hammer to a neighbor's incinerator.. At 4 he graduated to arson, setting fire to either the same neighbor's garage or one of the others. A bit more violent at 15 he jabbed a fork in another boy's eyeball. By 17 after a series of assaults and robberies, punctuated by the stabbing of a guard he impressed a judge enough to be sentenced to San Quentin as its youngest inmate.

Noirsville

low angle style

A flat-ish Dutch angle a sweet slide on the pave to hell

Leone reference:  Above, Buscemi and Keitel doing the Tuco and Blondie parts at Sad Hill Cemetery while Madsen appears suddenly in Angel Eye's mode below.

low angle style

low angle style

Another Leone reference: Il Triello with low angle style

reflections

Kurt Blatz

This sequence above with Kurt Blatz was also an homage to a similar scene in Spaghetti Western director Sergio Corbucci's Django (1966).

If you haven't seen it, do so. 10/10