Men of Respect

Amongst the several hundred (yes, pirated) DVDs I own, I finally got around to watching one last night that I had picked up a few years ago, a New York gangster flick of the above title from the early '90s. Ever heard of it? Probably not. It seems to have sunk without trace at the box office, and has hardly registered on IMDB (only a few hundred ratings and 5 reviews). A shame, because it's actually well worth a look.

Its 'gimmick' - which may have led to it not being taken as seriously as it deserves - is that it is based on Macbeth. Shakespeare purists are going to complain about the changes necessarily made, and the loss of the Bard's language. Scorsese devotees may gripe that it somehow shows a lack of respect to the gangster genre to rehash such an old story. And there is inevitably a certain lack of suspense, since the story is so well-known; also, a certain flagging of pace towards the end.

However, it has a top-notch cast: Peter Boyle, Rod Steiger, Dennis Farina, Stanley Tucci, Michael Badalucco, and a very funny cameo from Steven Wright as the "night porter". 'Lady Macbeth' - Katherine Borowitz, John Turturro's wife, an actress who has, sadly, rarely appeared on screen - is terrific. (The main weakness, in fact, is Turturro's 'Macbeth', really a bit over the top: he starts off pretty wired, and as he descends into madness becomes all goggle-eyed leers and twitches.)

And the script, by director William Reilly, is quite brilliant in many ways, inventively updating several of the key elements (the "witches", an eccentric family of spiritualists, are thoroughly creepy, yet also somehow believable; Banquo's son is established as a credible candidate for future power, and rather sinister), and slyly poking fun at some of the elements of the original that seem absurd or implausible to a modern audience. It really is one of the best modern-day adaptations of Shakespeare I've seen. Go check it out.