The controversial film Bad Lieutenant has had a belated release on circuit. ANDREW WORSDALE looks at the director’s career
WHILE he was still in his teens Abel Ferrara, the director of Bad Lieutenant, started making films on Super 8. In the early Eighties he gravitated towards exploitation pictures with such legendary titles as Driller Killer and MS.45 (aka Angel of Vengeance) – the latter a decidedly nasty piece about a hooker on a revenge mission against all men after being gang- raped (the director himself is credited at the end as playing first Rapist).
The film became a cult hit, Ferrara’s career blossomed and he’s made a film a year ever since.
Possibly his best-known work prior to Bad Lieutenant (1992) was King of New York (1990), with Christopher Walken as the sadistic mobster with a soft spot for homeless kids. Beautifully shot (lurid neon interacting with drenching rain), it also has one of the greatest shootouts ever put on film, photographed against the blaring ultra-violet of disco lights all cut to a hypnotic techno score. The film is also noted for introducing one of America’s great new actors, Laurence Fishburne.
After King of New York, Ferrara made Bad Lieutenant followed by Snake Eyes (aka Dangerous Game), an obsessive tale of love and sex in the movie-making world – significant mainly for the best screen performance yet by pop siren Madonna.
After this trio of weird and wonderful beasts he was co-opted by Hollywood for the big-budget Body Snatchers, a scary reworking of the classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but studio timidity and distribution jitters meant it never saw the light of day.
Annoyed, Ferrara returned to his native New York and made two nasty low-budget horror films back to back: The Addiction, a vampire movie packed with spectacular excess, and The Funeral, a black horror comedy.
Bad Lieutenant, however, remains his masterwork. In it, Harvey Keitel delivers a performance of blistering intensity as the cop who’s more interested in pursuing his vices than the daily grind of investigating homicides. We’re treated to a transgressive trip through his own inner hell, as he snorts, shoots up, masturbates in front of two teenage girls, drinks himself into oblivion and accumulates a massive debt through bad bets on baseball.
Finally, the brutal rape of a nun gets him to rethink and turn his quest towards his own redemption. The take on Catholicism in the latter part of the film is a bit over the top – at one point Keitel even hallucinates that Christ appears to him.
But the grit of the script, the direction, and Keitel baring both body and soul to the lens in possibly one of this decade’s most uncompromising performances, make this existential cop story a must for any serious movie-goer who isn’t too easily offended.
The film is showing at Sammy Marks Square, Pretoria and Village Walk, Johannesburg, before moving to Cape Town and Durban