Bloodhounds of Broadway (1989)
Directed by Howard Brookner

Film Review

Meanwhile, Fate appears to be smiling on Feet Samuels.  Having won a small fortune at cards, he heads over to a party hosted by socialite Harriet MacKyle to shower Hortense with gifts.  He confides in Regret that this will be his last night on Earth, as he has previously sold his body to Doc Bodeeker for medical research.  Regret convinces Feet that, now he is flush with cash, he should buy back his body, but Bodeeker is adamant that Feet's contract with him be honoured.  As Feet contemplates his future (or lack of it), Regret welcomes in the New Year by getting into bed with a gangster's moll, before returning back to the woman he really loves, Lovey Lou, but she has gone cold on him.

Harriet's party comes to a dramatic end when Handsome Jack shoots dead her beloved parrot.  She immediately turns to her admirer, mild accountant Basil Valentine, and, believing him to be a ruthless killer, begs him to assassinate her parrot's murderer.  By now, the Brain still hasn't found anyone to help him and he is close to death when he runs into the waif he had bought a flower from earlier that evening.  Since she was able to buy medicine for her stricken child with the money the Brain gave her, the poor woman takes pity on the wounded hoodlum and invites him into her modest abode.  In the early hours, the bloodhounds have finally caught up with Regret, and Basil's attempt to fake Handsome Jack's assassination goes badly wrong.  Feet is being pursued by a cleaver-waving Bodeeker and the Brain is knocking at death's door.  Somehow it all manages to end happily and 1929 looks like being a good year after all...

Writer-director Howard Brookner already had two full-length films under his belt before he made up his mind he would try to break into Hollywood.  Both of these were made-for-television documentaries and one, Burroughs: the Movie (1983), a portrait of the counterculture writer William S. Burroughs, had met with considerable critical acclaim.  Brookner had already sold his idea for Bloodhounds of Broadway - a lively 1920s pastiche based on Damon Runyon's short stories - to the American television channel PBS, to be included in their American Playhouse series - before he began making overtures to the Hollywood execs.  Finally, after two years of toing and froing, he was able to persuade David Puttnam, chairman of Columbia Pictures, to back the project.  Brookner landed himself with a four million dollar budget and an incredibly tight shootings schedule - a tough deal for a first-time director working on what was supposed to be a glossy Hollywood production.

Things got much tougher as time went by.  Filming was due to commence late in the autumn of 1987.  In the spring of the same year Brookner discovered he was HIV positive, something he determinedly kept from everyone except his closest friend Brad Gooch until filming on Bloodhounds of Broadway had been completed.  Such was the paranoia around AIDS in these early years of the virus taking hold that Columbia would have almost certainly pulled the plug on the project if they had had any inkling that its director had contracted the disease.  Brookner was taking AZT but the side-effects of the new drug were debilitating and he found he wasn't able to focus on his work, so he stopped taking it.  He also stopped eating, and yet somehow he found the strength to complete what he must have known would be his last film.

Midway through post-production, early in 1988, Brookner succumbed to a brain infection caused by the AIDS virus and was hospitalised.  When he came out of hospital, he was in a poor state physically but he was still keen to see his film through.  Unfortunately, the execs at Columbia didn't like his rough cut and the film was taken away from him.  It was re-edited, abridged and given a voiceover narration to make the multi-threaded storyline easier to comprehend.  What Brookner had feared all along happened in the end: his baby was taken from him and thrown into an industrial meat grinder.  When he first saw the contract, Brookner had asked Lindsay Law at PBS: ''What do we do when Columbia wants final cut? You never allow that, do you?''  Law replied: "'Howard, this is the first feature film of a long career; you can't expect a studio to give you final cut."  To which Brookner answered, with eerie prescience, "But what if this is my only film?"

Columbia thought so little of the film that they sold it on to another company, Vestron, and when Vestron went bust they bought it back and gave it a limited theatrical release with next to no publicity.  The critics panned the film and it was a massive flop, barely clawing back one per cent of what it cost to make.  Six months later, it ended up being aired on PBS.  The film came and went with virtually nobody noticing.  Thankfully, Howard Brookner was not around to witness this terrible failure.  He had succumbed to AIDS on 27th April 1989, six months before the film's release in November 1989.  The maddest scene in Bloodhounds of Broadway is the one in which a narcissistic playboy shoots dead a parrot, for no reason whatever.  It is an apt metaphor for what Columbia did to the film, and to Brookner's reputation.

Bloodhounds of Broadway certainly isn't Howard Brookner's finest moment as a director, but as all we have is a bastardised cut of his original concept it is hard to gauge how much better it might have been if its author had been able to complete it to his satisfaction.  There is a great deal that is wrong with the film, but there is also much to enjoy.  You need to exercise an extremely high level of concentration (or take notes as you go) to keep up with the multiple story strands that keep twisting around each other, offering a host of colourful characters that are at times frustratingly hard to tell apart.  It's an enjoyable romp for fans of Damon Runyon's short stories, bringing together four of his best tales: The Bloodhound of Broadway; The Brain Goes Home; Social Error; and A Very Honorable Guy.

Looking as if it was thrown together by someone who had been a food blender in a previous life, the plot seesaws frantically between farce and tragedy, cramming in all the old gangster movie clichés - but doing so with such an unbridled and reckless sense of fun that you can forgive the film its muddled narrative and tacky dialogue.  (Far from helping with the exposition, the appended voiceover soon becomes an annoying, patronising distraction.)  At one point, the film even ends up imitating a Looney Tunes cartoon, with an overweight loser being chased in the snow by a lunatic doctor waving a meat cleaver.  Silly it may be, but it is all good-natured fun, done with such style that you are more likely to laugh than groan.

That Brookner's own personal experiences are imprinted in the film is surely no accident.  He was conscious of his own mortality throughout the film's production, so the confusion and fragility of life, its arbitrariness and injustice, its wondrous moments of beauty and tragedy, were all bound to work their way into the fabric of the film.  Brookner's decision to stop taking AZT (thereby shortening his days so that he could make a better film) is even reflected in the Faustian pact that one of his characters enters into with a surgeon who is obsessed with cutting off his feet.  What is more surprising is how pointedly the film relates to current events outside Brookner's immediate concern.  The film is set on the last day before that momentous year of 1929, when the Jazz Age came to a crashing halt with the Wall Street Crash that sent America sliding into its worst depression ever.  Production had barely gotten underway when Black Monday happened - that scary day in October 1987 when stock markets around the world went into a tailspin, heralding what many feared would be another Great Depression.  Simultaneously, the AIDS pandemic was at its height, slamming down the shutters on a decade of unprecedented personal freedom, the like of which we will never see again.  Bloodhounds of Broadway may be set at the end of the Jazz Age but it anticipates the same loss of Paradise that America experienced in the 1980s.  It is an eerily prophetic film, from a man whose own personal Paradise was being torn from his fingers as he made it.

Before he became cognizant of his life-threatening condition, Howard Brookner was in seventh heaven as he set about assembling his cast.  His contacts in the heady New York art scene of the 1980s helped him to attract an amazing cast that included Hollywood stars Matt Dillon, Jennifer Grey and Randy Quaid as well as the pop legend Madonna.  (The story goes that Brookner persuaded Dillon to come on board by inviting him to lunch at Umberto's Clam House in Manhattan and showing him some explicit photographs of the gangster Joey Gallo lying dead in the restaurant.)  Brookner even managed to rope William Burroughs into the film (God knows how he did it) for a small cameo role - in a few scenes, the iconic writer steals the focus as a snooty butler. Brookner also puts in a fleeting appearance before the camera, 'doing a Hitchcock'.

Exterior filming was to take place at four cities in New Jersey - Union City, Jersey City, Newark and Montclair - within a tight schedule that began in December 1987.  The glitzy cast of talented performers is the main attraction of Brookner's film.  Even if they are let down by a fairly uneven script, most of the cast turn in an enjoyable performance, with Quaid standing out especially as the luckless gambler who sells his body for medical research just as his fortune is about to change for the better.  Despite looking like a stunning facsimile of Louise Brooks, Madonna is overshadowed by her co-stars, who fit more easily into the 'spats and feathers' period setting, but she comes into her own when she sings a duet with Jennifer Grey (I Surrender Dear), the film's showstopper centrepiece.

In defiance of the tight budget, Bloodhounds of Broadway boasts some impressive production values, its authentic sets and stylish mise-en-scène making it strongly evocative of the era in which it is set.  As in the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby) there is a palpable sense of a dying era.  It is a last hurrah for the Roaring '20s, the prelude before the grimmest decade in American history, and as you watch the film you can almost feel the cold wind of change on your neck.  If the tragicomic romp does, by some miracle, come up with a happy ending, you know it's going to be a very short-lived one.   This is one of those films that you have to see at least three times before you can start to enjoy it fully.  The first time you watch it you are so preoccupied with untangling the mare's nest of a narrative that you risk missing what the film is really about, which is Howard Brookner's wry observation that life is a game of chance and that you should always make the best of the hand that fate deals you, for you never know how soon the party is going to end.

Film Synopsis

Reporter Waldo Winchester recalls that one of the wildest nights of his career was New Year's Eve 1928.  It all began at Mindy's diner on Broadway, with a criminal mastermind, the Brain, treating a hard luck gambler named Regret (after the only horse he won a bet on) to a slap-up meal.  Feet Samuels shows up to settle a debt with the Brain and then goes off with Regret to see how long Feet's current run of good fortune will last at the gambling table.  The Brain is thereupon stabbed by a hired assassin and spends the next several hours being driven around the city, in the hope that at least one of his many kept floozies will take him in and send for medical attention. Before leaving Mindy's, Regret gets into a fight with the unforgiving mobster Marvin Clay.  When, later that evening, Clay is found with a bullet wound in his chest the police go chasing after his killer, using bloodhounds to trail him all over the city.  What the bloodhounds have picked up is not the scent of the killer but the sausages stuffed in Regret's pocket.