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A lot of the movies we covered in the Seventies they were big movies. They were not B-movies, they were not tiny independent exploitation films like horror so often is. The Exorcist was a major studio release, a blockbuster before we even had the concept of blockbuster filmmaking. It is the film equivalent to a really pricey steak at a great restaurant. The Omen might not be chateaubriand, but it is a good cut of meat. I've enjoyed a lot of the movies we've done since, but I'm also not going to pretend that Hellraiser is not a hamburger. Or that Alucarda isn't White Castle.
It has been a minute since we've seen a "respectable" take on devils in cinema. Angel Heart had real money behind it, it shot on location in two cities, it had a big name director and star, and it ended up an also-ran at the 1987 box office. It's ambitious, beautiful, transgressive, all-around impressive, yet audiences wanted to watch Lethal Weapon instead. Steak is not going to be on the menu all that often for the rest of this series.
Surely Angel Heart should have had a better reception. Here is director Alan Parker making a Satan movie, the critics should have been kinder. Parker was an award-winning, acclaimed director who would go on to made Academy Award darlings like Mississippi Burning. Or maybe I'm reading this backwards, his attempt at horror so scared him that he spent his career afterwards in crappy Oscarbait Land with things like Evita and The Life of David Gale. Angel Heart's star is Mickey Rourke, who in 1987 was one of the hottest men in the world. Robert De Niro has a very important supporting role.
Seems like everything got overshadowed by Lisa Bonet.
This is an ugly thing to talk about but we should confront it. Child female stars becoming adults and appearing in sexually-explicit films has been a major tabloid fascination for decades - for all the worst reasons. I can think of movies best known for once-innocent little girls like Drew Barrymore, Elizabeth Berkley, or Lindsay Lohan having nude scenes in them. If this seems awful, and exploitative in a not fun way, it is. I think this trend has largely died down, but I might be giving us too much credit. Sometimes the movies might deserve better, sometimes they deserve worse. In 1987 Lisa Bonet was best-known for playing the beloved daughter, Denise Huxtable on The Cosby Show, then the definition of the pure wholesome family sitcom (but extremely tarnished now). This actress choosing to appear in a neo-noir occult horror film would be a huge swing already. It all gets more intense after she has multiple nude scenes and a very graphic sex scene while covered in blood. I can imagine why people did not see Angel Heart for Angel Heart in 1987 is what I mean.
On the one hand, Angel Heart did not need all this controversy because it is a great movie. On the other hand, it is exactly as horny in gross ways as its reputation implies. Yes, Satan is in this movie, but he's relatively chaste compared to the world he rules over he's mostly. There are multiple murders and the script tells us the graphic mutilation details involved. There's incest. The MPAA wanted to rate Angel Heart a full X, but compromised down to an R.
Angel Heart is very wet movie, either from snow melting in the streets of New York or the constant perspiration from the humidity in New Orleans. Mickey Roarke is soaked all through the second half. Lisa Bonet's character is introduced with a sheer white dress clinging to her chest,fully see-through after washing her hair. If she's not wet from water and soap, it's blood, since her next scene is set in a Voodoo ceremony with Bonet writhing in ecstasy while fresh chicken blood drips all over her. There's a lot of fluids mixing, is what I'm getting at, and Angel Heart is not content with mere sexual metaphors.
This film is set in 1955 with gumshoe private eye Harry Angel (Rourke) landing a new case. Angel is a disorganized, slightly disheveled Brooklynite in an oversized suit with an eye for the ladies. His does not want trouble but $5,000 upfront will make him think differently. His employer is Louis Cyphre (De Niro), a strange man operating out of the second floor of a Harlem Church, owed some unspecified "collateral" from a Forties singer named Johnny Favorite. Favorite disappeared during WWII apparently due to shell shock, but his trail has become suspiciously hard to follow. Angel discovers the case seems to be involved with black magic, stolen identity, and very few happy participants. Nobody liked this Favorite fella, but most of them turn up dead anyway, murdered to keep their silence. Lisa Bonet plays Epiphany Proudfoot, Johnny's bastard daughter, left behind in the Louisiana bayou with already a little son of her own. She also has no idea where her father might be, nor does she much miss him.
Most of Angel Heart follows the usual tropes of the noir. I suspect the film is set as a post-war period piece to keep to keep the detective work fully hard-boiled without needing to deconstruct the concept. (Noir has been so heavily played with by everybody from Godard to the Coen Brothers that postmodernism might actually be a core tenet of the genre at this point.) The cast names are peculiar pulp fiction inventions: Favorite, Angel, Toots Sweet, etc. Harry Angel gets into fights with thugs, he wittily banters with the local police force, he flirts with beautiful women, and he does solve the case - even if by the end, he really did not want to. He's above society's failures, openly mocking the Jim Crow rules of Fifties Louisiana. He sits in the Colored Section of a streetcar and offends the racist cops by sleeping with Black women. This would be a job well done if his employer were not a demon out to balance his books.
Actually Angel Heart might have been just a decade too early. Big twist endings blowing your sense of reality were very popular in the Nineties and so was the Neo-Noir aesthetic. You could even have both if you were the movie Dark City.
There's a very interesting recurring visual motif in Angel Heart: the fans. There's tons and tons of shots of slow-moving electric fans built into the walls of buildings. (Of course we need air circulation in this film, the cast is melting in the heart.) The fans create a great noir visual with the blades' shadows filling hallways. But also this seems to be a core boundary marker in the film. Every time we see a fan we're descending into Harry Angel's subconscious, a world full of elevators and staircases and often quite a lot of blood. All the lifts and steps are going down, you can probably guess where.
I do need to talk about the Satan of Angel Heart. Big Spoilers: that name "Louis Cyphre" is a cipher, not a difficult one, he's Lucifer. ("Ever your name is a dime store joke!") Robert De Niro plays him very coy, he's toying with Angel the entire time. He's relishing his evil without needing to go extremely ham with it. Our devil is only in a handful of scenes, two of which are set on holy Christian ground, clearly indicting the hypocrisy of these institutions. Angel Heart uses some devil eyes effects, which look terrible and hilarious. And they were totally unnecessary, most of the wickedness is brought out just from the costume and hair. Cyphre has very long hair done-up in a bun, and letting his hair down transforms him into a creature that does not belong in the 20th century. He's got sharp long fingernails, which are truly horrible when he's crushing his breakfast, which is - of course - a hard-boiled egg. That sound effect is unsettling.
In a few years De Niro's peer, Al Pacino would play Satan and turn him into a cartoon. The Devil's Advocate loses this comparison.
The ultimate result is that Angel Heart is a Faustian bargain movie where the Devil gets what he is owed. Faith cannot save our hero, nor can love since the major affair turns out to be an unnatural abomination. The contract has no loopholes. There is no choice but to get on the elevator - going down.
Next Time! Christopher Walken proves that Angels can be worse than Demons in The Prophecy.
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