The Screengrab : jack palance

Unwatchable #64: “Angels’ Brigade”

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen our friends from Mystery Science Theater 3000. Longtime readers of Unwatchable will recall that our trek through the lower reaches of the IMDb Bottom 100 list was littered with MST3K fodder, including obscurities (like Devil Fish and Track of the Moonbeast) that would never have found their way onto the list without an assist from the ‘bots. It’s time to add another entry to that list: the 1979 drive-in drivel Angels’ Brigade (also known as Angels Revenge). As a reminder, my policy in these cases is to find a pristine, unsnarked-upon copy of the movie in question whenever possible. In this case it was not possible, but rest assured I have not consciously stolen any hilarious observations.

Angels’ Brigade was truly a pivotal film in the distinguished career of director Greydon Clark. Before making this quintessential ’70s jiggle-fest, his career had languished in the exploitation ghetto of Black Shampoo, Satan’s Cheerleaders and Hi-Riders. Afterwards, he rocketed to the A-list heights of 1983’s Joysticks (starring Joe Don Baker), 1983’s Wacko (starring Joe Don Baker and George Kennedy), and 1985’s Final Justice (starring Joe Don Baker and Bill “squeal like a pig” McKinney), before reaching the pinnacle of The Forbidden Dance (sadly Joe Don Baker-free). Can we legitimately credit Angels’ Brigade with this change of fortune? I say we can.

The movie begins in mid-action sequence, with seven boobsy women in tight-fitting white jumpsuits engaged in some sort of terrorist activity. This goes on for nearly fifteen minutes before the opening credits roll and inform us that the stars of the movie we’re watching are Peter Lawford, Alan Hale, Pat Buttram, Jim Backus, and Jack Palance. This comes as quite as surprise, but sure enough, all of those luminaries eventually show up in Angels’ Brigade, as does Arthur Godfrey. I have to believe some sort of tax shelter or money laundering scheme was in play.

Eventually flashbacks reveal in painstaking and painful detail the process through which lounge singer Michelle Wilson assembles a Fox Force Five-esque team of foxy ladies to take on a drug cartel she blames for her brother’s woes. Reasonable people can disagree as to the film’s moment of greatness. Some would single out the beach scene in which the gals strip down to their bikinis and seduce a couple of yahoos responsible for bringing a drug shipment ashore, or perhaps the slow-moving rooftop chase in which Palance barely breaks a sweat in his leisure suit. I would point to the white supremacist group led by Jim Backus in a Sgt. Pepper outfit. (No one actually says they’re white supremacists, but I could tell by all the little Hitler mustaches.)

If you somehow manage to get an hour into Angels’ Brigade without realizing it’s a Charlie’s Angels knockoff, the score actually rips off the Charlie’s Angels theme during the climactic action sequence. The ending appears to promise a sequel, but fortunately, promises were made to be broken.

Previously on Unwatchable:
65. Meet the Browns
66. Jail Bait
67. Nine Lives
68. Kazaam
69. The Perfect Holiday (pending)

Yesterday's Hits: City Slickers (1991, Ron Underwood)

Paul Clark — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made City Slickers a hit?: The Western was one of classical Hollywood’s most popular genres. But while the greatest Westerns have endured in the American consciousness to this day, the popularity of Western films went downhill during the 1960s. By the 1980s, the number of Westerns made by Hollywood had dwindled to a handful of titles per year, and only a few of these (Young Guns, Dances With Wolves) made any money. At a time when people sat through long commutes to work and sweated the economic recession, it was hard for most audiences to relate to the old-fashioned cowboy mythos.

Yet even then, Westerns exerted a pull on our imaginations. The inspiration behind City Slickers was the way it combined the pleasures of an old-fashioned cattle-drive Western with characters with whom the audience could identify. The movie’s heroes weren’t larger than life, but rather a trio of middle-aged everyguys trying to escape the doldrums of modern life- bad marriages, dead-end jobs, fears of growing old- by embracing (after a fashion) the cowboy lifestyle, if only for two weeks. Add to this the presence of popular comic Billy Crystal, who has recently shown his leading-man chops with 1989’s When Harry Met Sally, and the combination of comedy and cowboys proved irresistible to audiences. City Slickers became one of 1991’s biggest hits, raking in nearly $125 million at the domestic box office.

What happened?: Sometimes, there’s no easily-pinpointed factor to explain a movie’s fall from its original level of popularity. While some blockbusters continue to factor prominently in popular culture and others fall from grace, most just sort of fade into the background. Of course, the misbegotten 1994 sequel City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly’s Gold didn’t help matters. But mostly, City Slickers’ lack of enduring pop culture influence can be chalked up to the fact that it appealed primarily to middle-aged moviegoers, rarely the sort of audiences that fanatically obsess over a movie until it enters the popular lexicon.

Does City Slickers still work?: It mostly does, although it’s not without its drawbacks. For a movie that was sold primarily on its famously funny leading man, the comedic scenes are among the movie’s least effective. Part of the problem is Crystal, whose trademark kvetching (and oft-repeated refrain of “hel-loooooooooo???”) quickly becomes irritating. Not helping matters is director Ron Underwood’s misguided decision to underscore all of the big slapstick moments with jaunty, cutesy music by Marc Shaiman. These scenes lean too heavily on the wacky factor, which drains away whatever wit was originally there.

But while it’s not nearly as funny as it thinks it is, City Slickers is a sturdy and self-aware twist on the Western genre. Despite their fast-paced modern lives, lifelong friends Mitch (Crystal), Phil (Daniel Stern) and Ed (Bruno Kirby) were raised on Westerns, and this colors their experiences on the trail. They show both fear and respect for aging trail boss Curly (Oscar-winner Jack Palance), who Mitch proclaims “the toughest guy I’ve ever seen,” but the two of them also bond during their time together on the trail. The characters explicitly reference Red River, The Magnificent Seven, Rawhide, Bonanza, and other favorites, but they do so in a way that presents them as shared pieces of their past instead of simply clever allusions. And the movie becomes surprisingly exciting when the unlikely cowpokes have to bring the herd in by themselves, and it’s a satisfying scene when they actually pull it off.

However, City Slickers is at its best when dealing with the friendship between its heroes. Screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel were Hollywood’s go-to guys in the late eighties and early nineties for mainstream fare about middle-aged everyguys, and this movie demonstrates why. Likewise, Crystal, Stern and Kirby have an easy and infectious bonhomie that makes them convincing as three men who’ve remained friends through both good and bad. The late Kirby is especially good as the most pragmatic of the three, who worked his way up from a difficult childhood to create a comfortable life, but has never lost his taste for adventure. And verbal shtick aside, Crystal is affecting as the ill-at-ease salaryman Mitch, who ventures West with his lifelong friends with the goal of “finding his smile.” In the end, he does, and so did I.

The Top 20 Movies About Movies (Part Deux)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

DAY FOR NIGHT (1973)

Though cinema originated in America and nearly every film on this list depicts Americans making American movies, celluloid fever is by no means limited to the United States. Yet even in foreign lands, our influence nevertheless pervades the art form: the original French title of François Truffaut’s shaggy dog charmer is La Nuit américaine, a phrase referring to the filmmaking process known here as day-for-night, which literally translates as “American night.” While the main plot of Truffaut’s love letter to his chosen profession involves the offscreen dramas of several above-the-line divas starring in Day For Night’s film within a film, Je Vous Présente Paméla (Meet Pamela), it’s the below-the-line grips, prop men and other crewmembers who are the workaday heart of this naturalistic depiction of the hard work and small victories of any and every film production, an exhilarating, exasperating process where success or failure rests not in the director’s vision or the ultimate quality of the end result, but rather on a zillion unpredictable details like a small cat deciding whether or not to drink milk from a saucer while a dozen otherwise sane adults stand around, clutching heavy equipment, praying to get the shot they need before they lose the light.

HEARTS OF DARKNESS: A FILMMAKER'S APOCALYPSE (1991)

This high-water mark of the making-of genre started out with Francis Coppola trying to give his wife, Eleanor, something to do during what turned out to be the years spent working on Apocalypse Now. Eleanor's published journal about the experience, Notes, was published the same year that Apocalypse Now was released, but the sensitive footage she shot would remain unseen until filmmakers George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr took on the task of piecing it together and adding new interviews, narration (by Eleanor Coppola) and such choice outtakes as the infamous "French Plantation sequence", Marlon Brando improvising his way to oblivion, and a broken, drunken Martin Sheen picking a fight with his own reflection and losing. A fascinating story well told, and a better amplification of the original movie than Apocalypse Now Redux.

THE PLAYER (1992)

Robert Altman was never one to shy away from biting the hand that fed him, and this adaptation of Michael Tolkin's scathing Hollywood novel is a prime example. Altman's meta methods reveal themselves right off the bat with a tour-de-force 8-minute tracking shot that gets you thinking about the opening of Touch of Evil just as two onscreen characters start discussing the opening of Touch of Evil. The scores of celebrities appearing as themselves lend an unprecedented verisimilitude to the proceedings, anticipating a huge wave of inside show-biz entertainment to follow, from The Larry Sanders Show to Entourage. In Altman's hands, the satire is never cartoonish, even when a studio exec (Tim Robbins) is realizing every Hollywood suit's fantasy by killing a screenwriter (Vincent D'Onofrio) with his bare hands. Indeed, at times it's barely satire – as in the serious issue film about capital punishment that's transformed by committee into a Bruce Willis action movie with a happy ending. (Three years later, the Demi Moore version of The Scarlet Letter would demonstrate just how far-fetched that plot twist wasn't.) The fact that The Player was the director's biggest hit in decades, making him (at least briefly) a player again is perhaps the most Altmanesque touch of all.

CONTEMPT (1963)

Rarely has a movie so lived up to its title than Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt. Godard holds nearly everyone and everything involved with the movie in contempt: its producers, its stars, its characters, its audience, and even itself. He doesn't even spare himself from the bile, using the movie's lead character, Michel Piccoli, as a stand-in representing his own willingness to sacrifice his artistic principles for a shot at a fat paycheck. The movie's plot is the basest and best of romans a clef, so directly mirroring the real-life action behind the scenes that seeing it is practically living it: a crass, commercially-minded American film director (played with loathsome glee by Jack Palance, and meant to be a transparent duplicate of Contempt's actual producer, Joseph Levine) hires an idealistic playwright who takes a scriptwriting job for the paycheck and the three of them – joined by the movie's director and the writer's girlfriend – begin to deeply hate each other throughout the entire course of the film. As if daring the audience not to like the movie, Godard frustrates our expectations at every turn: a violent confrontation fizzles out instead of exploding, an erotic meditation is coldly robbed of its sexuality, and what should be a cathartic emotional confrontation turns into an enervating argument. Incredibly controlled, amazingly well-made, provocative beyond understanding, and one of the most deeply subversive mainstream films ever made, Contempt is brilliant in its portrayal of how movies can be simultaneously bigger and smaller than life.

Click Here for Part One, Part Three, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

DVD Digest for June 3, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:00:00 GMT

With Father’s Day coming in less than two weeks, the studios begin to unveil their snazzy new editions of what TNT used to call “movies for guys who like movies.” We’ve got all the manly movies you need to keep dad happy while mom and her friends are out seeing the Sex and the City movie (seriously, how did we not see that coming?).

Before Clint Eastwood became known as an Academy Award-winning filmmaker (or a guy who co-starred with an orangutan) he was first and foremost a grimacing badass. And while some- including yours truly- have a soft spot for his Man With No Name trilogy- the most enduring character from this period would also certainly be “Dirty” Harry Callahan. This week, Warner unveils new DVD and Blu-Ray editions of all five of Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films, featuring all of the features from previous DVD editions plus a number of new ones. Most notably, Warner Brothers’ box set (the films are also sold separately) includes a new feature-length documentary, Clint Eastwood: Out of the Shadows. In addition, the memorabilia included in the box set includes a 40-page hardcover book and a map of San Francisco detailing Harry’s hunt for Scorpio.

But if dad’s looking for wartime heroism (Blu-Ray only), MGM and Fox both have something that’ll fit the bill. MGM will unveil Blu-Ray editions of A Bridge Too Far and Battle of Britain this week, although these new discs will contain no special features. So if it’s tricked out Blu-Rays (and better movies) you want, go with Fox’s war DVDs. The studio will be releasing three of its classics- Patton, The Longest Day and The Sand Pebbles- exclusively on Blu-Ray, packed with special features and all the bells and whistles he could ever hope for.

But that’s not all, folks. If dad wants some laughs with his testosterone, buy him the new City Slickers: Collector’s Edition (MGM), which gives him some Western action, male bonding humor courtesy of Crystal, Kirby and Stern, and of course Jack Palance, who even in death can still crap bigger than you. Other, more recent dudely comedies releasing this week include Semi-Pro (New Line, also Blu-Ray), Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show (Lionsgate), and for the father whose enjoyment of movies far outweighs his taste, Meet the Spartans (Fox, also Blu-Ray). And what’s a list of guy movies with James Bond? Sony will release a new three-disc edition of Casino Royale, Bond’s best big-screen adventure since the sixties (there, I said it).

Other new releases this week include: Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic Control (Weinstein Company); the Jessica Alba remake of The Eye (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Michael Caine and Demi Moore in Flawless (Magnolia); the long-delayed The Onion Movie (Fox); and Asia Argento just the way we like her (i.e. mostly naked and toting a gun) in Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate (Magnolia). The week’s most notable non-guy-movie old-school release is Jean-Jacques Beineix’s seminal Cinema du look classic Diva (Lionsgate). Finally, releasing on Blu-Ray only: Cloverfield (Paramount), Signs (Buena Vista), The Recruit (Buena Vista), There Will Be Blood (Paramount).

Forgotten Films: "Che!" (1969)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

By any measure, Ernesto "Che" Guevara is having as good a year in the movies as any failed revolutionary who's been dead for more than forty years has a right to expect. The word from Cannes about Steven Soderbergh's two-part film starring Benecio del Toro has been mostly upbeat, and the documentary Chevolution, about his lingering market force as a brand image, has been doing well on the festival circuit. He's also had the honor of having his romantic youth depicted onscreen in The Motorcycle Diaries. (There's also a 2005 biopic called Che, starring Eduardo Noriego of The Devil's Backbone in the title role, that's just been shuttled out on DVD to take advantage of whatever publicity the Soderbergh film generates.) But the first attempt by Hollywood to immortalize Che on film came out in 1969, when his corpse was barely cold and his face still adorned many a campus wall and Godard picture. That was Che!--note the exclamation point in the title, a sure sign of a film that intends to enthrall the viewer's or inflame his passions, as in That's Entertainment!, Tora! Tora! Tora!, and Not with My Wife, You Don't! Seen today, which is very hard to do, the movie is best experienced as a dizzying record of just how confused Hollywood was in the year of our Lord Easy Rider, as it tried to give the kids what they wanted to see even as studio heads were putting in electrified moats around their pleasure domes to keep the kids from the Spahn Ranch the hell out. The film, which stars Omar Sharif, then the movies' reigning old-style matinee-idol heartthrob, was directed by Richard Fleischer, in between his chores on two other historical dramas, The Boston Strangler and, yes, Tora! Tora! Tora!.

It begins in the Cuban bush, where Che, pounding along with Fidel Castro's guerrilla army, is disgruntled because he wants to prove himself a fighter. But because of that damned medical degree of his, Fidel keeps him on trench foot duty instead of unleashing him as the righteous terminator he knows he could be. It must be especially hard for him to take, because Fidel is played by Jack Palance, decked out in a beard and a false nose that looks as if it ought to come off with his eyeglasses. Eventually, Fidel recognizes his friend's physical courage and killer instincts, or maybe he's just grateful to him for not falling down laughing when Fidel makes radio speeches into a microphone, striding around and frantically waving his arms as if he were trying to direct an air strike on the film set to put him out of his misery, even though he has no audience that can see him except for Che and the circling birds. The high point of the movie comes when Che and Fidel have cross words after Che thinks the big boy caved during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Taking to his bed with a bottle, Fidel howls after Che that he knows that he never really cared about the revolution, in tones not especially dissimilar to those Joan Crawford would have used to tell her departing lover that she knows now that he never really wanted her, he was just using her to get to her daughter.

The last section of the movie, dealing with the Bolivian misadventure that ended Guevara's life, includes split-screen sequences that force connections between Che's activities and images of worldwide political unrest, as well as a number of scenes that would only be perfected two years later when Woody Allen reworked and improved on them in Bananas. Like a great many things conceived in the tumultuous year of 1968, such as the Democratic National Convention, the Nixon administration, and my parents' marriage, Che! wound up pleasing nobody. Conservatives were appalled that the studio was trying to make money by celebrating a Communist thug, radicals were angry that the studio was trying to make money by exploiting their martyred hero, and everyone in between thought that Omar Sharif looked a lot cuter without the beret. Recently, though, Sharif added a footnote to the movie's ignominious history when he issued a press statement saying that of all the roles he had played, it was the one that he most deeply regretted, and declaring that the CIA "was behind this film. I only knew later how they manipulated the truth." To the best of our knowledge, the CIA has issued no comment on Sharif's charges, maybe because they're working their way through their list of things they have to apologize for in chronological order and haven't gotten to 1969 yet. But if Benecio del Toro ever gets an offer to don some long plastic whiskers and star in the new musical Osama!, alongside Zac Efron as Ayman al-Zawahiri, you'll know that your tax dollars are still being put to good use.

The Rep Report (March 12-19)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The Museum of Modern Art is honoring the centennial of Rex Harrison. Tall, crisp, and capable of being snide and downright nasty in a way that only enhanced his seductiveness, nobody did sly like sexy Rexy. The programming, which mixes camp giggles such as Cleopatra and King Richard and the Crusaders with prestige bloat-a-thons such as The Agony and the Ecstasy and My Fair Lady, may be too true a picture of how much of this time on movie soundstages was not ideally spent, but the important thing is that it does include his most wonderful film performance in his greatest movie, the beyond-suave superstar conductor whose jealous suspicions towards his young wife (Linda Darnell) turn him into a whirling dervish in Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours.

Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963), the director's heh-heh "commercial" movie, returns to the Film Forum for a two-week run, from March 14-27. Produced by Carlo Ponti and the uncredited Joseph E. Levine, with a cast led by Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance (as an overbearing movie producer), and Fritz Lang as his own bad self, working from the base of a best-selling Alberto Moravia novel and with an actual budget, Godard contrived to turn out one of the strangest and orneriest movies of his not exactly self-effacing career. Long considered a weird misfire, the movie inspired a number of Godard-watchers and other movie lovers to reconsider its qualities after it was revived at the Forum back in 1997; maybe this is going to become some kind of once-a-decade revival rituals. Terrence Rafferty recently used this latest engagement to grapple with the picture in the pages of The New York Times.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center's "Infernal Machines: The Films of Kim Ki-Young" (March 12 – 18) tips its hat to a maverick Korean filmmaker whose work made him a inspiration to many of the newer directors who have been behind the current Korean New Wave. Richard Pena describes him as an "instinctual artist" who "always seems ready to abandon correct or tasteful form for a powerful visual or aural effect. The rawness of the emotions on screen is more than matched by the directness of his cinematic style." Kim's audacity as a filmmaker may have been too much for the Korean film industry, which basically drove him out of the business by the mid-1980s. He was rediscovered and even returned to filmmaking in the mid-1990s but died in 1998.

Reviving Richard Fleischer: "Violent Saturday" and "Mandingo"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The director Richard Fleischer, who died a couple of years ago at the age of 89, had a long career, an immaculate bloodline (as the son and nephew of Max and Dave Fleischer, the animators behind the great short films starring Betty Boop, Superman, and Popeye), and no critical reputation to speak of. Fleischer's vast filmography is all over the map in terms of subject matter and style, and his name is attached to a number of big commercial disasters (Dr. Dolittle, Tora! Tora! Tora!) and minor embarassments (Che!, an attempt by 20th-Century Fox to cash in on '60s revolutionary youth, starring Omar Sharif in the title role and Jack Palance as Fidel Castro; The Jazz Singer, starring Neil Diamond, with Laurence Olivier as his chagrinned poppa; Red Sonja with Brigitte Nielsen) that are unified mainly by their lack of personality. But he's begun to attract defenders, and Dave Kehr, for one, thinks it's surprising that he "still has not been given a major New York retrospective." As it happens, three of Fleisher's movies are enjoying return engagements on the New York revival circuit in the days and weeks to come. Violent Saturday (1955), which plays for a week at Film Forum starting February 29, is one of those odd film noirs where the thugs from the city hit the highway and track their mud all over the clean, open fields of the American heartland. Written by Sidney Boehm, who also did the script for The Big Heat, it serves up Lee Marvin as the nastiest of a trio of bank robbers who impose their bad morals and worse manners on a quiet little town where they may fit in a little than the locals want to admit. It was made the same year as James Sturges' better-known rural thriller Bad Day at Black Rock, where Marvin and Ernest Borgnine both served as muscle for the local forces of darkness. Borgnine is in this one, too, but cast against type as an Amish farmer who has understandable cause to worry that his religious proscription against violence may not be strong enough to survive its encounter with Lee Marvin. The film, which enjoyed a brief period of revival and acclaim in the mid-80s when it was discovered by critics and used as a club against Peter Weir's tonier Witness, is a reminder of how well Fleischer's no-frills filmmaking technique worked when applied to simple but gimmicky thriller material, as in the 1952 The Narrow Margin and Armored Car Robbery, both testaments to the grip of nuts-and-bolts noir and the nut-cracking sturdiness of Charles McGraw's jawline.

The "Film Comments Selects" series at Walter Reade Theater is showing Fleischer's 1971 10 Rillington Place on February 21 and 24, thus giving audiences the chance to see the director of Gandhi, Richard Attenborough, sweat up the screen as a serial killer who strangled eight women and left it to an innocent fellow played by John Hurt to be hanged in his place. But the real once-in-a-lifetime opportunity here may be the chance to see the 1975 Mandingo (screening on February 23) on a big screen, assuming that no one tears it down before the closing credits roll. This anti-Gone with the Wind, set on a Southern slave-breeding plantation presided over by James Mason, was made in 1975 from a script by Norman Wexler, the ad executive turned wild man screenwriter who wrote Joe and Serpico. (Wexler, who reportedly served as a model for Andy Kaufman's loathsome lounge-singer character Tony Clifton, was notorious for such stunts as blowing off a man trying to make conversation with him on a commercial airplane flight by telling him that he was on his way to assassinate President Nixon. Wexler's seatmate notified a flight attendant, who in turn notified the FBI, and when the plane landed, Wexler wound up having to talk to a lot of people he would rather have not talked to.)

Kehr takes the position that "Mandingo is Fleischer’s last great crime film, in which the role of the faceless killer is played by an entire social system." This is a very interesting take on the picture, though some will feel that it may amount to putting a little too much thought into a movie that climaxes with Perry King reacting to the news that his wife (Susan George) has been having an affair with his prize slave, played by the heavyweight champ Ken Norton--King finds out the hard way, after his wife has given birth--by sticking Norton into a boiling cauldron and jabbing him with a pitchfork. But however seriously you end up taking Mandingo, it's definitely one of a kind, and very entertaining, if you can handle the fact that Eric Cartman would question its political correctness. (I remember that it was briefly on rotation on HBO around the time that my high school buddies first got cable, and for a long time, they were much taken with King's line, "I fancied her, so I bought her! She's gonna be my bed wench!" I can promise you, however, that use of this line in the real world got them no action whatsoever.) Devotees of hambone turns will want to see it just for the great James Mason drawling his lines, sitting with his bare feet on a black kid's tummy (it's supposed to be good for the arthritis), and generally giving the kind of performance that gives one visions of the star constantly asking the director, "Now, that last take, you're just going to show it for laughs at the wrap party and then burn the negative, right?" There was actually a sort of sequel to Mandingo called Drum, and it had a script that Wexler had worked on and a cast headed by Warren Oates, Pam Grier, and Yaphet Kotto, who you might think would raise the stakes a bit from Perry King, Susan George, and Ken Norton, but it had none of the, um, magic of the original, and is beloved by no one. Fleischer didn't direct it. So maybe he's some kind of auteur after all.

Le Bon Temps Roule!

Phil Nugent — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It's Fat Tuesday, which marks the noisy, beer-stained conclusion to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Sadly, most of you who visit this site are trapped at your jobs or classrooms right now, and while we could address ourselves exclusively to those now celebrating in the Pelican State, most of them are probably too drunk to read. We'll just settle for mentally sending them some love rays and hope those in the French Quarter remember that as soon as the clock turns to twelve tonight, those nice policemen on horseback whose job it is to clear the streets will start unsheathing their billy clubs. For the rest of you, we'll just remind you that there have been a number of motion pictures that tried to tap into the mysterious beauty and happy vibe of the city that care forgot. Most of these movies stank like week-old gumbo, but here's a few that might make for an enjoyable carnival day rental:

PANIC IN THE STREETS (1950)

This thriller starts out on the New Orleans docks, where a tough named Blackie (played by a hulking, gaunt-featured newcomer to movies billed as "Walter Jack Palance") murders a guy who's fresh off the boat who looks as if he's only got about five minutes to live anyway. When the coroner confirms that the dead man was suffering from pneumonic plague, Richard Widmark (as a U.S. Public Health officer) and a cop played by Paul Douglas have to track down Palance, his whimpering sidekick Zero Mostel, and anyone else who may have been in contact with him, while keeping things quiet so as to prevent a panic. The director, Elia Kazan, who a year later would make one of the great movies set in New Orleans when he transferred Tennesee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire to film, shot this movie in actual New Orleans locations, which means that, in addition to its virtues as a crackerjack entertainment — which are considerable — it also has the fascination of serving as a semi-documentary record of the city as it was more than half a century ago. Fun fact: shortly after directing Mostel in this picture, Kazan testified against him in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, thus helping to get the actor blacklisted.

HARD TIMES (1975)

This period piece, set during the Depression, was the first film directed by its screenwriter, Walter Hill. It's a vehicle for Charles Bronson, in what is almost certainly the best movie and probably the best performance of his '70s period as a top-billed international star; he plays a soft-spoken drifter who falls in with a gambler (James Coburn) and begins competing in bare-knuckle fistfights that are thrown together to give the locals something to bet on. You get a sense of what the leisurely pace of life does to you in New Orleans from this film: for an action movie, it has a unusually slow tempo, as if Hill were a little drunk on the atmosphere and needed to take care to remember to keep putting his next foot in front of the other in the right order. But it's so flavorful and lovingly crafted that it's never boring. Strother Martin, who wears a white suit and a moustache that make him look more than ever like Tennessee Williams's Mini-Me, plays Coburn's sidekick, who tends Bronson's wounds; he explains his unlicensed medical status by saying that "in the fourth year of my studies, a small black cloud appeared on the campus. I departed under it." (The young Becky Allen, a mainstay of New Orleans theater for many years, has a small, good appearance as his dinner date.)

Eighteen years later, another talented action director, John Woo, would come to New Orleans to shoot his first American film, Hard Target, starring Jean-Claude Damme (as "Chance Boudreaux"), who stumbles across an operation, led by Lance Henriksen, to organize The Most Dangerous Game-style hunts of displaced homeless men on the streets of the city. At one point, Henriksen tells someone that "it's no accident we're in New Orleans... There's always some unhappy corner of the globe where we can ply our trade." So I guess the filmmakers deserve some kind of credit for not sucking up to the local Tourist Board. Oddly enough, this was not the first movie that tried to account for Van Damme's Belgian accent by insisting that his character was supposed to be a Cajun.

THE BIG EASY (1986)

This fast-talking crime movie is one that New Orleans itself has always had a love-hate relationship with. It's a cartoon of the city's image, complete with crooked cops, weird accents (the hero, a detective played by Dennis Quaid, is meant to be Cajun-Irish), and such lines as, "Who do I look like, the Grand Marshall of the Mardi Gras?" But on its own endearingly unambitious terms, it's often a fun cartoon, with a memorable little turn-on of a bedroom scene between Quaid and Ellen Barkin (who, when Quaid sticks his hand up her skirt, unrolls her smile as if she'd been wondering all her life what was in there), and funny turns by Lisa Jane Persky, Grace Zabriskie, and local icon John Goodman. There's even a brief appearance (as an inexplicably surly magnet salesman) by Peter Gabb, who starred in a Tulane University production of John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves in which this writer played a nun, a performance hailed by one critic as having been "worth trying, I guess." This movie is especially worth seeing for Charles Ludlam's appearance as Quaid's lawyer, identified at one point as "da man dat got da governor acquitted." Ludlam, the founder of New York's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, was a god in his own specialized field of high-camp, Pop Art theatrical farce, but he didn't leave behind much on film, and by the time The Big Easy opened, he had died of AIDS. Though Ludlam was a Yankee, his joyously broad, eye-rolling cameo specifically captures the kind of fun that blossoms in New Orleans like few things I've ever seen.

TUNE IN TOMORROW... (1990)

This one's really freaky, and definitely a matter of taste. Fans of hardcore silliness will find a lot in it to like. Even its bloodlines are surreal: the screenplay, by the British novelist William Boyd (An Ice Cream War; A Good Man in Africa), is based on Mario Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which was set in Lima, Peru in the 1950s, but with the action shifted to New Orleans in the same period. It was directed by Jon Amiel, a British TV and movie director who was then fairly hot after coming off the Dennis Potter-scripted miniseries The Singing Detective, and who was on his way, after this film came out, to never being fairly hot again. It stars Peter Falk as "Pedro Carmichael", a radio soap-opera writer who takes a creatorly interest in the forbidden romance developing between hot-blooded man-child Keanu Reeves and the ripe, womanly Barbara Hershey. The movie, which really takes off in the sections where Pedro's radio show fantasies are acted out by a group of actors that includes Peter Gallagher, Elizabeth McGovern, Dan Hedaya (in an eyepatch), Hope Lange, Buck Henry, and local embarrassment John Larroquette, also features a terrific original score by Wynton Marsalis, who can be seen performing with his band in a nightclub sequence. If you ever get the chance, give it a shot: it sure won't remind you of much else that you've seen before.