Live to Tell

February 22nd, 2004 · No Comments

Another Netflix discovery tonight: James Foley’s “At Close Range” (1986), starring Sean Penn and Christopher Walken. I think I put it in the queue because I wanted to see what else the director of “Glengarry Glen Ross” had done. It has a crazy mid-eighties cast: Chris Penn playing the half-brother of his real brother, Kiefer Sutherland (who gets only one line) as one of Sean Penn’s friends, David Strathairn as an apparently mute and epileptic safe-cracker, Mary Stuart Masterson as Penn’s love interest, and Crispin Glover as another of Penn’s friends with sideburns down to his mouth. This movie comes comes right after Glover shot part three of the Beaver Trilogy (1985), following Sean Penn (1981) and Gary, the original “Beaver Kid” (1979). (See this film, if you haven’t. Buy it from Trent Harris’s site).

But the strangest thing about the movie is the repeated use of variations on the opening notes of the then Mrs. Penn’s “Live to Tell” as musical cues throughout the movie. Themes from the song are brought up at least seven times, and are pretty much the entire soundtrack to the film, before we finally get the big payoff, the song itself, as the closing credits roll. The first credit? “Live to Tell, performed by MADONNA” (in the tallest letters in the whole credit sequence). Foley also directed “Who’s That Girl” and her “Papa Don’t Preach” video, so it all makes sense, I guess. The title makes it sound like a military thriller, but it was instead a based-on-fact Pennsylvania gangland epic, with plenty of bluster and bravado from Penn and Walken. It’s better than average, beautifully shot, and well worth seeing.

Tags: Film