The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Quentin Tarantino · a film · 1992 · written and directed by Quentin Tarantino · in English
Mode
Heist film played as its own aftermath; chamber piece of talk and dread, comic and brutal in one key
Mythos
The traitor in the company of thieves, and the traitor the one the loyal man loves; the father of the gang choosing between his son’s word and his own suspicion; the mask, in colour names: myth evoked and half built
Phase
One morning after a robbery, in near real time in one warehouse, with three returns to the weeks before it and one breakfast at the start
Presentation
Feature film, the theatrical version of about 99 minutes, in colour, in English; no original score, pop of the late 1960s and 1970s framed as a radio show
Register
Comic talk over dread; long arguments about songs and tips, and violence shown at length; a steady deadpan broken by pain
Scale
Eight men, a policeman among them, a gang boss and his son, one room and a few rooms before it
Governing Proposition
Men hired for a jewellery robbery under colour names, bound by a code of no names, no friendship and no tipping, gather in a warehouse after the robbery has gone wrong, and one of them is a policeman. The wager of the film is that the only bond it shows to be real is the one the code forbids, that the bond is founded on a lie, and that in this world a man is what he can perform: the policeman is the best performer in the room.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins at breakfast in a diner. Eight men in black suits sit round a table and talk: Mr. Brown, played by Tarantino himself, offers a reading of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”, and Mr. Pink, played by Steve Buscemi, refuses to tip and argues his case. None of them is yet in a crime; the code they live by is set out first in talk, about a dollar left on a table and who shares what.
Quentin Tarantino wrote and directed it, his first feature as director. Lawrence Bender produced it, with Live Entertainment; Harvey Keitel joined as an actor and co-producer, which raised the money. Andrzej Sekuła photographed it and Sally Menke edited it. There is no original score: the music is pop of the late 1960s and 1970s, framed as a radio show, “K-Billy’s Super Sounds of the Seventies”, with Steven Wright as the voice of the deejay. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1992 and was released in the United States by Miramax that October. The film judged here is the theatrical version of about 99 minutes, the only version known.
The men are Mr. White (Keitel), Mr. Orange (Tim Roth), Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen), Mr. Pink, Mr. Blue (Edward Bunker) and Mr. Brown, with Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney), who has hired them, and his son, Nice Guy Eddie (Chris Penn). The colour names, taken from The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, are part of the code: no man is to know another’s name. The breakfast is the last time the code holds.
Movement II
The men walk out of the diner in slow motion to George Baker Selection’s “Little Green Bag”, and the next cut is to the back seat of a car. Orange has been shot. He is bleeding and crying, and White holds his hand. Between the walk and the back seat is the robbery, and the film never shows it.
The warehouse is the meeting place, and the film stays there in near real time. The men who reach it argue over what went wrong and whether there is a rat among them. Orange lies on the floor in a spreading pool of blood, and the bleeding is the clock. Pink’s escape from the scene is told by sound alone. The viewer knows what the robbers know, fragments, and the heist film is played as its own aftermath.
The first section under an intertitle, “Mr. White”, goes back before the robbery, to White with Joe and to talk of Alabama. It is the thinnest of the three. The film returns to the warehouse, and Blonde arrives with a policeman taken hostage.
Movement III
The second section, “Mr. Blonde”, shows Vic Vega just out of prison, joshing with Eddie and Joe. The section makes his loyalty and his sadism one fact, and the film will pay it at the end.
Back in the warehouse, Blonde is left with Orange on the floor and with the policeman, Marvin Nash (Kirk Baltz). He turns on the radio. Madsen dances to Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You”, and the camera turns away to an empty doorway while the ear is cut. When the scene returns, the radio returns with it.
Then comes the can of petrol, and then a shot from the floor. The comedy of manners has become slaughter, and the tone has not broken.
Movement IV
The third section, “Mr. Orange”, goes back furthest. Freddy is a policeman working undercover, and his handler, Holdaway (Randy Brooks), coaches him in an anecdote, the commode story. The film shows the story written, then rehearsed, then performed, and at last performed inside the scene it describes. A policeman learns to tell a story until he can tell it as a thief, and in this world that is what a man is.
The section is placed about two thirds of the way through. The viewer learns that Orange is the policeman while White still trusts him, so suspense becomes dread, and every earlier tenderness between them, the hand held in the back seat, White’s promises on the warehouse floor, is read again. Told in order the film would be a heist with a twist; told this way it asks what loyalty is worth when one side of it is invented.
The section reaches the robbery’s end without showing the robbery. In a car, Freddy shoots a woman: a sudden cold drop in a film of talk. From there the film goes back to the warehouse, where Orange lies bleeding and White still believes in him.
Movement V
Joe and Eddie come to the warehouse. Joe suspects Orange, and must choose between his suspicion and the word of White, whom he raised in the trade. White, who has broken every rule of the code for Orange, takes his side against Joe. Guns come up in a circle, three ways, and nearly everyone falls. The choreography is muddled enough that who shot whom has never been settled; the film’s own logic loosens at the point it closes.
Orange confesses to White that he is a policeman. The police are waiting outside. The code forbade a bond, and the one bond the film shows to be real was made by the man who broke the code and founded on the lie of the man who kept to his part.
White howls, and the camera holds on his face while the shots are fired offscreen. The end credits run to Harry Nilsson’s “Coconut”. The film has lasted about 99 minutes, much of it in one room, and has kept women, the state beyond a waiting force, and every world outside the gang beyond its walls.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test leaves the spine standing. The withheld robbery is what the film is built around, so the warehouse in real time cannot be cut; the “Mr. Orange” section is required, since the commode story, a policeman rehearsing an anecdote until he can tell it as a thief, is how the film says what Freddy is and what talk is in this world; the Blonde section makes Vic’s loyalty and his sadism one fact, and the standoff pays it. But much of a short film gives. The diner sets the code and the talk and runs longer than its work; the Mr. White section with Joe and Alabama is thin; Pink’s escape outside is told by sound alone and left loose. Permitted talk takes a share of 99 minutes, and the necessity is short of the threshold.
Score: 7.1 / 10
The disclosure can be stated. Men who live by a professional code, no names, no real friendship, no tipping, find that the only bond the film shows to be real is the one the code forbids, and it is founded on a lie: White breaks every rule for Orange, takes his side against the man who raised him in the trade, and is shot for it after Orange confesses. Beside it stands a truth about talk, that identity here is a performance rehearsed until it holds. What holds the axis well down is that the disclosure never leaves the genre’s room. The violence is shown at length and weighed lightly; the film’s interest is in manner and loyalty as code; its race talk, the slurs and Holdaway’s coaching, is displayed and not examined.
Score: 6.7 / 10
The register is comic talk and dread, and the dread rises in three places. Orange bleeding in the back seat in the first minutes at the warehouse, crying and held by White, sets a floor of pain under the talk. The torture is the first summit: Madsen dancing to “Stuck in the Middle with You”, the camera turning away to an empty doorway while the ear is cut, the radio returning as the scene returns, then the petrol and the shot from the floor. The flashback in which Freddy shoots the woman in the car is a sudden cold drop. The last minute, Orange’s confession and White’s howl, is the second summit. Elsewhere the diner, the Joe scenes and the bickering in the warehouse are played level, and elevation is rare across the whole.
Score: 6.8 / 10
There is a pattern, and part of it is built. The betrayer in a company of thieves is old; here the traitor is the one the loyal man loves, the plot is Orange’s double life and White’s faith in him, and the end is the oath broken in both directions. Joe Cabot, the father of the gang, chooses between the word of the man he raised in the trade and his own suspicion, and the family of thieves destroys itself in a circle of guns. The colour names strip the men to masks. But the archetype is carried lightly: the rat and the loyal man are drawn in genre strokes, and the film never builds a world in which they take on larger weight. The particular stays particular, a diner bill, a Madonna song, a can of petrol. Myth is evoked and only half built.
Score: 6.5 / 10
The inheritance is the heist film and the American crime picture, The Killing (1956) above all, with its broken chronology of a robbery; Ringo Lam’s City on Fire (1987), from which the undercover policeman and the closing standoff are taken; and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) for the colour names. The turns are real: the robbery is never shown, so the heist film is played as its own aftermath; the crime film is filled with talk about pop songs, tipping and comic books at a length and ease it had not used; chronology is broken into named chapters. The stake was a first feature on a small budget. But each turn has a source in plain view, the borrowing was close enough to draw a charge of lifting, and the departure is in manner and arrangement more than in what a crime film can know.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. Withholding the robbery puts the viewer where the robbers are, with fragments only. The placing of the “Mr. Orange” section is the decisive choice: the viewer learns that Orange is the policeman about two thirds of the way through, while White still trusts him, so suspense turns to dread and every earlier tenderness between them is read again. Told in order, the film would be a heist with a twist; told this way, it asks what loyalty is worth when one side of it is invented. The near real time of the warehouse makes the bleeding a clock, and the commode story, written, rehearsed and performed in the scene it describes, is the form in small. The diner and the White section are container more than instrument.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Evidence across thirty-four years. The film has been written about at length, first in the debate over its violence and its borrowing from City on Fire, then in readings of Tarantino’s talk, his use of pop, his treatment of race and his men without women. Some questions stay open: whether White’s loyalty is love, pride or the code turned inside out; whether the film enjoys the torture it turns away from; why Orange confesses when silence would cost him nothing. On return the rhymes of performance, the commode story against White’s own war stories, reward attention. But much of the return is to dialogue and texture, the most argued question, who shoots Eddie in the standoff, is a question of staging, and the larger critical yield has passed to the director’s later films.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Released in 1992, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of the 1990s. Intrinsic force: the film showed that a low-budget American crime picture could run on talk, broken chronology and pop quotation, and that the genre’s violence could be staged as comedy and horror at once; that reorganised a manner more than what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: after sex, lies, and videotape (1989), it fixed the Sundance and Miramax model of the independent film as a commercial proposition; its idiom was imitated across the decade, in crime films of talk and colour names, from Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead (1995) to Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998); the slow-motion walk and the torture to a pop song passed into common grammar. Much of that reach was carried by Pulp Fiction (1994), and what the imitators took was largely surface.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty-four years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in one version, and later transfers and restorations repair only. Presence has been continuous and wide: theatrical revivals, home video in every format, television, its own anniversary screenings, and a place in the general culture through its title walk, its colour names and its torture scene. Fame is not proof of permanence, and wide presence is credited by a tenth at most. The fabric is charged slightly: the pop soundtrack was already period in 1992 and dates little, but the black suits, the talk about Madonna and the casual slurs fix the film to its moment, and the slurs now narrow some of its reception. It stands at the foot of its span.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The making bears weight in the writing above all: talk that gives each man a voice in a few lines and carries the plot under its digressions. Sally Menke cuts the chronology so that every section lands where it changes what we know; Andrzej Sekuła’s long takes in the warehouse, the circling camera at the diner and the turn away at the torture are exact. The ensemble is strong: Keitel’s protective fury, Roth’s bleeding and his rehearsed swagger, Buscemi’s nerves, Madsen’s ease, Tierney’s granite. The costs are real and run through a short film: the warehouse staging is theatrical and the small budget shows; Tarantino’s own Mr. Brown is weak; Pink’s exit is fumbled; and the standoff’s choreography is muddled enough to leave unclear who shot whom, at the climax the film is built toward.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the diner, where eight men in suits argue about Madonna and a dollar tip, and the warehouse floor, where Orange lies in a pool of blood for an hour. One law governs both: these men live by talk and by rules about talk, and the rules hold until blood makes them false. The tipping debate is the code, Pink’s refusal to share; the warehouse is the code failing, White sharing everything with the one man who lied. The torture obeys the same law, a performance for a radio audience of one, and so do the commode story and Joe’s list of names. The tone, comic and brutal at once, does not break. But the Joe and Eddie scenes in the flashbacks lean to plain gangster comedy, and the standoff’s logic is looser than the law it closes.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 99 minutes holds. The orders present: crime as a trade, with its planning, its professionals and its pay; the law, in an undercover policeman, his handler, a policeman taken hostage and the force waiting outside; a family of sorts, Joe, his son and the man he raised in the trade, and the bond between White and Orange; consciousness, in Orange’s fear, rehearsal and guilt; race and masculinity, in the talk. They are integrated: the robbery, the rat and the loyalty are one movement. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, below its floor, is what is absent: women are seen only as victims through windscreens and as the subject of talk; the state is a waiting police force; history, the sacred, the natural order and any society beyond the gang do not enter. A small form held tightly, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 5.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.5, then The Living Form at 7.4, then Pressure on Tradition, The Made and The Inner Law at 7.3. A film whole in its one version and continuously present for thirty-four years; a form in which the withheld robbery and the late placing of the “Mr. Orange” section make suspense into dread; a reach that fixed a model of independent production and a manner imitated across the decade; writing and cutting that carry a short film; and one law, talk and rules about talk failing under blood, from the diner to the warehouse floor.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 5.6, below its floor: crime, the law and a gang family held tightly, with women seen only as victims and as talk, the state a waiting force, and history, the sacred, the natural order and any society beyond the gang absent. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep at 6.5, betrayal drawn in genre strokes and never given a world; then The Unconcealment at 6.7, a disclosure that stays inside the genre’s room, its violence weighed lightly and its race talk displayed; then The Sublime and The Bottomless Well at 6.8, elevation gathered in three places and a return drawn mostly to dialogue and texture.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.1 falls short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.4, The Made at 7.3, The Inner Law at 7.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.5 meets the bar of 8.5 exactly, but Pressure on Tradition at 7.3, The Swerve at 7.2, The Unconcealment at 6.7 and The Archetypal Deep at 6.5 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at ten of the eleven axes it counts, every one but The Imperishable, from The Living Form at 7.4 down to The Archetypal Deep at 6.5, all below 7.5. The Megethos Floor is unmet: The Encompassed at 5.6 falls short of its own floor of 6.0 by four tenths. One of the five summit conditions is met, the Coherence Floor. The twelve sum to 84.5, an average of 7.04 that displays 7.0: the work stands where its aggregate places it, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires. What holds it below Tier IV is breadth and depth together: a necessity loosened by permitted talk, a disclosure and a myth kept inside the genre, and a form too small to hold the orders it leaves out.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Reservoir Dogs as released, the theatrical version of about 99 minutes, from the diner to the warehouse: written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, produced by Lawrence Bender with Live Entertainment and with Harvey Keitel as co-producer, photographed by Andrzej Sekuła, edited by Sally Menke, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1992 and released in the United States by Miramax in October 1992. No other cut is known, and later transfers and restorations are weighed only as repair. No print, screenplay or recording was consulted, and shot-level detail is not argued from. No dialogue is quoted; song titles, the radio show’s name and the intertitles are given as the record has them. The sources the film draws on, The Killing, City on Fire and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, are named as they are commonly cited. Figures that could not be verified, among them the budget, the festival history beyond Sundance, the share of the running time spent in the warehouse, the scene count and the timings, are not given.