Taglines: An Outrageous Story of Greed, Lust and Vanity in America.
The Bonfire of the Vanities movie storyline. Sherman McCoy (Tom Hanks) is a Wall Street bond trader who makes millions while enjoying the good life and the sexual favors of Maria Ruskin (Melanie Griffith), a Southern belle gold digger. Sherman and Maria are driving back to Maria’s apartment from JFK Airport when they take a wrong turn on the expressway and the two find themselves in the “war-zone” of the South Bronx.
They are approached by two suspicious black youths after Sherman gets out of the car to move a tire placed purposely in the middle of the road. Sherman jumps back into the car and Maria guns the engine in reverse, running over one of the teenagers and putting him in a coma. The two drive away back to Maria’s apartment. Sherman initially wants to report incident to the police, but Maria immediately talks him out of it, fearing that their affair would be publicly exposed.
Meanwhile, indigent alcoholic journalist Peter Fallow (Bruce Willis), anxious for a story to make good with his editor, comes upon the hit-and-run case as a rallying point for the black community calling upon Jewish district attorney Abe Weiss (F. Murray Abraham), who is the Bronx District Attorney seeking re-election. According to Judge Leonard White (Morgan Freeman), almost all of DA Weiss’ prosecutions end up with black and Puerto Rican defendants going to prison and Weiss is seeking a white defendant for purposes of convincing the minority-majority community that he is worth re-electing.
Weiss recognizes the press coverage inherent in prosecuting the callow Sherman, who has been discovered as the owner of the car, and therefore presumed to be the hit-and-run driver, in order to cultivate the image as an avenger for the minorities and be propelled to the mayorship of New York City. As Sherman is brought to his knees, New York City fragments into different factions who use the case to suit their own cynical purposes.
Finally, Sherman is left without any allies to support him except for the sympathetic Judge Leonard White and the remorseful Fallow. Fallow gains a tremendous advantage and insight into the case when he is dating a woman who is the sub-letting landlady of Maria’s apartment, and knows of secret recordings of conversations in the apartment made by the authorities to prove that the woman is not in fact living in the rent-controlled apartment herself. She discovers information about the McCoy case (where Maria states she was driving the car), which she gives to Fallow, who in turn covertly supplies it to Sherman McCoy’s defense lawyer.
Sherman gets his hands on a tape and plays the recording in court, where it reveals Maria directly contradicting the evidence she has just given, showing she has been perjuring herself and causing her to faint. Sherman plays the tape in a tape recorder inside his briefcase connected to a small loudspeaker that he holds on the desk.
When the judge orders that he approach the bench with this evidence, he asserts that the tape is all his (making it admissible evidence and it is technically truthful since it refers only to the dummy tape he was holding and ignores the real tape that is hidden which is not his), resulting in his acquittal.
The Bonfire of the Vanities is a 1990 American comedy-drama film adaptation of the best-selling novel of the same name by Tom Wolfe, originally serialized in Rolling Stone. A critical and commercial flop, the movie was directed by Brian De Palma, and stars Tom Hanks as Sherman McCoy, Bruce Willis as Peter Fallow, Melanie Griffith as Maria Ruskin, and Kim Cattrall as Judy McCoy, Sherman’s wife. The screenplay was written by Michael Cristofer, and the original music score was composed by Dave Grusin. The film was marketed with the tagline “An outrageous story of greed, lust and vanity in America.”
The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990)
Directed by: Brian De Palma
Starring: Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Kim Cattrall, Saul Rubinek, Morgan Freeman, John Hancock, Kevin Dunn, Clifton James, Louis Giambalvo
Screenplay by: Michael Cristofer
Production Design by: Richard Sylbert
Cinematography by: Vilmos Zsigmond
Film Editing by: Bill Pankow, David Ray
Costume Design by: Ann Roth
Set Decoration by: Joe D. Mitchell, Justin Scoppa Jr.
Art Direction by: Gregory Bolton, Peter Landsdown Smith
Music by: Dave Grusin
MPAA RatingB R for language.
Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures
Release Date: December 21, 1990
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