The Problematics: ‘Reservoir Dogs,’ Quentin Tarantino’s Blistering Sundance Film Festival Debut, Turns 30

Thirty years ago this month, Quentin Tarantino’s directorial debut Reservoir Dogs premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. I wonder what that might have been like, seeing it in frigid Park City way back in the day. It’s not as if the festival had been lacking in galvanic debut pictures during this period. You had sex, lies, and videotape in 1989, Chameleon Street in 1990, Slacker in 1991. But if you’re familiar with those pictures (and you should be), you can see that, for as much as they steered Sundance away from its ‘70s- ‘80s slightly granola reputation, none of them are quite in the same league as Dogs in the category of take-it-or-leave-it confrontation.

Endlessly profane and steadfastly blood-soaked, Tarantino’s unstuck-in-time tale of a jewelry heist gone spectacularly wrong still can crack your jaw today. Its hard-bitten criminals are certainly meant to elicit audience concern, at the very least. Even as they steal and kill and mouth the most repellent, racist, sexist, reactionary and worse garbage you’ve ever heard coming out of human mouths, the movie wants you to give a damn about what happens to them.

While longtime readers of crime writers like Elmore Leonard or, say, Edward Bunker (who actually acts in this film, in the role of Mr. Blue) would be pretty used to the banter of these creeps, most moviegoers — and, I imagine, quite a few Sundance attendees — were not. 

A few decades later, we ask: does the objectionable talk — not to mention action; there are only two women in the film of any consequence, and one of them is hauled out of a car and bashed on the head, while the other is straight-up shot to death — lessen the movie’s impact, or potential impact, let’s say? 

And let’s say, well, not so much. Like pretty much all of Tarantino’s movies — which more often than not meld a grindhouse aesthetic with arthouse technique (and let’s not forget that, whether Jean-Luc Godard likes Tarantino or not, his own debut Breathless did pretty much the same thing) — Reservoir Dogs has little use for propriety, righteous or not. It’s a crime picture. As the line in Glengarry Glen Ross says, if you don’t like it, leave.

Which is not to say that the movie has retained all of its freshness. The scene that has aged worst, in my estimation, is the opening. The diner scene, in which Messrs. White, Blonde, Blue, Orange, and Pink, along with ringleader Joe and his son Nice Guy Eddie, bloviate on the subject of Madonna’s 1984 hit song “Like A Virgin.” 

It’s Mr. Brown, played by Tarantino himself — being that this was his first film, audiences had yet to tire of the filmmaker’s pretentions to being an actor, which some may recall took him down some very weird blind alleys, including the Broadway stage for about twenty minutes — who waxes most vile re both Madonna and the song, blithely dropping the word “cooze” and repeating the word “dick” ad practically infinitum. It feels hackneyed today. Not so much because the talk is gross, but because the scene did some well springing. There was a period during which you couldn’t necessarily tell if a Tarantino character was a criminal or an expert on the game show Meet The Geeks. (Navy guys talking about Curt Jurgens in the Tarantino-script-doctored Crimson Tide was an all-time eyeroll.) And Tarantino’s imitators did the same thing, relentlessly, and not nearly as well. 

Steve Buscemi as Mr. Pink does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of just being completely objectionable across the board. He’s the one who delivers the faux-libertarian spiel about not leaving a tip for the waitress. He’s also the first character to drop the N-word. But for as much as the movie inundates the viewer with nasty bad-guy conversation, it’s also expert at subverting audience expectations. Tarantino’s cuts — executed by editor Sally Menke, a master whose loss (she died in 2010; her last picture with Tarantino was 2009’s Inglourious Basterds) was incalculable — can be like hammers to the kneecaps. For instance, after the opening credits and their accompanying shots of the gang in their black-and-white suits looking very crime-movie slick in slow motion, we’re in a car with Tim Roth’s Mr. Orange and Harvey Keitel’s Mr. White and there’s blood everywhere and Orange is screaming like the veritable stuck pig. Their masks of cool are completely blown. And one begins to feel as if one is in for a different kind of test of endurance — Roth just doesn’t stop screaming. But if you tune out here, you’re apt to have a lesser appreciation of just what an intricate narrative the film is constructing. 

Similarly, as much of a jerk as Buscemi’s Mr. Brown is, he makes good sense when he arrives at the warehouse that was supposed to be a meeting spot and sees White compassionately administering to the gut-shot Orange. He’s not kind, but as he iterates over and over, he’s “professional.” (Incidentally, Buscemi would later go on to direct an excellent adaptation of Edward Bunker’s harrowing prison novel Animal Factory.) 

With respect to that intricate narrative structure, it actually provides a sort of rationale for making the characters as vividly obnoxious as they are. Yes, Tarantino here lives to thumb his nose at propriety, but he also understands that these character have to be made to stand out, fast. Because they’re going to be called upon to deliver a lot of exposition as the movie continues. And exposition coming from a truculent foul-mouthed character spectacularly embodied by Steve Buscemi is exposition you will unhesitatingly sit still for. “We got a rat in the house,” his Mr. Brown says. And he is right. 

The trio scene in the warehouse is very crafty too in its modulation of degrees of toxic masculinity. Keitel’s Mr. White feels responsible for Orange getting gutshot, and protests to every-man-for-himself Brown “I mean the man was dying in my arms! What the fuck was I supposed to do?” The wounded indignation Keitel displays here is the sort of thing the actor was born for.

By the time Michael Madsen’s quietly psychotic Mr. Blonde shows up, and we are treated to the very first Tarantino car-trunk POV shot, you’re likely to be all in. Even though the talk and the action are both going to get uglier. 

Tarantino’s nonchalant approach to his characters tossing around racial epithets has been examined, decried, and more, in individual reviews, academic papers, and so on. (Always worth reading on Tarantino: the late bell hooks.) A persuasive (to some) counter to the disapprobation he gets is the fact that he (arguably) writes great, fascinating Black characters. And, you know, he made Django Unchained, which he himself at least considered a pretty definitive anti-racist statement. The only Black character in Reservoir Dogs is a cop, Detective Holdaway, played by Randy Brooks. This character is the supervisor of the “rat” in this gang’s house. I’m going to play nice with the readers who haven’t yet seen Reservoir Dogs and not reveal here who that character/actor is. (It’s not revealed until pretty late in the movie and WILL come as a surprise.) 

Holdaway is smart, conscientious, and something of a moral compass for his undercover guy, who’s prone, as many undercover cops in movies are, to getting too close to the people he’s trying to bring down. The undercover guy asks Holdaway to go easy on an informant, insisting “he’s a good guy.” Holdaway immediately shoots back, “Long Beach Mike is not your amigo.” Rather, he is a “scumbag.”

It’s under Holdaway that the movie’s most stunning sequence unfolds. “The Commode Story” is a fictitious anecdote that the undercover guy is supposed to tell his other gang members in order to gain trust. A flashback within a flashback about rehearsing a fictional story that is then depicted cinematically as a factual story. And Tarantino makes the phony story a suspense tour de force. This is very advanced filmmaking. Before the undercover cop goes out to tell this story, he looks at himself in the mirror almost obsessively, to see that he’s got his stance down. This is very much in keeping with the “let’s get into character” line in Tarantino’s next film, Pulp Fiction. Criminals may be bad actors, but in a sense they’re also…actors. As are we all. 

And when these actors, while still alive, are trying to one-up each other, there’s nothing they won’t say. “What a white bitch’ll put up with, a black bitch wouldn’t put up with for a minute,” says Brown at one point, apropos of nothing. In this conversation Tarantino knits in some authentic-social detail, with Brown, White, and Nice Guy Eddie debating whether Ladera Heights is the Black Beverly Hills or the Black Palos Verdes. Yes, it’s still gross, but you have to admit that in concocting this stuff Tarantino took care to bring in some added value, such as it is. 

And honestly sometimes the stuff is, God forgive me, funny. The role of Joe is played by Lawrence Tierney, 1940s movie tough guy and legendarily difficult character. Not known as a comedic actor, his 1991 appearance on Seinfeld notwithstanding. But the scene in which he gives all the dogs their “colors” makes me chortle to this day. Not least because of Tierney’s response to Buscemi’s “Why am I Mr. Pink,” which does contain a homophobic slur. Honestly, people, it’s the timing. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.