The Bonfire of the Vanities (Warner Bros., 1990)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, September 30) my husband Charles and I watched the 1990 movie The Bonfire of the Vanities, directed by Brian De Palma based on a script by Michael Cristofer (who made his bones from a 1977 play called The Shadow Box, about three terminally ill people who are the subjects of a psychological experiment on how they handle immediately impending mortality) from the 650-plus page novel by Tom Wolfe. Aside from a handful of short stories, this was Wolfe’s first entirely fictional work, and I got interested in both the book and the movie from a used copy I’d bought at the Last Bookstore in Los Angeles of The Devil’s Candy, a book by Julie Salamon published in 1991 (just a year after the release of the film) about the making of the film. That got me interested both in reading the novel (which I finished a few days ago) and seeing the movie. I wanted to do both because Cristofer made some rather annoying changes to the story. The basic plot of both book and film is super-bond trader Sherman McCoy (Tom Hanks) and his mistress Maria Ruskin (Melanie Griffith) are driving home from LaGuardia International Airport one night when they lose their way and end up in the South Bronx, where they’re confronted by two young Black men who seem to be out either to hijack their car or assault, rob. and, in her case, rape them. While Sherman gets out to move the tire they’ve laid down across the street to blockade them, Maria gets behind the wheel and calls to Sherman to get back in. When he finally does so, they feel a thump as their car hits the younger and more vulnerable of the Black men. They briefly debate whether to stop and call the police, but decide not to and instead just speed off and ultimately find their way back to Manhattan. The boy they hit finds his way to a local hospital in the Bronx, where the emergency room doctors treat him for a sprained wrist and send him home. The next day he drifts into a coma from the concussion he got during the accident, though before he lost consciousness he told his mother Annie Lamb (Mary Alice) that the car that hit him was a Mercedes, that two white people – a man and a woman – were in it, and the first letter of its license plate was “R” while the second was either “P” or “E.”

The case becomes a cause célèbre when Rev. Nathaniel Bacon (John Hancock), whom Wolfe intended as a combined caricature of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, grabs hold of it and builds it into a story of racial discrimination. Rev. Bacon stages big civil-rights demonstrations in front of the hospital saying that the shabby treatment the kid, Henry Lamb (credited as Patrick Malone even though all we get to see of him is a comatose body in a hospital bed), got was an example of institutionalized racism and an indication that to the people who run America’s health-care system Black lives don’t matter. The story gets tipped to Peter Fallow (Bruce Willis – in the book the character is a British expat but he became an American in the film after the producers tried and failed to get John Cleese of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers fame to play him), a drunken, dissolute reporter for a tabloid called City Light owned by a Brit named Gerald Moore (Robert Stephens), called “Steiner” in the book. After interviewing an old high-school teacher of Henry Lamb’s who says Lamb was one of the few kids who wasn’t trying to assault him or literally piss on him, Fallow in his articles on the case starts calling Lamb an “honor student,” and that mischaracterization further inflames the racial politics surrounding the case. The case gets assigned to police detectives Goldberg (Norman Parker) and Martin (Barton Heyman), who on a routine stop at Sherman McCoy’s apartment (they’re checking out all registered owners of Mercedes cars in New York City with the right start to their license numbers) get him so flustered that he demands to speak to an attorney – and the cops become convinced he’s the guilty party. The case falls to Bronx district attorney Abe Weiss (F. Murray Abraham, who at his own request was uncredited because if he were to be credited, he wanted equal billing to Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis), who in the book was just running for re-election as D.A. but in the film is running for Mayor. He sees the McCoy case as his meal ticket to higher office, proof that the Bronx criminal-justice system isn’t racist and will therefore prosecute a white defendant as eagerly and thoroughly as a Black or Latino one, if not more so.

Weiss assigns the case to junior prosecutor Jed Kramer (Saul Rubinek) – in the book he was called “Lawrence Kramer” but they changed his name for the film, possibly to avoid having him confused with real-life Gay author and AIDS activist Larry Kramer – though Cristofer’s script leaves out the delicious scenes in the novel in which Kramer is shown cruising hot-looking female jurors in his cases and eventually bedding one of them. He also left out the even more marvelous scenes showing point by point how Sherman McCoy is dragged down from his “Master of the Universe” persona and systematically humiliated by the routine of being jailed after Weiss reneges on his promise to Killian to let McCoy turn himself in without actually being incarcerated. McCoy is hoping Maria Ruskin will surface and exonerate him, since she was actually driving the car when it hit Henry Lamb, but she’s off in Italy canoodling with another of her paramours, artist Filippo Cherazzi (Emmanuel Xuereb). When she returns at last McCoy arranges to meet her but wears a wire to the meeting at Killian’s suggestion. She immediately wants to have sex with him, until she feels under his clothes, uncovers the tape recorder, and immediately gets furious with him and tells Jed Kramer and the grand jury a version of the night’s events that implicates McCoy. McCoy is indicted and taken before the judge in the case, Leonard White (Morgan Freeman), but he has a secret weapon. He and Maria were meeting for their trysts in a rent-controlled apartment she was subletting from another woman, and the landlord, anxious to eject his rent-controlled tenant so he could rent the apartment to someone else at full market rate, bugged the place. Killian gets the tape, which includes a discussion of the case in which Maria acknowledged she was driving when the accident occurred and said the prosecutors had tried to get her to lie against him. Judge White immediately throws out the indictment after McCoy assures him that he recorded the tape (which he didn’t, but if he had it would be admissible as evidence whereas if a third party made it, it wouldn’t be) and plays it in court. Then he makes a big speech complaining that just about every party in the case had behaved badly, and when Rev. Bacon accuses him of being a racist, Judge White stands up in all his tall African-Americanness and thunders, “Me? A racist?”

In Tom Wolfe’s original novel the judge was Jewish and was named Kovitsky, and he was based on a real-life Jewish New York judge named Burton Roberts. Judge Roberts was flattered by his portrayal in the book and actually asked to play the part in the movie, but De Palma decided he didn’t want to risk casting an amateur and having to do multiple takes of his scenes. He sought out Walter Matthau for the role, but Matthau demanded $1 million and Warner Bros. said no. They then signed Alan Arkin for $125,000, but midway through the movie De Palma decided to make the judge Black instead of Jewish because he was worried there weren’t any sympathetic Black characters in the movie. (There weren’t any sympathetic white characters, either: Tom Wolfe was an equal-opportunity cynic.) Even Annie Lamb, whom we’re led to believe was an honestly grieving mother, lit up when an attorney suggested she sue the hospital for $12 million and immediately started on a shopping spree for new clothes. So they got Morgan Freeman, who cost them $650,000, while under Arkin’s “pay or play” contract they had to pay him, too, whether he was in the film or not. Also, Wolfe had written the “decency” speech for the novel’s initial publication as a serial in Rolling Stone magazine, but by the time he assembled the serial chapters into a novel he decided he didn’t want it in the story and took it out. Michael Cristofer put it back in and therefore included a scene Wolfe had specifically decided should not be in the story. The filmmakers had a lot of trouble with the ending because Cristofer had written a bizarre climax in which McCoy, fleeing the courtroom after the indictment is dismissed, stumbles over a statue of justice, knocks over its metal sword, picks it up, and starts wielding it as a weapon against Fallow and everybody else he thinks tormented him. (I had assumed based on The Devil’s Candy that Wolfe had written the scene for the novel, but it wasn’t in there.) After a series of previews, the “suits” at Warner Bros. decided to leave in the “decency” speech and take out the scene of McCoy wielding the sword – and, alas, the Blu-Ray disc Charles and I were watching the film on did not contain a “Deleted Scenes” section, which I was hoping for because I wanted to see the sword scene.

Also, the book ended with Henry Lamb dying in the hospital and the district attorney re-indicting McCoy and putting him on trial for manslaughter – after he’d already lost his job, his apartment, his money (all his assets were confiscated by the court when Annie Lamb won her $12 million wrongful-death lawsuit against him), and his family – wife Judy (Kim Cattrall) having left him and taken their daughter Campbell (Kirsten Dunst in her first live-action role) with her. And while the novel was narrated in the third person, the film is an extended flashback told in the first person by Peter Fallow on the night he accepts the Pulitzer Prize for his true-crime book on the case, The Real McCoy and the Forgotten Lamb. One thing De Palma and Cristofer did do right was preserve Wolfe’s cynical view of human nature; just about every character in the story is after either money, sex, or both, and they don’t care who they hurt in the pursuit of those goals. One bizarre decision of Cristofer’s that we were thankfully spared was a tag scene in which Henry Lamb recovers from his coma and walks out of the hospital, totally ignored and utterly oblivious to the hubbub that’s gone on around him. That one got blown when for some reason Spike Lee, who had nothing whatever to do with the making of this movie, blurted it out at a press conference about one of his own projects. The Bonfire of the Vanities became one of Hollywood’s legendary flops, thanks largely to Julie Salamon’s black-comic account of its making, but it’s not a bad movie. It does suffer from the impossibility of taking a 659-page novel and boiling it down to a 125-minute movie. Really the only way to do justice to Wolfe’s story would have been to shoot it as a modern-style 10-hour TV miniseries for “streaming” so audiences could either watch it in one-hour segments or “binge” it all in one go the way they can with normal-length novels like The Handmaid’s Tale and Big Little Lies. (I’ve often fantasized about Erich von Stroheim looking down from heaven, seeing that modern audiences will sit through a 10-hour movie, and thinking, “I was right all along! Now is when I should have been alive! Technology has finally caught up with me.”) But it’s actually a well-made movie that holds the audience’s interest (well, mine and Charles’s, anyway) and, though the casting is problematic (producer Peter Guber developed the project at Warners before he and his business partner Jon Peters decamped to run Columbia, and it was his decision to cast Tom Hanks in the lead because he wanted a likable actor to soften the character’s detestability), it’s a good, solidly entertaining film even though it’s not what it could have been.