Bad Girl from Madonna's 1992 Erotica album is not just one of Madonna's greatest videos, but one of the greatest videos of all time. Over used words today like Epic should be attributed to works such as this. This is cinema, this is storyline, this is acting, this is David Fincher, and above all, this is Madonna doing what she does best.
Madonna solely brought Movie Star into the rock music world back in 1984 with Mary Lambert's Borderline playing a Lolita of the streets character. Nine years later with Bad Girl, we get what would be her Academy Award winning performance as Louise Oriole - an on the verge, alcoholic fashion magazine editor who has a sexual compulsion and flirts with death rather than deal with her feelings of depression from a dying relationship.
David Fincher directs this fourth and final video with Madonna. Christopher Walken co-stars as the guardian angel watching over Louise in discontent while protecting her every move until the one moment he falters while reading about the Bloody Rampage Killer in the New York Post that will eventually take her life.
We have great stuff here. Louise licking Friskee's cat food off her finger. Dropping her dirty lace underpants in the bathroom sink. Roaming the streets, bars and restaurants of New York with fabulous hair, face and Azzedine Alaia power suits. And Madonna giving one of her greatest on screen performances. This is what Body of Evidence should have been and she knows it, hence why we have this superb video. Madonna was not going to let this moment in time pass without giving it the punctuation mark she wanted.
Bad Girl trivia: Originally to be directed by Tim Burton (initially reported in Liz Smith's column in 1992). Cameo from James Rebhorn - whom Madonna abandons towards the end for killer - also had a role in Woody Allen's Shadow and Fog which Madonna had a cameo - as trapeze artist, Marie. Rebhorn also had a role in Fincher's 1997 film, The Game, starring ex-husband Sean Penn. Christopher Walken played Sean Penn's father in James Foley's At Close Range. Oriole, the main character's last name, is the street that Madonna lived on when she divorced Penn and was the house photographed for Vogue in 1989 - it is of the 'bird streets' that name that entire section of the Hollywood Hills.
