57: Angel Heart (with Robyn Citizen)

Robyn Citizen, TIFF’s Senior Manager of Festival Programming, returns to the program to discuss (in great spoilery detail) a Spooky Szn classic, the film noir / horror hybrid Angel Heart, an extremely controversial film in 1987, branded with the X rating by the MPAA before director Alan Parker removed 10 seconds of sex and violence.

Like The Sixth Sense over a decade later, Angel Heart has everything riding on the big twist at the end paying off, and is a pleasure to revisit just to see how you were tricked the first time. We also talk about the glory days of Mickey Rourke, the film’s complex portrayal of race and its white protagonist operating in black spaces (set in mid-fifties Harlem and segregated New Orleans), and this film’s themes of racial necropolitics: a framework of how society determines who gets to live and who has to die, which would later repeat itself in real life New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

Plus: how Lisa Bonet crossed Bill Cosby by starring in this film, and how Angel Heart sparked a decades-long feud between Mickey Rourke and Robert De Niro!

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Trailer for Angel Heart (Parker, 1987)

From the syndicated television cut of Angel Heart, alternate (mostly SFW) version of That Scene with imagery not included in the theatrical version.