THE BARBER...

In films that focus on serial killers, it’s rare that the killer himself is being stalked. Hell, that ruins the entire notion of vicarious living for the teenage fans of these films, where semi-naked women are spied on while they do filthy things, and destroyed for being so darn lovely and unavailable.  But in The Barber, an intriguing and highly watchable little thriller,  the killer is the target.

 

Francis Visser  (Scott Glenn) was once accused of killing 17 women.  When there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him, he moved to a small town, changed his name to ‘Eugene Van Wingerdt’, and lives out his days as the neighborhood barber. The police chief and the waitresses at the local diner adore the old coot. Why not?  He’s a slightly fragile grandpa figure who dresses neatly, never curses, and dispenses wisdom to anyone within earshot.  He has a kind word for everyone, and even takes in local hoods and teaches them how to cut hair. He’s a nice guy.

 

The difficulty in creating a character that is supposed to be nebulous is that we all know Scott Glenn, still a tough piece of rope at age 70, is not fragile at all. Plus, the posters for the movie show him grinning slyly while wielding a straight razor.  So when a young troublemaker named John McCormack (Chris Coy) arrives in town demanding that Eugene teach him the finer points of serial murder, we assume that the town’s beloved haircutter is probably not the sweetheart he pretends to be.

 

The standard serial killer movie ends with the bad guy getting his comeuppance;  he killed a bunch of women, demented teenage boys in the audience got their jollies, but inevitably the murderer has to fall to his death, or be shot by Jody Foster. Normalcy is restored, and we can all go home knowing that serial killers are just bogey men to be stuffed back into the closet.  Of course, sometimes the killer lives, just in case there's a sequel to be made, but he usually gets it in the end.  For a while they were killed in unique ways, crushed in trash compactors, or fed to crocodiles, but a bullet works just as well and seems more gritty. Meanwhile, The Barber ends with a twist right out of a 'Tales from the Crypt' episode, and even though you can see it coming from miles away, it’s still  satisfying in an old EC comic book kind of way. McCormack, you see, isn’t exactly a serial killer in training.  But I’ll leave it to you to find out what he’s all about.

 

Eugene learns to relish McCormack’s company. He especially enjoys teaching him the tricks of his old trade, such as how to look at his watch when picking up a hitchhiker, just to show that he’s really in a hurry and is only stopping to help out of the goodness of his heart.  Eugene shows McCormack how to be a murderous fiend with the same pride and attention to detail as an old samurai would prepare a rookie for battle.

 

Glenn, who has long been one of our most reliable and charismatic character actors, is the key to the movie’s success.  He’s fascinating, whether he’s referring to a potential victim as “yummy,” or he’s simply shuffling around the barber shop in his old-man act.  The movie wouldn’t be half as good without him, for it’s probably the most sexless and least violent of any serial killer movie I’ve ever seen.  Director Basil Owies (making his feature debut after a number of short films) and veteran screenwriter Max Enscoe seem uninterested in the usual serial killer fare. Eugene doesn’t appear to crave his victims physically – he just takes them to a deserted area and buries them alive.  The only real violence we see in the movie is when various male characters start slugging it out, or attacking each other with baseball bats.  It’s as if Owies and Enscoe, at heart, wanted to make a simple cop movie with lots of revenge and ass-kicking and Latino men shouting “motherfucker” across a crowded bar.

 

But that’s a mild quibble. The movie works better than most, features some good acting (I especially liked Stephen Tobolowsky as a police chief who looks like a harmless old wreck but harbors some violent instincts of his own), and there are enough plot twists to keep you wondering.  True, you might forget the whole thing as soon as the final credits roll, but for 95 minutes you are in the world of The Barber. It’s not a bad place to be.

- Don Stradley

BUZZARD...

Buzzard is a simple story told in a string of blackout scenes. People talk. They eat. Sometimes they hit each other. Blackout. Next scene comes up. And so on. Godard used to do it this way. So did Jim Jarmusch. It’s a nice style, and it can be effective, especially when you’re depicting characters who are, shall we say, smaller than life.

 

The movie’s hero (or ‘anti-hero’) is  Marty Jackitansky  (Joshua Burge), a touchy young guy who works a temp job at a mortgage company. When we first see him he’s closing out his checking account so he can take advantage of a new $50-dollar offer from the same bank to open a new account. He’s kind of a prick, and he knows it.

 

Never meeting a scam he doesn’t like, Marty eventually gets his hands on some old company checks and signs them over to himself, which seems like an easy way to get quick money. When he learns his crime is easily traceable by the firm, he grows paranoid.  Thinking his shabby apartment will be surrounded by cops and surveillance cameras, he hides out in the basement of a co-worker. They bicker and get on each other’s nerves.  When the stress of hiding out becomes too much, he snaps and assaults his friend. Then he hits the streets, hoping to lay low until the coast is clear.

 

The second part of the movie is decidedly grimmer than the first.  Using his native ability to scam people, Marty manages to stay in hotels for a while, but they become increasingly smaller and grimier as his money runs out. We eventually see him scavenging from dumpsters, like the buzzard of the movie’s title. He turns to violence, which isn’t a surprise, since he’s such a hothead. He wants to be a rebel, but he’s not sure what he’s rebelling against. He rails against corporate America, but if you asked him why corporate America was bad, he probably couldn’t tell you.  It’s just a notion he probably heard on one of his heavy metal albums. 

 

The world of Buzzard is an indistinct grey, the sort of bland cityscape you see in comic books and graphic novels.  It supposedly takes place in Detroit, but you wouldn’t know it.  The time period, too, is a mystery.  There are references to Soundgarden, and the characters seem mangy enough to have existed at any time during the past two decades. There are no mobile phones, and no references to apps or the internet.  Maybe it takes place in the 1990s. I don’t know.  All that is clear is that the people  around Marty seem unbearably stupid and self-absorbed.  It’s no wonder he feels no guilt about ripping people off. Bank tellers seem robotic.  Store clerks seem smug.  To blow ‘em all up would seem a reasonable conclusion for a guy like Marty. 

 

While the movie may remind me of an early Jarmusch, this is only in reference to its style. The characters in Jarmusch, for instance, were adults, with adult behavior. They gambled, they liked sports, they  occasionally thought about women.  In Buzzard, the characters have jobs, but they’re still playing with plastic Star Wars swords, and living in their parents’ basement.  Marty, for all of his anger and frustration, is a nerd, too. Even in a dire moment, he doesn’t mind explaining the difference between Bigfoot and the Florida Skunk Ape. He even builds a glove that resembles the one worn by Freddy in Nightmare on Elm Street. He wears monster masks out in public.  Here’s a guy on the run from the law, yet rather than remain inconspicuous,  he’s so dumb that he wears masks and a giant glove with blades.  Then again, he’s so used to going through life unnoticed that he probably can’t imagine anyone seeing him, even with a rubber mask on.

 

I liked Joshua Burge as Marty. He looks like Buster Keaton, sounds like Donald Sutherland, and is always a click away from doing some damage.  Writer/director Joel Potrykus even has the chutzpah to put Marty in a dark movie theater, peering through the blades of his Freddy glove, looking exactly like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, waiting for the explosion to come.  Is this a conscious move? An homage, like Godard dressing his French actors like Bogart? Or a warning that even our nerds will become dangerous?  Marty would usually be played for laughs as a supporting character in another story.  Here, he’s front and center.  And he’s fascinating.  I especially loved the long scene, shot in one delirious take,  where he sits in a hotel room eating a plate of spaghetti and watching TV. He stuffs his mouth with such animal pleasure that he finally seems, with his hotel robe and slippers, like a king in his castle.

 

- Don Stradley

 

FOXCATCHER...

FOXCATCHER PLAYS WITH THE FACTS, BUT STILL TELLS A COMPELLING TALE OF ATHLETIC DREAMS GONE AWRY...

by Don Stradley

How did crazy millionaire John Dupont decide the Schultz brothers could help achieve his dream of sponsoring a wrestling team to represent the US at the 1988  Olympics?  Was it because they were already experienced gold medal winners? Or was it because he sensed they were, at heart, a couple of simpletons to be manipulated?


We don’t quite get the answer in Bennet Miller’s Foxcatcher, a dramatization of a real life case that saw Dupont bring the famous wrestling brothers to his Newtown PA compound and eventually murder one of them.  I’d forgotten the details of the case – I wasn’t sure if Dupont murdered one brother, or both, or if they’d murdered him for his money.  By forgetting the particulars, I enjoyed watching the movie unfold.  But I have no more understanding of the case, and all of its weirdness, than I did before.


DuPont (Steve Carell) was a pathetic figure, a sheltered rich boy whose mother used to pay her chauffer’s son to be his friend. He grew up to be one of those pseudo sportsmen, the rich guy who owns a lot of guns and talks tough, but in reality is just a fat little runt. He had an interest in amateur wrestling, and by the 1980s was harboring a desire to sponsor (and coach) the US Olympic team.  Mysteriously, like a James Bond villain, DuPont invites Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) to his Foxcatcher Farm training ground, where Mark is easily impressed by DuPont’s generosity and patriotism.  When we first see Mark, he’s making a speech in front of bunch of bored children, trying to tell them about integrity and honor. They don’t get it. DuPont sucks Mark in by telling him that great Olympic wrestlers should be appreciated by their country. Mark falls for it. Indeed, he laps it up.


Like William Holden in Sunset Blvd, Mark finds himself lured into DuPont’s Norma Desmond type atmosphere.  Mark grew up without a father, and DuPont seems like a reasonable surrogate.  DuPont, too, is friendless, and craves loyalty.  Some will see this as a story about a sugar daddy and his young charge, but there’s nothing sexual going on.  Both Mark and DuPont seem strangely asexual.  What they seem to need goes deeper than sex, and into some wounded area in the soul. They are badly damaged men.


The setup works for a while, and all seems well when  Mark wins a medal at the World Championships. We also see him catering to DuPont, cutting his hair, appearing with him at public gatherings.  They hug a lot. They pose for photographs.  But DuPont’s seediness brings Mark down. In time, the champion athlete is snorting cocaine, and losing his competitive edge.  To correct things, DuPont calls upon Mark’s older brother, the more sensible David (Mark Ruffalo).  David knows more about wrestling, and he knows more about what makes his brother tick.  The downside is that DuPont is slowly squeezed out.  DuPont may be loony, but even he knows there’s no room for him once the brothers are reunited.  Once David arrives, DuPont mopes about like a spurned lover.


Tatum and Ruffalo are convincing as a pair of broken down athletes. They limp around, slightly hunchbacked, their  bodies seeming to ache with every move.  When they train together they butt heads and slap at each other like a pair of mountain gorillas at mating time.  Amateur wrestling is a deadly dull sport,  but Miller makes the wrestling sequences interesting because he closes in on Tatum’s face, especially when an opponent is, literally, wiping the floor with him.  We also see the sport's weird side. There’s a scene where wrestlers grunt and grown for a spot on the American team, their efforts gently applauded by a small audience that might have been at a wine tasting or a fancy dog show.


Ruffalo is very good as David, a man so shaped by his athletic background that when he puts an arm around his brother, we’re not sure if he’s going to hug him or throw him.  Tatum specializes in playing vulnerable meatheads, and as Mark Schultz we see him punching himself in the face, slamming his head into a mirror,  and crying a lot.   But as hard as Tatum tries, we’re never quite moved.  How can we sympathize with a character so dumb that he falls for DuPont’s line of bull, which includes a desire to be called “the Golden Eagle of America”?


Carell, sporting a prosthetic nose and fake teeth, plays John DuPont as a tired old ghost of a man, saying his lines as if he can’t find enough air in his lungs.  There’s a brilliant scene where DuPont gets drunk on champagne and starts challenging his wrestling team. They playfully allow the geezer to take them down.  Half-believing that he’s legitimately taken these young bruisers to the mat, he rises, grinning like a demented kid at his own birthday party.  There are also enough stuffed birds in the house and references to “mother” that DuPont seems like a distant relative of Norman Bates. Miller creates too many scenes where Carell stares into space, as if we’re supposed to guess at the inner demons capering in his mind, but it’s still a strong performance from Carell, now one of our top character actors.


Still, the movie  suffers from a heaviness, and it moves towards its climax with elephantine steps. The final quarter of the movie feels like an extended scene of the three main players sitting in silence, gazing at some dark  unknown.  Did DuPont love Mark?  Did Mark love DuPont?  The real Mark Shultz has gone on record saying he hates the movie and hates Miller.  Facts were fudged, and Foxcatcher is apparently loaded with inaccuracies, but  I can only comment on the movie as presented.  It’s a good one, with good acting.  What keeps it from being great is Miller’s laborious effort to make it seem “important”, as if John DuPont is supposed to represent a kind of decrepit, decadent Americana.  And at 134 minutes, you may find yourself growing weary of the story, no matter how good the acting.

 

BOOK REVIEW: BEHIND THE LOCKED DOOR - GEORGE HARRISON

EXCELLENT NEW BIOGRAPHY SHOWS THE QUIET BEATLE AS A FULLY FORMED HUMAN CHARACTER, NOT JUST A PIOUS ROCK STAR...

by Don Stradley

There are at least a half dozen new biographies of George Harrison  listed on Amazon, including one by his older sister, and one by his first wife. Other Harrison bios include a lovely coffee table book based on the well-made but rather safe  HBO documentary by Martin Scorsese,  and others with titles like   ‘Working Class Mystic: A Spiritual Biography of George Harrison’, and  ‘Here Comes the Sun: The Spiritual and Musical Journey of George Harrison’.  I’m not even counting the various kindle-only editions and reissues of older books.  If the quiet Beatle knew how his past was being picked over, he’d be annoyed. His first song written for the Beatles, after all, was titled ‘Don’t Bother Me’.

‘Behind the Locked Door’ by Graeme Thomson is probably as good as it gets when it comes to documenting George Harrison. Then again, how do we know? Beatle books have a sameness to them, and by now, more than 50 years after the band hit America, the stories are developing a cut and paste feel.  I could read five or six George bios, and probably patch together a reasonable bio on my own, without having to visit Liverpool or interview some elderly sound engineer who could offer such tidbits as ‘Well, George always wore nice shoes, you know.’ The vaults, I believe, are empty. Any author attempting a Beatle bio is going to need a spectacular voice and a hell of a point of view to make his work stand out.  Thomson succeeds on most fronts, giving us a more developed and three dimensional Harrison than the one we usually get, including the one Scorsese gave us. 

George, we learn from Thomson, was a bit of a rebel, though a good lad at heart. He was fond of his mum and dad, and once he became a famous Beatle, his mum would invite scores of adoring female fans into the Harrison home to show off her son’s old bedroom. Now and then they girls would help her with the laundry. She was a smart ol’ gal, this Louise Harrison.  It’s funny to imagine a house full of little female Beatle fans, dutifully helping Louise iron George’s socks.

George discovered the guitar at age 12, and would cling to it like a life raft for most of his life.  Harrison mastered many styles, from Chuck Berry to Chet Atkins to the heavy slide playing that dominated much of his later playing.  Though  a recent memoir by Beatles recording engineer Geoff Emerick, described Harrison as a fumbler who struggled with his instrument, Thomson portrays Harrison as a careful craftsman who made each note count.  It’s also of interest that more than one musician  quoted in the book says that Harrison always sounded better when he was just mucking around with his guitar in a hotel room or at his home, than he did in a recording studio.

The problem, of course, was that George was the youngest of the Beatles, stuck in the role of little brother for the band’s duration. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were not just older, but they were brilliant songwriters and singers.  George’s guitar was a significant part of the group’s sound, but songwriters get the royalties, not guitarists.  Hence, George tried to write songs, often with forgettable results.  Lennon and McCartney could write a hit on their lunch break. Harrison, meanwhile,  spent months on a tune, and would only write about things that were deeply personal.   With workmanlike diligence, he gradually learned the craft.  By the time the Beatles broke up, he’d written some of their most beautiful songs.  That he went from singing Carl Perkins’ ‘Matchbox’ to writing and singing ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ is one of the most impressive creative arcs in the history of rock music.

Thomson, who has written for various music publications in the U.K., gives us the edgier aspects of Harrison, too.  George was a bit of a womanizer, and a drinker, and despite his yearning for spiritual growth, could be as selfish and demanding as any spoiled rock star.  He wasn’t always generous about giving credit where it was due, and his treatment of some Moog representatives in the late 1960s was deplorable.  He was so sheltered that he didn’t know how to use a locker or a pay phone.  He claimed that being a Beatle had been a nightmare,  yet he never hesitated to play the Beatle card when trying to seduce a woman or get a good seat in a restaurant. He could be surprisingly kind, yet casually cruel.

And, of course, there were his friendships with Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan, which actually seemed more emotional and volatile than anything he may have had with his fellow Beatles.  Clapton fell in love with Harrison’s first wife, Patty Boyd, and there ensued a decade long game of sexual one-upmanship between the guitarists.  Harrison’s friendship with Dylan is less fiery, but just as interesting.  It’s as if Harrison wanted to replace Lennon and McCartney with the one man who might have been a greater songwriter, and become his pal to boot.  According to Thomson, Harrison would record hours of himself covering Dylan tunes in his home studio.  Could there someday be a CD of Harrison doing Dylan?  

Yet, this uneducated Liverpool boy,  “a real wacker” as Lennon called him, would go on to be a galvanizing entertainment force once the Beatles had ended, first with the wondrous recordings on All Things Must Pass, then with his epic  Madison Square Garden charity concert for Bangladesh, then as a movie producer and head of  Handmade Films, and again in the 1980s as the founder of the Travelling Wilburys, a dream group featuring Harrison, Dylan, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, and Jeff Lynne. 

Thomson covers all of these victorious moments, and also the defeats, such as Harrison’s troubled 1974 tour of North America, the plagiarism lawsuit around ‘My Sweet Lord’, and his struggles for commercial success in the era of disco and punk.  He sees Harrison as constantly toiling, even as he was beset with a creeping fogeyism; by age 34, Harrison was content to putter in his garden and sneer at the new sounds he heard. Thomson suggests Harrison could have enjoyed greater success in the 1970s, if only he’d given his fans a bit of what they wanted. “Had he popped up on Top of the Pops,” Thomson writes, “wearing his Krishna hat, a smile and a pair of bright trousers he might have scored a few more brownie points.” 

Then,  there was Harrison’s interest in Eastern religions, which either made him  a source of fascination or a subject of derision, depending on your take.  It’s been forgotten by now, but there was a time when Harrison was perceived as a pious ‘holier than thou’ type shoving that dreary Indian music down our throats, especially by critics at Rolling Stone.  But the disdain of critics was nothing compared to the eternal battle raging within Harrison, as he “would ping pong  back and forth between the sacred and the profane, going slightly further in either direction each time.”

Thomson structures the book as if Harrison’s career reached a pinnacle with the Bangladesh concert, and that everything to follow was an anti-climax. There’s some accuracy in this, and no doubt Thomson makes it seem as if the concert, where Harrison rallied a dozen or more of his pop star friends to help raise money for monsoon victims, was a truly heaven-touched event. “Forty years later,” he writes, “it shines like a beacon of practical, clear-headed, empathetic activism amid the bed-ins, bagism and myriad woolly gestures of the age which generated lots of heat but very little light.” 

I like Thomson’s writing. It never takes off on any wild flights of inspiration, but in a plain-spoken and quite effective manner he  tells the tale  he sets out to tell, that of a boy who dropped out of school to join a band with his much older mates, a boy who “was far from stupid, but by comparison his creativity and intelligence was much rougher around the edges, a little less consciously artful.”  The boy grew up to seek God, and struggled mightily as he bounced back and forth between the material world and the spiritual.  Thomson also deserves credit for  writing about Harrison’s interest in India in a way that never bores. Harrison’s sad end, which included a home invasion attack by a demented Beatles’ fan (Harrison’s worst nightmare, dating back to the 1960s, had come true), is handled tastefully, with just enough attention to detail to satisfy.

The more we know about the Beatles, the bigger the puzzle grows, and there will always seem to be missing pieces. In ‘Behind The Locked Door’, Lennon comes off as distant, and two-faced.  McCartney comes off as a hurricane  creative force, but a bully. Ringo Starr seemed to be a friend, and according to one chapter, was still supplying Harrison with drugs well into the 1980s.  George? I ended up liking him. Sure, he was prickly at times, but by the book’s end he seemed to become a decent fellow, a man with the courage of his convictions, even if it took him years to reach that point.  I particularly  liked reading about how he treated the ‘apple scruffs,’ those loyal young girls who hung around the gate of Abbey Road  studios hoping for a glimpse of their heroes.  George would occasionally bring them tea, or stop to say hello.  How his attention must have thrilled them!

Yet, he may have seen something of himself in those girls, wide-eyed and slightly innocent, yearning for something more meaningful than what existed on their own side of the gate.

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

WARNER ARCHIVES: TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY (1951)...STORM WARNING (1951)

Warner Archives Gives Us A Look At One of Hollywood's Forgotten Stars: Steve Cochran

by Don Stradley

Steve Cochran is known more for his stormy personal life and mysterious death than for any of his movie appearances.  This is understandable for a character who earned more than a few paragraphs in some of the trashier Hollywood tomes.   When Cochran was found dead on his yacht at age 48, a victim of rough seas and failing health, there was a sense that his bad behavior had finally caught up to him.  That his acting work is largely forgotten is a shame, for at one time the hard partying Cochran  was one of  Warner Bros’ brightest hopes for the future. 

 Tomorrow is Another Day (1951), currently available on the Warner Archives streaming service, shows Cochran as Bill Clark, an ex-con who was jailed for murdering his father.  In prison since he was 13, Clark comes into the civilian world nearly 20 years later like a teenager in a grown man’s body. “Your generation grew up, married, raised families, went to war,” the warden tells him as he prepares to leave prison. “But nothing happened to you, Bill. You just got older.”  Clark enters a post-war America of extravagance and good times.  He’s bewildered by it all, satisfying himself first with some newfangled ‘banana nut’ pie, and later by visiting Dream Land, one of the “dime a dance” halls he’d probably read about while he was doing time.  That’s where he meets Cay Higgins (Ruth Roman, with some over-the-moon Joan Crawford eyebrows).   Bill goes home with her one night and runs into her  angry boyfriend. A scuffle breaks out, and Bill is dropped hard.  When he wakes up, he sees Cay’s boyfriend on the floor, his body lodging a bullet or two.  Cay did the shooting in self-defense, but convinces Bill that he did it.  ‘You don’t remember what happened?” she says.  She practically looks into the camera and says, I got this big gorilla right where I want him!

The couple hits the road, pretending to be married.  They shack up in a camp where Bill gets a job picking lettuce.  Unexpectedly, Cay enjoys married life, even if it’s only a ruse to hide from the law.  Meanwhile, Bill grows more neurotic as he senses the cops closing in on them.  Though the movie wasn’t a huge hit,  director Felix Feist gives it a light noir feel and does the best he can with a typical Warner Bros potboiler.

Cochran was 34 at the time of Tomorrow is Another Day.   A former cowboy and railroad worker who’d left the University of Wyoming to try his hand at acting, he’d impressed studio heads with his work in films starring Danny Kaye, and Ronald Reagan. He’d also delivered a strong supporting performance opposite James Cagney in White Heat.  Warner Bros was testing the waters with Cochran as a leading man in the John Garfield mold.  There’s a key moment in Tomorrow is Another Day when the couple on the lam trade their city finery for leather jackets and blue jeans. With his low-key acting and feral good looks, Cochran looks less like Garfield and more like the off-beat leading men to come, from Marlon Brando to Monty Clift.   Warner Bros would spend the next couple of years trying him in a variety of roles,  from rodeo men to tank commanders, but Cochran was simply born to play heavies.

 

Consider Storm Warning, released by Warner the same year as Tomorrow Is Another Day. Ginger Rogers witnesses a murder committed by the KKK, and notices her brother-in-law (Cochran)  among the mob, underneath a white hood.   Directed by Stuart Heisler,  the movie  was accurately described by Bosley Crowther as a “mechanically melodramatic film, superficially forceful but lacking real substance or depth.”  Yet, the movie was a money-maker and Cochran turns in one of the slimiest performances of his career as a Klan lackey,   a stupid man hiding behind the force of a large group.  With a strong cast around him, including Rogers, Reagan, and Doris Day, Cochran steals the picture. Hostile one moment, nervous as a bagged rat the next,   his villain has far more shading than say, Reagan does as a self-righteous District Attorney.  At the film’s climax, an enraged Cochran hurls Day across a room with such violence that it looked as if America’s future sweetheart wouldn’t come out of this movie without a touch of brain damage.

Unfortunately, Storm Warning hasn’t aged well. Cinematographer Carl Guthrie makes the best of the Corona, California backdrop and gives it a nice, noir feel, but at heart it’s  the sort of heavy-handed ‘message’ picture that Warner Bros was making in those days.  Yet, the scene where the town’s reigning “grand dragon” takes Rogers into a field and works her over with a bullwhip has a surreal terror about it, especially since Cochran is watching the action with an absolutely demented look on his face. (No one was better than Cochran at  lurking in the shadows looking like a wild-eyed degenerate!)

If Cochran was brooding in Tomorrow is Another Day, and manic in Storm Warning, he’s downright sinister in Highway 301, a routine crime thriller released just two months prior to Storm Warning, in Dec. 1950.  As dapper killer George Legenza, he plays the sort of short-tempered gangster that George Raft or Bogart might have played.   Granted, the movie is just a typical “crime doesn’t pay” drama, but Cochran shows he could play villainy close to the vest, even as he was taking particular pleasure in murdering women who posed a threat to his gang’s safety.  Crowther, in full-slam mode for The Times, wrote the movie off as “a straight exercise in low sadism,” and wasn’t far off the mark.

 

The film ends with Legenza making a mad sprint through the streets as he tries to elude the cops.  The scene is fascinating because Cochran plays it like he’s half-enjoying the chase.  Crowther noted that the audience for the NY premiere was “made up mainly of muscular youths” who weren’t especially interested in the story as a crime deterrent, but seemed to enjoy the action provided by this “this cheap gangster melodrama.”  One can imagine the youths in the theater cheering for Cochran as he dashed through alleys and parking lots, occasionally glancing over his shoulder to see if his pursuers were near.  Cochran  could easily portray  the kind of lazy charisma and disdain for authority that audiences have always liked;  if luck had been on his side, he might have picked up the sort of roles that went to Robert Mitchum.

 Unfortunately, Warner Bros was at a low point, still churning out traditional gangster flicks while other studios were moving into newer, fresher territories. Cochran went on to start his own production company, and  intermittently earned some critical praise  working for directors ranging from Michelangelo Antonioni to Roger Corman.  By the 1960s he was earning his bones in TV shows like Twilight Zone and Bonanza, and was frequently a subject for the scandal magazines of the day,  usually involving a woman.  He scuffled to write and direct his own projects, but his one effort, Tell Me In The Sunlight, wouldn’t be released until two years after he died. By 1987 when Mamie Van Doren wrote about their affair in one of her steamy memoirs, Cochran was long overlooked by all but the most serious of movie buffs.

The titles currently showing on the Warner Archives do Cochran some justice.  They show an actor who had been given the ball and was determined to run with it, an actor who had some questionable private habits but was, nonetheless,   as capable as anyone in the business.

Tomorrow is Another Day, Storm Warning, and Highway 301 are all available on the Warner Archive streaming service. 

ON DVD: ST VINCENT...

Bill Murray Continues His Run As A National Treasure...

by Don Stradley

St. Vincent is a predictable workout for those who like to think the worst among us are actually kind-hearted, but that’s positive news, because this is a movie that might actually get to you. Even though I could have won money by predicting plot twists, the story still moved me, and left me with a tear in my eye.

The movie wants to be a working class fable, so it takes place in Sheepshead Bay, which is apparently a neighborhood of seedy bars and horse races. It stars Bill Murray as Vincent, a grouchy slob who appears to be one of life’s losers. He’s often drunk, and gambles away his money at the track. Loan sharks are after him. Vincent is one of those guys who is always trying to talk his way out of a beating. His girlfriend is a Russian stripper (or hooker) who has notified him that she’s pregnant, though no one is really sure that Vincent is the father. One morning he wakes up to find he has new neighbors, Maggie (Melissa McCarthy), a recently separated woman who is scuffling to support herself as an emergency room nurse, and her delicate son Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher), a polite boy who speaks with the sweetness of a character in an old Peanuts cartoon. The new neighbors immediately get on Vincent's bad side when the moving van destroys Vincent’s fence. True, this is a bit of ham-handed film school symbolism about Vincent's protective outer wall being destroyed, but stick with it. There are gems to be found here.

Oliver is a frail little boy, and on his first day of school his keys and wallet are stolen. He ends up at Vincent’s. The old guy doesn’t mind watching the kid. They watch Abbott and Costello movies and eat sardines. Always in need of money, Vincent offers his services to Maggie as a babysitter. Oliver, fresh out of father figures, thinks the old guy is kind of cool in a weird way. Faster than you can say Uncle Buck, Vincent is teaching the boy how to deal with bullies, and how to bet on the horses. It’s the familiar old story: boy meets bum, boy loses bum, boy is reunited with bum in the end.

Granted, it’s a story we’ve seen before. It’s basically a John Hughes movie with sweaty armpits.

It's actually rather daring for writer/director Theodore Melfi to create such an old-timey, sentimental story. He’s gambling that such a tale will still hit people. To give his movie a darker edge, he pads the screenplay with some dark, real life elements: people have strokes; they grow senile; they can’t get good medical care; and money is scarce. And Vincent isn't particularly cuddly, either. He drinks too much, and he's ugly when he's drunk. But Melfi also inserts some cushions, such as a hooker with a heart of gold, bullies who turn out to be nice guys, and kids who see through the crusty armor of an old grumbler like Vincent.

What hooked me into the story was Murray. He’s become such a good actor that I simply caved in, even if I knew where Melfi was going. There’s pain in Murray’s eyes, and when he wails “Why!” after losing at the track, his anguish is stirring. I think he may have said, “Why not me?” but I can’t be sure. He may have said it with his eyes, or through mental telepathy. However he did it, he made me feel his agony. His friendship with the kid isn’t syrupy, and that’s to Murray’s credit. He could’ve played it for pure mawkishness, but for most of the movie we sense that he’s only in it for the babysitting money.


Murray has often played a character who is looking after a younger person. It goes all the way back to Meatballs, when he was the gregarious camp counselor. In Stripes, he was a confidant older brother to the goofs in his platoon. In Ghostbusters, well, he was protecting us kids from ghosts, wasn’t he? Even in Lost in Translation, he was providing guidance for a young woman. In Broken Flowers he was searching for his son. In Moonrise Kingdom his daughter runs away. In The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Murray has to deal with someone who may or may not be his son. In Rushmore, he befriends a young nerd. In What About Bob?, his relationship with a young boy is a big part of the story. I won’t try to psychoanalyze him, but this theme is noticeable throughout Murray's career. St. Vincent certainly continues the thread. Perhaps he’s been so popular, especially among male viewers, because Murray appeals to us as an older brother, or perhaps a dad figure.

He’s also become one of most watchable actors in the business. There’s a scene at the end of St. Vincent where he merely sits in a lawn chair mumbling the words to Bob Dylan’s ‘Shelter From The Storm’. He fiddles with a garden hose. He relaxes. He sprays water on his shoes. He’s magnetic.

So, sure, if you're a hard-bitten highbrow and you're into somber films, this isn't your movie. Hey, I don’t know if I would’ve liked it if someone besides Murray was playing Vincent. Jack Nicholsen might have pulled it off back in his About Schmidt phase, but not many other actors could do it. If occasionally you like to let your guard down and enjoy a slushy one, then St. Vincent could work for you. It's not great, but it has a heart. And it has Bill Murray.
 

BOOK REVIEW: SILVER SCREEN FIEND (Patton Oswalt)

COMEDIAN TALKS A LOT ABOUT MOVIES AND MANAGES TO  SAY NOTHING...


by Don Stradley

It's always a crap shoot when personalities from the pop culture devote an entire book to their movie going experiences. Regrettably, there haven't been many worth reading. Quentin Crisp, at the pinnacle of his 1980s fame, wrote a good one called How To Go To A Movie. His book was warm and humorous and humble. Patton Oswalt, a celebrity of sorts known for his HBO specials, movie roles, and a long stint on NBC's 'The King of Queens', should be able to write a good book about the movies. But after reading his Silver Screen Fiend, a patchy chronicle about his movie "addiction," I think Oswalt could learn something from Quentin Crisp.

It's not that Silver Screen Fiend is a particularly bad book, but the tone is off. Oswalt spent many years obsessively watching movies so he could check them off in various film encyclopedias. He was under the assumption that if he spent enough time sitting in old theaters he’d eventually become a film director by osmosis. But despite his readiness to rattle off facts and figures, I’m not even certain that Oswalt loves movies. He writes about movies the way a stalker rants about a woman. There’s no love involved, just a fixation.

Though his movie fandom dates back to his 1970s Virginia childhood when he watched The Longest Yard on television with his dad, the story begins in 1995 at the New Beverly Cinema of Los Angeles. Oswalt was there for a double feature of Sunset Boulevard and Ace in the Hole, taking his seat in “the sort of abyssal darkness deep sea fishes thrive on.” And like a fish, he’s hooked. He decides to become a movie expert, and even finds a sort of voodoo satisfaction in checking off movies every night. He calls it an addiction, but it reads more like an obsessive compulsive disorder.

Oswalt hits the foreign films. He hits the horror movie marathons, and any new piece of junk starring Bruce Willis. Bloodsucking Freaks? He’s there. Last Tango in Paris? He’s there. You could say he’s exhaustive. You could also say he’s not discerning. Oswalt lets all of these movies settle in his gut, hoping that every camera angle and plot twist will someday burst out of him in a moment of inspiration. Meanwhile, he also spends these years seeking success as a stand-up comic, writing for 'MAD-TV', and trying to figure out if he should be an edgy, ‘alternative’ comic, or simply dumb his act down and become more mainstream. Decisions, decisions.

Oswalt can’t quite pull off Silver Screen Fiend because he sets his feet in two camps. He wants to write about his movie habit, and he wants to write about his early days on the comedy grind. He tries to link the two, and occasionally makes a smooth logical jump from one to the other, but it’s as if two separate books were hitched together out of desperation. I liked his thoughts on comedy, about how some comics get comfortable at a particular club and can never play anywhere else, and how some are deluded into thinking they could simply do a set and get a sitcom deal. Maybe anecdotes about the early days of Laura Kightlinger aren’t exactly on par with hearing about the Beatles in Hamburg, but Oswalt provides some interesting “insider” stuff. Unfortunately, when Oswalt talks movies, he’s just another nerd in the coffee shop.


Of course, he’s determined to finish his tale. So on he goes, until he reaches that fateful day of seeing The Phantom Menace. For some reason, the disappointment of this movie snaps him out of his addiction. Maybe it was just old-fashioned burnout. Or maybe it was the realization that for all of his talk, he was probably never going to direct a movie.


Yet Oswalt would rise from the ashes, overcoming a less than auspicious debut in a Kelsey Grammar movie to become a pretty good actor. I see a gritty cable show in Oswalt’s future, some 'Breaking Bad' knockoff where he’ll play a dumpy police informant who dies sniveling in an alley.


Oswalt tries hard in Silver Screen Fiend. You can tell he worked like crazy to make sense of the whirlwind years he spent as a movie fanatic. But his prose is so overwrought that he never sounds like anything more than a stand-up comic who has read a few film books. Describing Billy Wilder, Oswalt writes, “He was on a three-engine speedboat of triumph and he punched through the waves like a shark gone blood simple on surfer guts.” Reading that made me think I was in the hands of a bad Harlan Ellison impersonator. Sure enough Oswalt drops Ellison's name a few pages later, and even thanks him in the final acknowledgments.


Oswalt, who proved he’s a good actor in films like Big Fan and Young Adult, seems too eager to prove his facility with words. To make his movie and comedy addiction palpable, he pads almost every page with drug references. Perhaps Oswalt got this idea from a quote by Frank Capra that appears at the front of the book, a line that is more economical and powerful than any of Oswalt’s hyperventilating: “As with heroin,” Capra said, “the antidote to film is more film.”


There are a few gems here and there. Most show up when Oswalt isn’t trying so hard, like when he writes about a shot of Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole, “slumped at his desk, not a garlic pickle in sight.” Or when he says of The Bicycle Thief, "You're rooting for two people you probably see a dozen times a day, in a 7-Eleven, in line at the DMV." Still, it's the comedy world that Oswalt paints more vividly, such as when he sees Andrew “Dice” Clay at the Comedy Store, add-libbing like mad for a miniscule crowd on a Thursday night. I also enjoyed Oswalt’s story about directing a staged reading of Jerry Lewis’ legendary Nazi death camp script, The Day The Clown Cried. The journey of a stand-up comic can be fascinating, and that’s the story Oswald should’ve told.


In short, Oswalt has nothing of significance to say about movies. For instance, he didn’t like Hiroshima Mon Amour, but the most he can say about it is that it “pissed me off,” and “ended up confusing me.”


Many of us have gone through a movie phase. For me, it was at the ratty old Harvard Square Cinema in Cambridge, a drafty place where I could occasionally feel vermin running across the tops of my shoes. I remember sitting through a Marx Brothers triple feature one day, and returning the next day for a double of Taxi Driver and Mean Streets. I was unemployed, and filled my time with movies. It was probably the best summer of my life. I’d hoped Oswalt’s book would conjure up some memories, but it didn’t. He’s just another self-made film scholar wanting to blow you away with obscure facts and sophomoric wordplay. I did enjoy a chapter at the end where he makes a list of movies that would play in the afterlife, such as an Orson Welles version of Batman starring Gary Cooper. That was fun, and it made me think Oswalt might have something to say someday.

Then again, anyone who favorably compares Kevin James with Jackie Gleason really doesn’t know what he’s talking about.