David Brothers’ Booze, Broads and Bullets week continues – right now Tim O’Neil takes on DKR, Tim Callahan on Millers retelling of Kirby’s The Pact, David takes on The Big Fat Kill, and Chad Nevett continues blogging his way through all of Sin City by writing a proper post on That Yellow Bastard.
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(This is going to be a short one.)
So That Yellow Bastard is famously inspired by Frank Miller walking out of The Dead Pool in 1988 angry that Dirty Harry had to go out like that. I’m paraphrasing but Miller basically said “I’ll show you a real final Dirty Harry movie”. Eight years later he got around to it, and it works pretty well. Hartigan isn’t wry enough to be Harry Callahan. Miller’s Batman is far more Dirty Harry than Hartigan was, and That Yellow Bastard is one of the least funny stories in Sin City. Which is strange, I guess. The Don Siegel Dirty Harry and the following films are full of the dry pithy one liners Miller is great at, Eastwood snarling his way through procedural garbage his whole day until he gets a reason to shoot someone. I mean, the inspiration is there, certainly.
But thats not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is how no one ever mentions that this:
is pretty damn close to this:
Whenever I read That Yellow Bastard all I can think of is Frank Miller sitting there and laughing to himself a he writes that chunk of dialog. Is Who Framed Roger Rabbit a better noir than The Dead Pool? Is that what he’s saying? It is, I guess. It’s more of a movie about permeated corruption than the Dead Pool, which isn’t really about anything. Of course its a Robert Zemeckis kids movie being compared with the fifth sequel to a 70s action movie, which is so far into relativism that, yes, Roger Rabbit is the more noir of the two. I dunno, it’s strange to see that influence there but thats kind of what I love about That Yellow Bastard so much. Its not the best Sin City story, Big Fat Kill is the best writing and debatably the best art, the original Sin City is awesome as a metaphor for the state of comics in 1991, Dame To Kill For probably works best as a piece of noir, Hell and Back is the start of late-period bigfoot-style gonzo storytelling . That Yellow Bastard is the one where Miller kind of lets the tone get away from him, or at least it seems like it until Junior walks in the room, puts his boot on Hartigan’s face and starts shrieking like Christopher Lloyd. Then it works, because Hartigan: cop with one last case and a bum ticker is too simple, it doesn’t have the interior conflict that the rest of the Sin City protagonists had. Hartigan is doomed from the start of the series, we know that. And the contrast to Marv and Dwight is obvious, but the absurdity of how pure a character Hartigan needs to be undercut. He does this in the cartooning, in little things like the bug eyes when he spots Junior in the bar, or the mushroom cloud in his revenge fantasy. It’s still not enough until the pederast walks in and quotes a kids movie. Then its perfect.
So mental its amazing