More specifically, it’s a film about male geeks. Tarantino would go onto write substantial roles for Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, and for Pam Grier in Jackie Brown, but in Reservoir Dogs there isn’t a single line of dialogue spoken by a woman. And whenever women are mentioned - as in a sniggering anecdote about a waitress who glued her abusive husband’s penis to his stomach - it sounds like the misogynistic locker-room gossip of boys who have never plucked up the courage to speak to a real live girl. It’s true that Mr White reminisces about a female associate called Alabama (presumably the Alabama played by Patricia Arquette in the Tarantino-scripted True Romance), but he claims that their partnership couldn’t last: “You push that woman-man thing too long and it gets to you after a while.” That sums it up. The characters like to view themselves as fearless gangsters. But at heart they are teenagers stuck in their parents’ basements. None of them is mature enough to handle “that woman-man thing”.

Perhaps that’s why Tarantino chose to open the film with his riff on Madonna’s Like a Virgin; the men around the diner table – juvenile, volatile, afraid of women – might as well be hormonal virgins themselves. And perhaps that’s why, when Mr Orange recites a story about his stint as a drug dealer, his main complaint is that people kept ringing him while he was trying to watch The Lost Boys. Consciously or not, Tarantino may have chosen this title because that is what the characters are. His Reservoir Dogs aren’t goodfellas or wise guys, but boys who never grew up.

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