Tarantino's debut. A heist film with no heist. The opening monologue about Madonna's Like a Virgin is the form's mission statement.
A diamond-store robbery has gone catastrophically wrong. Two thieves are dead at the scene. The survivors converge at a warehouse — colour-coded names, no real ones — and try to work out who set them up. One of them has been shot in the stomach and is bleeding out on the floor.
The film never shows the robbery. The set-up is the meeting before; the climax is the recriminations after. The two-hour structural risk Tarantino takes — making his debut feature a heist film without the heist — is, in retrospect, the film's argument. The heist is not the interesting part. What people do to each other when the heist goes wrong is.
Reservoir Dogs premiered at Sundance in January 1992. It was made for $1.2m, financed in part by Harvey Keitel — who had read the script, decided to star, and put up money to keep the production going. Tarantino was twenty-eight; he had previously worked as a video-store clerk in Manhattan Beach. The film grossed $2.8m theatrically and then became one of the most-rented videos of the early 1990s.
Almost every American independent thriller of the next ten years is downstream of Reservoir Dogs. The colour-coded character names. The non-chronological structure. The diner-table opening conversation about pop music. The pop-song needle drops over scenes of extreme violence. The aestheticised brutality. Tarantino did not invent any of these individually — French New Wave directors had been doing the structural play for decades, and Scorsese had been using pop needle drops since Mean Streets — but the synthesis is recognisably his, and the synthesis is what subsequent filmmakers picked up.
The film's most-discussed sequence is Mr. Blonde dancing to Stealers Wheel's 'Stuck in the Middle With You' while torturing a captured policeman, then cutting off the policeman's ear with a straight razor. The camera, in Tarantino's most-debated directorial choice, pans away to the doorway during the actual cut, returning only after the violence is over.
The debate about the scene has been running for thirty-four years. Tarantino has argued that the pan-away is the morally responsible choice — the audience is asked to imagine the violence rather than be entertained by it. Critics have countered that the choreography of the dance and the song's bouncy melody make the entire sequence too pleasurable for the implied violence to land as horror. Both readings are textually defensible. The argument is part of the film's continued cultural force.
Reservoir Dogs is structured as an ensemble — Harvey Keitel's Mr. White, Steve Buscemi's Mr. Pink, Tim Roth's Mr. Orange, Michael Madsen's Mr. Blonde, Lawrence Tierney's crime boss, Tarantino's own Mr. Brown. The film never settles on a single protagonist. The audience's identification migrates between characters as the film reveals what each is doing in the warehouse and why.
Tarantino has remained, throughout his career, an ensemble director. Pulp Fiction, Inglourious Basterds, The Hateful Eight, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — all are ensemble films. The choice was visible from his first feature.