My Back Is Killing Me! And Some Reviews…

First The National Film Board of Ivanlandia screened one film this month, and then it screened some more…

Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971; Burt Kennedy) A comedic Western remake of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest—which of course was the inspiration for Yojimbo, and thus A Fistful of Dollars—
but one where no one gets killed!

This is a “G”-rated companion piece to Blazing Saddles (because Support Your Local Gunfighter is almost as much a meta-Anti-Western as Mel Brooks’ classic—although admittedly not as funny or smart), gushing with very hokey humor and many faces that became extremely familiar on 1970s TV, including headliners James Garner and Suzanne Pleshette (RIP, foxy lady), as well as co-stars Harry Morgan and Ellen Corby (Grandma Walton), and heck, everybody else in this flick, too: it’s overloaded with “Hey! It’s that guy—whatzisface!”

It’s a very screwball comedy that feels as if some really smart people sat down in a room and made a list of the dumbest jokes possible, and then gave it an impossible pace and a very charming veneer—structurally, every character is frustrated routinely by someone or something, with the comedic situations piling up until it literally explodes.
If you study comedy, this flick is a good lesson in “call-backs,” so many asides and throwaway lines in this movie are references to something we’ve seen already.

Of course, I’m sure that part of my current excitement for Support Your Local Gunfighter stems from my love of it as a kid. Not to say that it’s a classic, or always funny, or bats 1.000, but Support Your Local Gunfighter moves so fast, that with a friendly six-pack, it will be quite enjoyable.

And I love the movie’s last line, delivered by goggle-eyed saddle-vet Jack Elam (who’d been in Sergio Leone’s indomitable Once Upon a Time in the West just two years earlier): “And me? I go on to star in Italian Westerns.”

[BTW, Support Your Local Gunfighter is not a real sequel to Garner/Kennedy’s 1969 Support Your Local Sheriff!, but of course is highly influenced by it. Support Your Local Sheriff! had been produced by star Garner to help kill his very successful image as a Western hero—from the TV show Maverick and other horse operas—and essentially recreate himself into the “Jim Garner” persona that would give him so much success in the 1970s with The Rockford Files and his series of ads for Polaroid, where he essentially played himself in both.]

A Serbian Film (2010; Srđan Spasojević) just tries too damn hard to shock.
Like I noted in my review of the similar—but better (because, if anything, it’s consistent)—The Life and Death of a Porno Gang (2009), the sexual madness portrayed is only truly disturbing if you’ve never seen a real hard-core porno flick before.
And I’m talking PORNO not erotica—I mean films by dudes like Rob Black, Greg Dark and John Stagliano. (Sorry if I’m out of date with my porn auteurs; I haven’t been following the jizz biz like I used to…)

Furthermore, a flick like A Serbian Film is really old news to anybody familiar with the Cinema of Transgression, a sick-fuck semi-collective neo-art-non-movement that festered and metastasized in NYC’s Lower East Side for a while in the early- to mid-1980s. At least, chief Transgression practitioners Richard Kern and Nick Zedd had the decency to never make a movie that was too long or too dull.

A Serbian Film is a flick made so that college sophomores can impress their roommates with how “hard” they are. I suppose the filmmakers are trying to “say” something—but it’s tiresome, at best.

The Mighty Peking Man (1977; Ho Meng-Hwa; produced by Runme Shaw) Honestly, Brian Trenchard-Smith’s commentary to the trailer of this film at Trailers From Hell is better than the film itself.
BTS is, for me, one of the best commentarians at Trailers From Hell—and while I can disagree with him on a film’s worth, I can’t fault any of the flicks that he has chosen to highlight—mainly because BTS is such a knowledgeable, sardonic and erudite host/narrator, always bringing historical as well as personal info into the equation. You can tell he’s having a blast, and it’s infectious.

The Mighty Peking Man, meanwhile, has all the right ingredients for perfection: monster, cities being smashed, old-school effects, blonde Tarzana chick, all of it!
But there’s just something off about this rip-off of 1976's King Kong remake, especially the pacing: even the scenes of model cities being crushed didn’t have that certain oomph that Japanese monster flicks have.
The movie is ripe for being ripped apart, and I had to watch a chunk of it at fast-forward to make it through to the end. Not recommended—stick with Mighty Peking Man’s Trailer From Hell.

The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968; Robert Aldrich) The last two minutes helps completely redeem this mess, hurling it into hyperspace and transforming it into a Rainer Werner Fassbinder film that essentially condemns the entire “consumer-entertainment complex:” you, me, the studios, the filmmakers, the actors, the audience, everybody!

That’s the best way I can describe it, honestly. It’s the best ending ever—not to say without it you wouldn’t have had a supercharged melodrama that never
realized how crazy it was in the first place—The Legend of Lylah Clare was already perfect camp because of its lack of self-awareness. But with its ending? Whew, then The Legend of Lylah Clare becomes something else.

So why did Robert Aldrich choose this movie as his follow-up to his mega-hit The Dirty Dozen?
Not that he shouldn’t have tackled “controversial” material (I think Aldrich’s subsequent The Killing of Sister George is fantastic; and I’m a big fan of his neo-agitprop Twilight’s Last Gleaming—and is that ever going to be available for home-viewing?), but why this unoriginal story (a mash-up of Vertigo, Sunset Boulevard and one of William Castle’s rip-offs of Aldrich’s own Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?)?
The actors all devour the scenery, but with the utmost grim seriousness—it’s like a John Waters script for a Divine film played straight. Or Douglas Sirk on lithium. Whatever it is, I blame the script—which never seems to have been polished, or even revised: there’s a very “first draft” feeling to the flick’s scenario and dialog.

That’s why I made the Fassbinder reference—because the ending is incredible: coming absolutely out of left field, mutating and metastasizing what’s come before into something utterly bizarre and new.

The Legend of Lylah Clare is a must-see for fans of The Cinema of Weirdness, but be warned—you have to slog through some extremely theatrical thesping first. (Sure, you could peek at the end—whatevs—but how can you then appreciate the weirdness it brings to the whole shebang? Whaddya do, eat yer dessert foist?)

Coppers

Let us consider

the “Cop” sub-genre of crime movies—

It’s a bit schizoid, yeah?

Often it’s either glorified right-wing propaganda or horror-movie-style quasi exploitation of CoPs Iz EviL tropes—

with nothing in between.

[That’s why I love Adam-12 on a philosophical level greater than Dragnet’s—because Adam-12 makes no judgments.

Officers Reed and Malloy are there to keep the peace—“to serve and protect”—and that’s it.

They leave the investigations—and judgments—to the detectives, guys like Joe Friday (I love how Thom Anderson notes in his impossible-to-see Los Angeles Plays Itself that Joe Friday is inadvertently extremely accurate in his portrayal of an LAPD dick—that the cop is judgmental, high-handed and arrogant, and considers citizens to be nuisances at best).

When the dicks arrive, Adam-12 burns rubber.

Reed and Malloy are beautiful automatons—shiny robotic guardians of, as James Ellroy aptly calls it, “White Man’s America.”

The personal life junk they yak about while cruising for trouble are just pre-programmed tapes inserted to fool the public: but the truth is that they’re the missing link between the chrome-droid-cops of THX-1138 (the original! Not the bastardized revision: UGH!) and The Terminator.

But like the Tin Man of Oz, Reed and Malloy have been given hearts: those prerecorded tapes of their so-called “civilian lives.”

So it’s with a quasi-humane nod of understanding as they hold that murdering and thieving dope fiend’s head down as they guide him into the back of the cruiser, or as they simply defuse an argument between two neighbors—even as they suit up to temporarily join the SWAT team.

But we really know what goes on at the end of their shift—the two cops step into their lockers to recharge their batteries.]

That being said, the cop novel was given an invigorating shot in the arm when a sergeant in the LAPD named Joseph Wambaugh started publishing some excellent books about the genuine life of a beat cop.

If you’re a fan of the “cop” genre—Adam-12, I love you!—then picking up Joseph Wambaugh’s excellent novels The New Centurions and The Choirboys is a must-do, especially if you like James Ellroy’s writing, as I do.

Ellroy has repeatedly given great props to Wambaugh as the man who finally made realistic and honest (warts and all) yet entertaining novels about the law enforcement personnel we so rely upon.

Unfortunately, I have yet to see The Onion Field (based on a non-fiction novel by Wambaugh; now available on Nflix Strumming, so I should watch it soon), but its reputation is quite good—but I hear that’s because Wambaugh was involved in the production.

When The New Centurions and The Choirboys were made into films, Wambaugh had no input and was reportedly annoyed by the results. Not that I can blame him.

The Choirboys (1977)

Directed by Robert Aldrich

Screenplay by Christopher Knopf

Based on the novel by Joseph Wambaugh

Produced by Mery Adelson and Lee Rich

Executive producers: Pietro and Mario Bregni and Mark Damon

Director of photography: Joseph Biroc

Music: Frank De Vol

Editors: Maury Winetrobe, William Martin and Irving Rosenblum

a Lorimar/Airone production, distributed by Universal Pictures

Running time: 119 minutes

Like the 1972 cop movie The New Centurions (review below), The Choirboys feels like about one hour's worth of (possibly better) material was cut out, so that what we’re seeing is incomplete at best.

As such, the tone of this flick is all over the place, and some subplots were completely worthless.

Scenes of intense, serious drama are followed--and ruined--by scenes of goofball, fratboy antics that are never funny or cute, and the flick's crude obsession with gay men and their “perversions” borders on the childish and asinine.

Much of the huge cast is wasted, but good performances by Burt Young as a kind vice cop, a very young Charles Haid, an even younger James Woods playing a nerd cop, Charles Durning overacting spectacularly, and Ivanlandia fave Tim McIntire (as the meanest cop around) kept me watching.

Director Robert Aldrich showed in The Longest Yard and The Dirty Dozen that he could balance hijinks and brutality very well, and The Choirboys is not a bad film per se, but a severely, shockingly uneven one.

With three film editors listed, I think that studio interference in post-production is to blame, but it certainly was Aldrich's choice to have the movie photographed in such a dull, flat way.

Now the question is who's to blame for the flick's atrocious music score?

I'm not surprised this movie isn't available on DVD, but as a fan of director Aldrich, I'm glad it was available as an instant-viewing movie (whoops—not anymore! N-flix has earmarked The Choirboys as “unavailable.”)

Aldrich has made a fascinating collection of films, and some are Ivanlandia faves, like Kiss Me Deadly, Attack!, The Killing of Sister George (perfect as a double feature with Santa Sangre for an evening of unhealthy relationships), and Emperor of the North.

In The Choirboys, I can often see sparks of something Aldrich’s going for, like when McIntire and his partner, an incredibly young Randy Quaid, get pummeled by an angry mob of blacks and Chicanos they’ve insulted and brutalized—and then McIntire is given an award for bravery, while better cops are hounded by incompetent pencil-pushers.

The New Centurions (1972)

Directed by Richard Fleischer

Screenplay by Stirling Silliphant

From the novel by Joseph Wambaugh

Director of photography: Ralph Woolsey

Film editor: Robert C. Jones

Music by Quincy Jones

Produced by Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff

Released by Columbia Pictures

Running time: 103 minutes

Finally released to DVD in 2008, this adaptation of Joseph Wambaugh’s great novel is worth a viewing by all fans of “1970s Urban Grit,” or TV police procedurals:

The New Centurions essentially created the template they all now follow.

That said, this film is episodic, so the scenes can often vary in quality, but the knockout scenes (like George C. Scott’s monolog in his last scene, or the scene with the prostitutes in the police truck) really give you the feeling of being a fly on the wall during something real.

These moments are often much better than the movie as a whole, and make the flick almost essential viewing.

But there’s some rank garbage and misguided filmmaking you have to wade through to get it: The film begins well enough by sharing the focus between a trio of rookie cops: Stacy Keach, Scott Wilson and Erik Estrada.

Unfortunately, the movie concentrates on Keach, whose plotline feels the most shopworn and simplistic:

he loves the force more than anything, his wife leaves him, he becomes a drunk, and so on—and the scenes of Keach working for the vice squad are played for crass laughs and are an insult to the intelligence.

Wilson and Estrada start off having compelling stories, respectively: one has shot an innocent man, and the other is an ex-gangbanger.

But these plots are dropped unceremoniously, leaving the viewer dissatisfied and a little puzzled. Was there studio interference or re-editing of The New Centurions? A trimming down to fit a more “manageable” length? This film sure feels like it.

Apropos of nothing, other than it’s a sci-fi-cop-horror hybrid—but I really like Predator 2:

The flick entertains me, and my suspension of disbelief accepts the plot and situations. It’s hardly as ridiculous as a Lethal Weapon flick—and Predator 2 can at least say its craziness stems from being in “the future” (of 1997—hah!) and having invisible aliens running around.

And Bill Paxton gets his spine torn out: gnarly!