The Travolta/Cage Project #23 Time To Kill (1989)

Over the course of The Travolta/Cage Project and the Travolta/Cage podcast, a multi-media chronological deep dive into the complete filmographies of Face/Off stars and preeminent cult movie icons Nicolas Cage and John Travolta,  I have been struck by how weirdly simpatico the films we’ve paired for the podcast have proven. 

That holds true of the episode Clint Worthington and I just recorded with special guest Brock Wilbur, whose new book Postal I keep hearing TREMENDOUS things about, which covered Basements, a staggeringly obscure, wildly inaccessible pair of 1987 Harold Pinter adaptations directed by Robert Altman during his 1980s theater phase and the 1989 period psychodrama Time To Kill. 

I fancy myself something of a Travolta and Cage fan, having happily dedicated the next four or five years of my life to watching and writing about every movie they’ve made, as well as the occasional television movie and failed pilot and Christmas album, but before I began this joyous celebration of two of cinema’s most endearing eccentrics I did not know either of these films existed. 

Basements and Time to Kill are shockingly little known for movies starring cult icons like John Travolta and Nicolas Cage but they have more in common than richly merited obscurity. As I wrote in my little-read article on Basements, both films find their stars on foreign ground, figuratively as well as literally, in that both Basements and Time to Kill take place in foreign countries and cast Travolta and Cage as non-Americans. 

Instead of illustrating their range, however, the miscasting of Travolta as a short-tempered hitman with the world’s worst Cockney accent and Cage as an Italian soldier in Ethiopia in 1936 proved just how inextricably contemporary and American Travolta and Cage have always been. 

Where Travolta embarrasses himself trying, and failing, to seem British opposite genuine Brit Tom Conti in Basements, Cage goes an opposite route. If Travolta tries too hard to play a foreigner, Cage makes no effort whatsoever to seem even vaguely Italian. Second or third generation Italian-American? Sure. In 1986’s The Boy in Blue, Cage played real-life 19th century Canadian legend  Ned Hanlan as a totally contemporary Los Angeles type with an accent that’s unmistakably Southern Californian rather than Canadian. 

Cage pulls a similar stunt here. Despite playing an Italian in a bona fide Italian movie, with an Italian cast and an Italian crew, Cage makes tormented Lt. Enrico Silvestri every bit as contemporary and unmistakably American as his Yankee take on Hanlan. 

Basements and Time to Kill both cast their American leads as killers, but Cage’s bad lieutenant commits a number of other crimes as well. Time to Kill echoes Basements in myriad ways but it’s an even more fascinating companion piece to Cage’s last starring vehicle, the wonderful, pitch-black horror-comedy/social satire Vampire’s Kiss. 

In Vampire’s Kiss and Time to Kill, Cage, at his most broodingly method, plays a dark and tormented man who commits sexual assault and kills someone, and becomes convinced that he has contracted a horrible disease.

In Vampire’s Kiss, that disease was vampirism. In Time to Kill, Cage is convinced that he has contracted leprosy despite little in the way of evidence, which connects it both to Vampire’s Kiss and our uncertain and terrified present, when the whole damn world is convinced that it might have a terrible illness, whether those fears are justified or not. 

Time to Kill opens with this most American and 1989 of Italian officers in, what else, a state of intense pain. Lieutenant Enrico has a terrible toothache that demands treatment, but when he spies a beautiful young Ethiopian woman named Miriam bathing herself he forces himself on her. 

Time to Kill belongs to the distressingly vast subsection of films from the 1970s and 1980s that depict sexual assault in a problematically ambiguous, even positive light, as something that begins non-consensual but eventually turns into something much different. The Ethiopian woman does not have the language to consent to sex with the tortured Italian officer but it isn’t long until she’s staring adoringly at him. 

The very married Lieutenant Enrico doesn’t have much time to grapple with what he’s done before he accidentally shoots the Ethiopian woman with a stray bullet while shooting at a hyena. He ends up killing and burying the young woman to hide evidence of his crimes. 

As in Vampire’s Kiss, the anti-hero/villain Cage plays confesses to his crimes without any consequences. In 1980s New York and 1936 Ethiopia, if you’re handsome and white and the people you hurt are women and/or minorities you literally can get away with murder. 

The film’s title has a double meaning: our protagonist is a killer but he also needs to kill time until he’s able to leave Ethiopia and return home to Italy and his wife. While it’s achingly clear that the lieutenant will avoid legal consequences for his crime, fate seems to have something much crueler and more lethal in store for the young soldier: he learns that the white turban Miriam wore is a signal that its wearer has leprosy. 

Lieutenant Enrico becomes convinced that he has contracted leprosy. He begins the film in almost unfathomable pain and proceeds to fall apart psychologically and physically once he comes to think that he has a disease so horrifying and alienating that it has become shorthand for being a reviled, ostracized outcast with no place in society. 

Though he seemingly has no place playing an Italian in an Italian movie, Cage seems very much in his element basting in paranoia and fear as he contemplates a fate worse than death and his seemingly imminent doom. 

The great character actor Giancarlo Giannini steals scenes as a half-mad major who takes a shine to Cage’s sweaty killer because of his seeming madness, not despite it. He sees some of his own insanity reflected in the younger man’s increasingly erratic behavior. 

With a score by Ennio Morricone and cinematography from Blasco Giurato, who shot Cinema Paradisio, Time to Kill gets darker and more broodingly atmospheric as it proceeds and its anti-hero devolves further into madness as he becomes convinced that his body is swimming with disease, that it will betray and destroy him in the most agonizing possible manner. 

Time to Kill punishes its anti-hero for his sins and transgressions before completely letting him off the hook when he discovers that Miriam did not have leprosy, and consequently could not have passed it on to him. Lieutenant Enrico does not deserve a happy ending, even of the ironic variety, but the film gives him one all the same, sending him back to Italy but not before establishing that his cruelty and callousness led to the eminently preventable death of at least one more person. 

Time To Kill is on some level about the horrible price sexism, racism and colonialism inflict on the colonized and the colonizer alike. It’s about arrogant men who treat what are ironically referred to as “our loyal subjects” as sub-human vessels for their sexual pleasure or simple-minded children with no agency, who are incapable of seeing Africans as equals or fully human. 

Yet Time to Kill nevertheless feels shaped and molded by the very sexism, racism and colonialism that it sets out to critique, or at least comment upon. Miriam, her family and her people are treated as inherently inferior by Fascist soldiers but the movie itself never depicts its African characters as fully human. It only seems interested in them to the extent that they inform the protagonist’s grim journey of paranoia and fear. 

Time to Kill is a VERY curious, tremendously flawed, exceedingly problematic movie but it has an enormous asset in Cage, who didn’t need great material to be absolutely riveting. Cage brings a Brandoesque intensity and brute physicality to the challenging role of a soldier staring down oblivion. Even when ferociously miscast in a misbegotten international production Cage is never anything less than compelling. 

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