Cassidy Blues is an irreverent and fun romp. It was written and directed by Richard Corso and Kareem Kamahi Taylor. What the filmmakers are trying to do with this film is not clear. But I can make some guesses.
First, this film revolves around a brand of cigarettes called Cassidy Blues. So that’s one part of the reasoning behind the title. What are we make of this? Cigarettes are a taboo today. Vaping seems more or less okay, but every right minded person agrees, at least in principle, that smoking is wrong. So right off the bat, the notion of having a short film based on cigarettes raises a lot of questions. The film does not appear to be set in the past, but it is in every way a throwback. The conceit of placing cigarettes in the middle of this plot seems to me to be a way of telling the audience to take a deep breath and not be so sensitive to these sorts of things. And for me, at least, this is a breath of fresh air.
Also a breath of fresh air is the jazz trio that is constantly playing in the background. It’s great music and the absence of the usual electronic ‘cinematic’ score is, as with a lot in this film, refreshing.
So what is this film really about? The plot revolves around a pair of young women who are professional thieves, and two police detectives who are on their trail. We first meet the two women after, we suspect, a robbery. They’re planning on taking a train but feel that perhaps one more robbery might be in order before they have to go.
This gives us enough to think more about the title. In the world of the film, Cassidy Blues is the name of a kind of cigarette, but it also has other resonances. One of the most famous films about a pair who rob banks and trains is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. So we feel like we’re in throwback territory here. We have here a pair, just like in the aforementioned film, a pair of robbers who are not destined to do well. That may take care of the Cassidy part of the title, but what about the Blues? This film turns out to be about the cops as much as it is about the robbers. So where do we get the Blues? I would say that the most likely contender is the TV series, Hill Street Blues. This series ran for most of the 1980s and was famous for its realistic portrayal of the police and the chaotic environment they inhabit.
So what do we get when we combine Hill Street Blues with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? We get something that isn’t backwards looking at all. We in fact get something that looks much more like something Quentin Tarantino might have made. We’ve got the two hot female protagonists, the robbery gone wrong, the ultra modern, but somehow retro vibe and the emphasis on great dialogue. All this makes me think that this film is, if not an homage, at least heavily influenced by the Pulp Fiction director. And, like a Tarantino film, this one skips around in time.
And, like many Tarantino films, this one is much more about tone and mood than plot or character. The characters are all endearing despite their somewhat clichéd form. The cops in particular are absolutely stock characters: the detective whose marriage is on the verge of collapse, who lives on cigarettes, coffee and whatever he can get from the local greasy spoon. We’ve seen him a million times, but I, for one, never get tired of him. His partner reads Stephen King and hesitates to pull the trigger when confronted with perps who are the same age as his own daughters.
But ultimately, I very much enjoyed this film. If there were a TV series being made today with this same tone and these characters, I would watch every episode. I personally think that the move towards exclusively serialized TV is a mistake. I, and I think many like me, would love a retro/Tarantino inspired episodic cop show. Even if that cop show revolved around something as declaseé as cigarettes.
© 2021. UniversalCinema Mag.