ANGEL HEART
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1987 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: A hard-boiled detective story and
something more. This is a complex film that has some
interesting things to say about the nature of religion.
There is a lot more to this film than the hot topic of the
ten seconds cut from the sex scene.
Harry Angel (played by Mickey Rourke) is a hard-boiled private eye in the Philip Marlowe tradition. He is a little crude, a little rude, and occasionally a little bit dense. His client is Louis Cyphre (played by Robert DeNiro), a recluse with a silver cane, pointed fingernails, and, like a cipher, is something of a mystery to be solved. Cyphre hires Angel to track down Johnny Favorite, a singer who disappeared twelve years earlier in 1943. Angel follows a trail that has been cold for twelve years through Harlem, Poughkeepsie, Coney Island, and soon to New Orleans. The trail will lead from drug addicts to evangelists to voodoo worshipers. Harry will trigger a series of murders of friends of Favorite and will become the prime suspect in some of these murders before he discovers the secret of the disappearance of Favorite.
ANGEL HEART is an interesting variation on the detective stories of the '40s. It is as moody a piece as Raymond Chandler would have written, probably nearly as suspenseful, but it also is a comment on religion. We see gospel evangelists squeezing money from their believers, we see baptisms for a religion whose primary symbol is, as one character describes, a man to a wooden cross, and we see voodoo rituals with slaughtered chickens. Each somehow looks equally ridiculous. I doubt that Raymond Chandler would have ever thought to put comparative religion into one of his stories.
To be perfectly frank, my first reaction was to say that this was just a fair detective story and a little bit more and hence would have given the film a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale. However, thinking back, the full solution of the mystery makes a lot of the film, even some of its settings, seem a lot more interesting. The film has a complexity and makes statements not immediately apparent on first viewing. On consideration, the film does deserve a +2.
Oh, and as for the film having to have ten seconds of Mickey Rourke shaking his buttocks edited out in order to go from an X to an R rating--who cares? That ten seconds has become a major topic of interest about the film. It has little to do with the main thrust of the film. There might not have even been an explicit sex scene if the rating system had not been around. Arguing what an R-rated film should be and what can only be in a X-rated film is like arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. And I guess that brings us back to Angels.
Mark R. Leeper
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