It’s No Surprise Harvey Keitel’s 1992 Crime Thriller Has an NC-17 Rating
Hollywood has made plenty of cop movies, many focused on the profession’s immorality and corruption. But few, if any, portray an officer with so much venom and disdain as 1992’s Bad Lieutenant. The film, directed by Abel Ferrara and starring Harvey Keitel, follows a man in the thrall of the worst human impulses. He burns through life abusing his power, looking out for himself above all others, and doing his job in the most destructive way possible. The world of Bad Lieutenant led to an NC-17 rating, but that didn’t stop the movie from finding a cult following, including one of the best directors of all time.
Harvey Keitel’s NC-17 movie is an entertaining crime drama about a depraved cop
The title Bad Lieutenant doesn’t do justice to the level of scumbag behavior that the unnamed policeman (Keitel) gets up to in this movie. By the time the movie starts, he has already descended to such a depth that light is barely visible. He snorts, drinks, injects, and gambles more than the lawbreakers he’s employed to stop. He sleeps around on his wife (the lieutenant’s family is clearly checked out on his actions) and coerces two teens to perform sex acts in front of him in exchange for not arresting them. The first act of the movie does nothing to suggest this cop has any redeeming qualities.
He’s indicative of a city corrupted to the core. Crime is rife and hope is scarce, not least because those in power are likelier to resemble the lieutenant than any pious do-gooder. In this world, there are no good men behind the badge.
Bad Lieutenant‘s cynical tone is in line with the work of its director and co-writer. Abel Ferrara, who wrote the movie with Zoe Lund, is a born-and-bred New Yorker who made his name with provocative crime thrillers and exploitation flicks set in his hometown.
The story never explains the lieutenant’s path to this point, but his lapsed religious beliefs introduce the idea that even he can find salvation. He visits a nun hospitalized after being raped by an unknown assailant. Rather than give the lieutenant information about the incident, she insists on granting the suspect forgiveness. That makes the lieutenant consider his own chances at redemption.
This sentiment comes to the fore in a melodramatic church scene (see the above YouTube clip), but Harvey Keitel’s fully committed performance gives the moment sincerity. As brutal as the movie gets, Bad Lieutenant is ultimately about a man’s belated quest to save his soul in a world where living morally is increasingly devalued. That’s only become more poignant in the passing years.
‘Bad Lieutenant’ earned its NC-17 rating
Bad Lieutenant was one of the first movies to receive an NC-17 rating for “sexual violence, strong sexual situations and dialogue, and graphic drug use.”
“NC-17” means no one aged 17 or younger can be admitted into the theater to view the film. The Motion Picture Association created the NC-17 rating to replace the previous X rating, which mostly came to be associated with pornos and a scarlet letter for any film interested in making money. Of course, this change had no effect in reality. Most theater chains have a blanket rule against showing NC-17 movies, nor will TV stations run commercials for them.
Two entities that refused to introduce Bad Lieutenant to their audiences were Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, the largest rental companies in the nation. To make the movie available to rent, Ferrara had to produce an R-rated cut of Bad Lieutenant for the home video market. He wasn’t pleased.
“People think ratings are given out by the government, but they’re made up by a bunch of housewives in Beverly Hills, and you have to pay for that,” the director declared in an interview with The AV Club. “It’s a rip-off. The R-rated version of that film is a joke.”
Ferrara might not have liked it, but the slightly toned-down version gave Bad Lieutenant access to a new audience that kept the film from falling through the cracks after it left the few theaters willing to show NC-17 movies.
The film’s legacy also includes a 2009 re-imagining directed by Werner Herzog and starring Nicolas Cage in one of his most entertainingly unhinged performances. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans generally received positive reviews, although Ferrara was also outspoken about his distaste for the project.
Critics and fellow directors championed ‘Bad Lieutenant’
Bad Lieutenant‘s restrictive rating wasn’t enough to dissuade critics and influential figures in the film industry from championing the work. The movie has a 77% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with notable reviewers praising Ferrara’s tone and Keitel’s acting.
“Few American films have so tellingly detailed the painful withdrawal of a reformed sinner,” Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers wrote.
“[Keitel] has the nerve to tackle roles like this that other actors, even those with street images, would shy away from. He bares everything here — his body, yes, but also his weaknesses, his hungers. It is a performance given without reservation,” Roger Ebert said in a four-star review.
The biggest stamp of approval came from another artist fluent in the language of New York grime: Martin Scorsese. The legendary filmmaker listed Bad Lieutenant as the fifth-best movie of the 1990s in an episode of Ebert’s show, At the Movies. “[Keitel has] always taken risks as an actor, and in the ’90s, in this film in particular, he really reached his prime,” Scorsese concluded.
