A few cops in a parking garage somewhere in Manhattan, drinking coffee and going over the horrors they deal with. Red lights are everywhere—Harvey Keitel, the unnamed “Bad Lieutenant,” walks up looking guilty, saying nothing. The other guys are talking about a nun that was raped in Spanish Harlem. They can’t believe it, they’re beside themselves. “I swear to God, if I had them, I’d kill those motherfuckers, right there.” She was raped with a crucifix, her church trashed and soiled. The Bad Lieutenant isn’t moved. “Happens every fuckin’ day. What’s so special about her? Just because she’s a fucking nun you’re upset.” He laughs, expecting everyone else to, I guess, but they all just look at him, stunned. “Hey… what’s your fucking problem, man?”
That’s not a movie pause, that’s not a movie beat. Bad Lieutenant may veer into magical religious realism at the end, but it’s a thoroughly realistic movie, one where emotions and situations play themselves out as they would in real life. Bad Lieutenant isn’t an exciting movie, nor is it stylized and all over the place like most of Abel Ferrari’s other films—this is his masterpiece. Released in 1992, and made when Ferrara and co-writer Zoe Lund were still using cocaine and heroin (Lund died of heart disease in 1999), Bad Lieutenant could be read as the comedown from the baroque but flat King of New York; Christopher Walken was set to play the Bad Lieutenant but bowed out three weeks before shooting. Keitel was willing and available, because, in Ferrara’s words, “he turned it into this whole other thing.”
For example, the scene where the Bad Lieutenant stops two teenage girls in their car by the river and asks for their licenses, they don’t have any and he starts jerking off as he makes them undress and mime fellatio so that they won’t go to jail. Keitel plays it totally straight, the full horror, but Walken’s version was going to end at dawn on the riverside, dancing and guns gleaming and hip-hop blaring. None of that bullshit repeated from King of New York, but closer to another masterpiece Keitel appeared in 12 years earlier: Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing.
The above scene was cut from the Blockbuster edition of the Bad Lieutenant videotape. In the United Kingdom, it was censored across the board, and in much finer detail (this 1995 report by Mark Kermode shows how prurient and slimy the censors seem themselves, rewinding and pausing on graphic images just like their supposed boogeymen). The other scene cut from the Blockbuster edition is the Bad Lieutenant dancing to “Pledging My Love” by Johnny Ace, strung out and arms splayed in wanting crucifix, dick and balls visible in high definition. This wasn’t in the Blockbuster edition. And that 93-or-so-minute cut is the one that was on Amazon Prime as of 2021, and probably still is today—with no note or warning that what you are watching is a compromised film.
“My work isn’t for five-year-olds. Ya dig? So somebody is not going to cut my film. If the government has a problem with the Bad Lieutenant, they should just ban the Bad Lieutenant outright.” Ferrara speaks of his character, not his movie, in that interview, and he’s often referred to Bad Lieutenant as “the Bad Lieutenant” because, I think, the Bad Lieutenant is a state we’ve all been in. Have you bet $120,000 on the Mets or shot your car radio with a gun in Manhattan traffic? No—but haven’t you ever felt like you shot your car radio? That everything’s going wrong and nothing will fix it?
Ferrara says the essence of the Bad Lieutenant is a scene they never shot: he robs a store, walks back in (employees don’t recognize him), talks a report, walks out and throws the report in the garbage. The Bad Lieutenant is a circle, but the one thing this scene doesn’t include is his salvation at the hands of a postcard all-forgiving nun and a statuesque Jesus. “I’VE DONE SO MANY BAD THINGS!” And we never see his wife, he clearly doesn’t care about his kids, his mother-in-law sees him doing coke, and he gets his brains blown out outside Penn Station at the end. “Pledging My Love” plays again.
In the end, he’s won nothing but oblivion. The two rapists he caught and put on a bus to Los Angeles, they’ll rape again. He didn’t give them any advice or scared straight talk—he just scared the shit out of them. They know he’s one of them—sick. But it’s not a permanent state. These kids might change… maybe…
But not the Bad Lieutenant. He must die, and when we watch the last days of his life, we get closer to the soul of a man than most movies, most books, most works of art. Keitel isn’t over the top, he isn’t bathetic, he’s completely real and irredeemable. And recognizable.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith