#edwin torres

[guy60660]

Edwin Torres

[idasessions]

Brian De Palma during production of Carlito’s Way, spring 1993

[90smovies]

[purelypacino]

There were many times during the filming of The Godfather when Al Pacino wanted to quit the set and go home. 21 years later, while working on Carlito's Way, he did just that. Wearing a knee-length black leather jacket, Pacino sweated his way through take after take of the final and fatal chase scene. Filming began in the winter and finished in the middle of summer; not exactly leather weather. "At one point," said Brian De Palma, "Al said he'd had enough and actually took the train home."

[90smovies]

[purelypacino]

Carlito Brigante is a composite of three people that writer Edwin Torres knew. To help protect them, and perhaps keep their pasts from catching up with them as Carlito's did, Torres has remained tight-lipped about their identities. 👤 Photo by Steven Klein posted by NeonMagazineScans.

[covertrook]

As the poet becomes the mountain, the building, the broken heart, the political upheaval…the poet becomes the poem being written. So then, what is the poet? - Edwin Torres

[cantsayidont]

CARLITO'S WAY (1993): Brian De Palma and Al Pacino reunited for this relatively restrained but overlong crime drama (adapted from two 1970s novels by Edwin Torres) about a savvy Puerto Rican gangster, newly released after five years in the joint, who just wants to run his more or less legit club and bank enough money to movie to the Bahamas with his dancer girlfriend (Penelope Ann Miller), only to be drawn back into the shit by his sleazy lawyer (Sean Penn), whose coke habit and bad judgment will eventually be their undoing.

Much less cartoonish than SCARFACE — or for that matter Pacino's over-the-top performance in HEAT two years later — but also less memorable and less compelling, and an uncharitable viewer might find the story's reliance on "for want of a nail" ironies a little trite. Penn's performance is less great than some critics have insisted, Luis Guzmán is stuck in basically the same "treacherous second banana" role he's played over and over again, and Miller seems out of place. A young Viggo Mortensen pops up briefly as Carlito's paraplegic former cellmate; he's terrible. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Nah. VERDICT: Competent and occasionally stylish, but pretty ho-hum unless you're a gangster movie connoisseur.