10 More Obscure Films You Must See
9. Bad Lieutenant (dir. Abel Ferrara, 1992) When it comes to uncompromising directors, Abel Ferrara is right up there. Whether youre talking about his video nasty Driller Killer, his gruesome rape revenge film Ms. 45 or his swaggering take on Romeo and Juliet in China Girl, his films are endurance tests which separate the men from the boys. And nowhere is this truer than the original Bad Lieutenant, a bleak tale of human suffering and Catholic redemption, featuring Harvey Keitel in one of the greatest performances of the 1990s.
Keitel plays a nameless cop who is deeply in debt to the Mob over the outcome of a baseball series, and who funds his cocaine and heroin habits by stealing drugs from crime scenes and selling them on to known criminals. He is assigned to find two men who attacked and brutally raped a nun (Frankie Thorn), and in the process his life collapses around him as he struggles to rationalise both the case and Gods compassion for its perpetrators. Bad Lieutenant is a pure and ruthless demonstration that horror or exploitation cinema can have as much to say about serious matters as any pretentious arthouse film or Oscar-baiting drama. Keitel gives a performance of blood, sweet, tears and God knows what else, conveying the agony of someone haunted by past mistakes and so steeped in sin that there seems no escape. The film contains striking Christian imagery, intercutting the rape scene with Christ screaming on the cross and Keitel crawling towards a vision of Christ while he breaks down in the church. The film is as compellingly bleak as Requiem for a Dream and its ending is still shocking after 20 years. Three Men on a Blog review The Movie Hour podcast: #43