![]() Additionally, No Sudden Move ’s supporting cast includes Ray Liotta, who’s seen as the living personification of Goodfellas (1990) but also features in countless other worthy crime movies including the last George V. The film’s two lead actors are Don Cheadle, who broke through playing Mouse in director Carl Franklin’s 1995 film adaptation of Mosley’s first Easy Rawlins detective novel Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) and Benecio Del Toro, whose own breakthrough roles also came in crime films (albeit mediocre ones like The Usual Suspects, 1995, The Way of the Gun, 2000, and Snatch, 2000). No Sudden Move ’s direction, editing, and cinematography is by Steven Soderbergh, who’s been making pulp-informed crime films on and off since The Underneath (1995), including a vitalizing (and self-defining) adaptation of Leonard’s Out of Sight (1998). And that’s worth mentioning now because Duke literally plays a criminal godfather in No Sudden Move, a substantive new film that’s very self conscious about its own place in the history of “American crime fiction stories.” ![]() That’s all to say that while it wouldn’t be the first choice, or even the second or third or fourth, a hypothetical book covering American crime fiction stories of page and screen from the 19th century until the present day could pretty credibly be subtitled From Dupin to Bill Duke. To seal his application, Duke also directed a genuine classic American crime movie from original material with Deep Cover (1992), a furiously stylized war on drugs detective story that conjures up an impenetrable smog of historical, sociopolitical, and even biblical implications (the film is scheduled for a home-video re-release by the Criterion Collection on July 13, an institutional rubber stamp confirming its slow-growing reputation as one of the best Hollywood films of the 1990s). First he earned directorial cred doing episodes of seminal cop shows like Hill Street Blues (1981-87) and Miami Vice (1984-90), later he performed in low-scale adaptations of novels by mystery Grand Masters like Elmore Leonard ( Freaky Deaky, 2012) and Walter Mosley ( Always Outnumbered, 1998), and in between he directed his own adaptations of mainstay characters like Chester Himes’ Harlem Detectives ( A Rage in Harlem, 1991) and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe ( The Golden Spiders, 2000). Across his 40-plus-year career of both acting in and directing films, Duke has constantly returned to crime fiction -sometimes adapting the classics, and sometimes contributing to new ones. There’s a handful of artists you could nominate to be the current godfather of American crime movies, but one nominee that’s probably not mentioned enough is Bill Duke. ![]() Film Review : No Sudden Moveĭirected by Steven Soderbergh. Bill Duke in No Sudden Move, image courtesy Warner Bros. ![]()
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