Bringing Out the Dead

Bringing Out the Dead is a 1999 American drama

lm directed by Martin Scorsese and written by Paul
Schrader, based on the novel by Joe Connelly.[2][3] It stars
Nicolas Cage, Patricia Arquette, John Goodman, Ving
Rhames and Tom Sizemore. The lm was a op at the
box oce but received very positive reviews from critics.
It was also the last North American title to be released on
Laserdisc.[4]

are both virgins, calling it a miracle. Frank rushes one

baby to the hospital but it later dies. In a moment of desperation Frank starts drinking and Marcus soon joins in,
crashing the ambulance into a parked car.
The following morning, Frank sees a stressed Mary leaving the hospital and follows her to an apartment block;
she tells Frank that shes going to visit a friend and he escorts her to the room. After a while Frank goes to the
room and barges his way in the door, only to discover
its in fact a drug den run by a friendly dealer named Cy
Coates (Curtis). Mary has turned back to drugs to cope
with her fathers uctuating condition and Frank tries to
get her to leave but he is dissuaded by Cy who oers
Frank some pills. In another moment of desperation he
swallows the drugs and begins to hallucinate, seeing more
ghosts of patients and the moment when he tried to save
Rose. Once over, he grabs Mary and carries her out of
the building. While visiting a comatose Mr. Burke in the
hospital Frank starts hearing Burkes voice in his head,
telling Frank to let him die but he resuscitates Burke instead.

Plot

Set in Manhattan in the early 1990s, Frank Pierce (Cage)

is a burned-out paramedic who works the graveyard shift
in a two-man ambulance team with various dierent partners. Usually exhausted and depressed, he has not saved
any patients in months and begins to see the ghosts of
those lost, especially a homeless adolescent girl named
Rose whose face appears on the bodies of others. Frank
and his rst partner Larry (Goodman) respond to a call by
the family of a man named Mr. Burke who has entered
cardiac arrest. Frank befriends Mr. Burkes distraught
daughter Mary (Arquette), a former junkie. Frank discovers Mary was childhood friends with Noel (Anthony),
a brain-damaged drug addict and delinquent who is frequently sent to the hospital.

The next shift Frank is paired with his third partner Tom
Wolls (Sizemore), an enthusiastic man with violent tendencies. At this point Frank is slowly beginning to lose
his mind - while tending to a suicidal junkie Frank manages to scare the patient away. The pair are then called to
Cys drug den where another shooting has occurred, and
nd Cy impaled on a railing, having attempted to jump
to safety. Frank holds on to Cy as the other emergency
services cut the railing but Cy and Frank are nearly ung
o the edge before being pulled back up. Cy then thanks
Frank for saving his life - the rst patient Frank has saved
in months. Afterwards Frank agrees to help Tom beat up
Noel, but Frank is distracted and Noel ees into an area
beneath the houses. Tom and Frank chase after Noel but
Frank starts to hallucinate again, snapping out of it just
as he comes upon Tom beating Noel with his bat. During
his second visit to Mr. Burke, the voice again pleas to
let him die, and this time Frank removes Burkes breathing apparatus causing him to enter cardiac arrest, ending
his life. Frank then heads to Marys apartment to inform
her, and she seems to accept her fathers death. Frank is
invited in, falling asleep at Marys side.

After a few minor calls (one involving Noel), Frank and

Larry respond to a shooting and he tends to one of the surviving victims. Frank notices two vials of a drug named
Red Death, a new form of heroin that has started plaguing the streets of New York and caused cardiac arrest calls
to sky-rocket, roll out from the victims sleeve which implies it was a shooting by a rival drug gang. While in the
back of the ambulance with Frank and Noel the victim
goes into denial and repents his drug dealing ways but
dies before they can reach the hospital.
The next day Frank is paired with his second partner Marcus (Rhames), an eccentric and religious man. They respond to the call of a man in a gothic club who has suffered a heart attack. Frank diagnoses that he has in fact
suering from a heroin overdose caused by Red Death.
As Frank injects the man with the antidote, Marcus starts
a prayer circle with the baed club-goers and just as
his preaching climaxes the overdosed man becomes conscious again. On the way back to the hospital Frank
swings by Marys apartment building to tell her that her
fathers condition is improving. Frank and Marcus then
respond to a call by a young Puerto Rican man whose
girlfriend is giving birth to twins despite his claims they

2 Cast
Nicolas Cage as Frank Pierce
1

REFERENCES

Patricia Arquette as Mary Burke

4 Production

John Goodman as Larry

The lm was part of a trio of lms in the late 1990s starring Nicolas Cage that were coproductions of Paramount
Pictures and Touchstone Pictures, with Face/O (1997)
with John Travolta and Snake Eyes (1998) with Gary
Sinise. The opening song on the movie is "T.B. Sheets", a
lengthy blues-inuenced song, about a young girl who lies
dying in a hospital bed, surrounded by the heavy smell of
death and disease. It was written by Van Morrison and
included on his 1967 album, Blowin' Your Mind!. The
song was originally to be used in Taxi Driver.

Ving Rhames as Marcus

Tom Sizemore as Tom Wolls
Marc Anthony as Noel
Cli Curtis as Cy Coates
Mary Beth Hurt as Nurse Constance

The director, Martin Scorsese, and Queen Latifah provided the voice of the ambulance dispatchers.

Aida Turturro as Nurse Crupp

Phyllis Somerville as Mrs. Burke

5 Reception

Queen Latifah as Dispatcher Love (Voice Only)

5.1 Critical response

Martin Scorsese as Dispatcher (Voice Only)

The lm was well received by critics and holds a 71%

Certied Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on
105 reviews. The sites consensus reads Stunning and
compelling, Scorsese and Cage succeed at satisfying the
audience.[5] Roger Ebert gave it a perfect four-star rating, writing, To look at Bringing Out the Dead--to look,
indeed, at almost any Scorsese lm--is to be reminded
that lm can touch us urgently and deeply.[6]

Sound-track

3.1

Track listing

1. "T.B. Sheets" - Van Morrison

2. "Janie Jones" - The Clash
3. "You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory" Johnny Thunders
4. "Whats the Frequency, Kenneth?" - R.E.M.
5. "I'm So Bored with the USA" - The Clash
6. "Red Red Wine" - UB40
7. "Nowhere to Run" - Martha Reeves and the Vandellas

5.2 Box oce

Bringing Out the Dead debuted at #4 in 1,936 theatres
with a week-end gross of only $6,193,052. Produced at
a budget of $55 million but generating a revenue of just
$16.7 million, the lm was a box oce bomb.

6 Notes
Siegel, Ashely (January 1, 2000). Bringing Out
The Dead (R) (lm review)". Mountain Xpress
(Asheville, North Carolina, United States). Retrieved January 25, 2010.

8. Too Many Fish in the Sea - The Marvelettes

9. Rang Tang Ding Dong (I Am a Japanese Sandman)" - The Cellos
10. "Rivers of Babylon" - The Melodians
11. Combination of the Two - Big Brother & The
Holding Company
12. "Bell Boy" - The Who

7 References
[1] http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=
bringingoutthedead.htm
[2] Washburn, Lindy (February 27, 2000). To Hell And
Back in an Ambulance Author Chronicles A Medics
Wild Ride Between Death And Saving Lives. The Record
(Bergen County, New Jersey). Retrieved January 25,
2010.

[3] McClurg, Jocelyn (March 1, 1998). "'Bringing Out The

Dead' Vivid, Out Of Control. Hartford Courant (Hartford, Conn.). p. G.2. Retrieved January 25, 2010.
[4] LaserDisc Museum.
trieved 2012-11-27.

LASERDISC PLANET. Re-

[5] Bring Out the Dead Reviews. Rotten Tomatoes. Flixster.

Retrieved 2010-02-16.
[6] Bringing Out the Dead. rogerebert.suntimes.com. Retrieved January 4, 2011.

External links
Bringing Out the Dead
Database

at the Internet Movie

Bringing Out the Dead at Rotten Tomatoes

Bringing Out the Dead at AllMovie

9 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

9.1

Text

Bringing Out the Dead Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bringing%20Out%20the%20Dead?oldid=646590339 Contributors: Gabbe,

RickK, RedWolf, Postdlf, Litefantastic, Rbs, Robert Weemeyer, DoubleCross, Andycjp, Rich Farmbrough, Rama, Xezbeth, Bender235,
Comedy Pigeon, Polylerus, Erik, Runtime, AN(Ger), Kusma, Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ), GregorB, Macaddct1984, YurikBot, Gaius
Cornelius, Staleydietrich, Slicing, Pegship, Jkelly, Pb30, CoolKatt number 99999, Whobot, Mrblondnyc, Attilios, SmackBot, CelticJobber, AnonUser, Verne Equinox, Cayla, BubbaStrangelove, GambitRF, Invincible Ninja, Salamurai, Ohconfucius, Ser Amantio di Nicolao, John, Wtwilson3, AGK, RattleandHum, ShelfSkewed, Cydebot, Treybien, Jainituos, BillWeiss, Alaibot, Thijs!bot, TonyTheTiger,
Eastmain, SGGH, Okki, QuasyBoy, JustAGal, AaronY, Sreejithk2000, Froid, Wiki Raja, Agadant, Mdumas43073, Films addicted,
WWGB, L.A.Nutti, Manyiakk, TXiKiBoT, Dirubin, Captain Courageous, Vchimpanzee, Rypcord, Sterry2607, SakuraAvalon86, Trivialist, PixelBot, Dutzi, BodhisattvaBot, Addbot, Radosaw10, Tassedethe, Luckas-bot, Sweetmelliuous, Ptbotgourou, Benateshofthestars,
Kjell Knudde, AnomieBOT, Obersachsebot, Xqbot, GrouchoBot, Dac28, BenzolBot, LtMuldoon, Cnwilliams, Jedi94, DixonDBot, JonnyBakes26, EmausBot, Ceadge, Jordancelticsfan, Rexodus, Polisher of Cobwebs, ClueBot NG, Eyelevel70, TruthTellerTV2, Easy4me,
CineAmigo, Saskatchebrave, A8mo and Anonymous: 81

9.2

Images

File:Wikiquote-logo.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Wikiquote-logo.svg License: Public domain

Contributors: ? Original artist: ?

9.3

Content license

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0