Holy cow! This has been mostly rehabilitated I think but people (including me) are still underrating it. Visually gorgeous but also really funny and sweet.

Bullet points:

- There's a moment in this that really shows how Beatty's exacting attention to detail as a director is unparalleled, above and beyond his affection for the four-color source material. Tracy is sitting across his desk from Junior, we see him lifting his coffee cup and right before he says his line the shot cuts to Junior's face, and we can hear the sound of Tracy's voice going into his coffee cup and back to normal as he lowers the cup, all off-camera! Maybe other movies have handled off-screen dialogue sound design that meticulously, but I've never noticed it.

- Dick Van Dyke plays District Attorney Fletcher in this, and even though he was, what, like 60, he does a great pratfall after he gets shot, bouncing off a bed and hitting the floor. Marvelous.

- On the off chance anyone is interested in this, my friend Jack started a podcast about old paperbacks and I was his first guest, talking about the novelization for this movie, you can hear me forget Sam Catchem and Bug Bailey are in the movie in real time (I hadn't rewatched it yet when we recorded): backpocketbookclub.libsyn.com/chapter-1-books-for-people-in-prison

- Madonna is great in this, everyone who says otherwise needs to take a long look at themselves.