Warren Beatty’s latest Dick Tracy TV special is a new work of oddball genius

God, this is going to need some explanations.

okay: LTCM aired last night a half-hour program block called Tracy zooms inwith TThe “Tracy” in question is Dick Tracy, the old school novel Pulp Detective. That means it was like that Dick Tracy Star (and director) Warren Beatty, dressed in his old bright yellow Dick Tracy costume pretending to be Dick Tracy on a Zoom call with TCM personalities Ben Mankiewicz and Leonard Maltin. This again was a reference to a special Beatty recorded, also with Maltin and also for TCM, back in 2010, which basically everyone assumed then and now assumes, was a fairly transparent (albeit very strange) Way for Beatty to retain the rights to the characterwhich he personally owns so that one day he can make a sequel to his 1990 film.

Deep breath!

The new Dick Tracy Special is shot through with references to the old one, and above all Mankiewicz tries to give the whole undertaking some funny-ironic distance. But the thing is this He, and a also-play Maltin, are completely defeated by Warren Beatty, whose dedication to the bit is great here. In response to a compliment from Mankiewicz, Beatty replies — like no man in the world has, ever – by touching his hat and saying “I’ll type it out – my hat, that is.” Then he explains at length “We’re all technocrats now!” while praising the virtues of Zoom.

We then come to one of the strangest things this author has ever had personally seen on cable TV: A four-minute sequence in which Tracy-Beatty shows the trailer for the 1990 film, ostensibly to comment but all he really does is mumble. Mainly about how nice it all looks (not wrongly how it happens; there’s a reason the look of Beatty’s tracy is still hip), but also a few “Well, I wouldn’t have done that” or “No, no, no…” At one point, he reviews a line Beatty delivers in the film Al Pacino: “Sorry, walnuts are good for the brain.” It’s not clear how much of the special is written, but this part appears to be pure Beatty, and it’s wonderfully incoherent.

Eventually it ends as it has to be: Beatty also “dials in” to the Zoom call as himself and gets into a fight with himself as Tracy. (First off, a good reminder that Beatty’s Dick Tracy voice is literally just his Warren Beatty voice.) Were you hoping to hear Dick Tracy rant for several minutes about how people don’t love the sanctity of cinema these days ? Great news!

Anyway, it ends with the two promising to make one Dick Tracy 2 together, and then a shot of Beatty sitting with himself at a restaurant table, not talking about anything while a song from the film plays. We don’t know if Beatty will ever make another movie, but god we’d see one of those once a decade, Unlimited time.