The Screengrab : joe don baker

That Guy! Joe Don Baker

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

It's possible that Joe Don Baker's name is as well known as his face, which sort of goes against the grain of those featured in the "That Guy!" franchise. However, one reason the name is well-known is that, in the last several years, it's picked up some currency as a punch line. Any name that starts out "Joe Don" and keeps going for another couple of syllables is apt to strike some people as that of a thuggish redneck hick, and that's how Baker was caricatured by the wisecracking robots of Mystery Science Theater 3000 when they ran a couple of his tackier starring vehicles in the 1990s. Is it out of deference to the fine tastes and sensibilities of the robot critical community that Joe Don has yet to appear on Inside the Actors Studio? This is one thing that sets him apart from, say, Billy Joel and Ricky Gervais. Another is that Joe Don actually attended the Actors Studio.

There is always cause to be wary whenever a white male claims to have suffered from discrimination based on his physical appearance. Usually there is cause to be openly derisive. Still, back in the 1980s, Joe Don Baker told an interviewer that it was very hard for him to get Hollywood to see him as anything other than a violent cracker with a pea-sized brain, and he told the interviewer this in response to a question about why he had taken to spending so much of his time working in England. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. In the '60s, Baker appeared in movies and on TV, in Westerns (Guns of the Magnificent Seven, Wild Rovers) and working-guy parts (Adam at 6 A.M.). He got a boost from the 1971 TV film Mongo's Back in Town, which served notice that he could bring a compelling degree of sensitivity to a tough-guy part, and also served notice that he might have to spend a certain amount of his career playing guys with names like "Mongo." He got a bigger boost the next year, playing Steve McQueen's brother in Sam Peckinpah's Junior Bonner, although he would later assure interviewers that he and Peckinpah were not the best thing that had ever happpened in each other's lives.

The success of his next film, Walking Tall, made him a star of a specialized, B-movie sort, and led to him taking pre-emptive measures against all many of unsavory types in a string of films, including Phil Karlson's Framed and the notorious Mitchell. His fling as a leading man burned out with the TV film To Kill a Cop and the short-lived TV series spun off from it, Eischied. After that, he settled into the familiar That Guy! routine of long patches of honest labor with the occasional stretch of lying in clover. He played a fictionalized Jimmy Hoffa in the TV film Power (1980), threatened Chevy Chase in Fletch, jousted with James Bond in License to Kill, got throttled by De Niro while attempting to enjoy a midnight snack in Cape Fear, had a high old time playing Joseph McCarthy to James Woods's Roy Cohn in Citizen Kane, stood viciously accused of being Winona Ryder's father in Reality Bites, did the dirty work for the man in Panther, took seeing his son get killed by evil white gorillas really well in Congo, kissed and made up with James Bond in Goldeneye and Tomorrow Never Dies, and showed, in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!, that he could make fun of his trailer-park image as well as any robot. For TV, he played Governor "Kissin' Jim" Folsom in the biopic George Wallace and buckskinned superlawyer Gerry Spence in The Siege of Ruby Ridge.

Where to see Joe Don Baker at his best:

WALKING TALL & CHARLEY VARRICK (1973)

Like it or not, the role of Buford Pusser, scary Tennessee lawman extraordinaire, will always be the first thing that leaps to most people's minds when Baker's name comes up. There are reasons enough to like that fine: Baker gives a strong star performance that endows the club-swinging sheriff considerable dignity. Like Dirty Harry, Pusser has to be portrayed as self-righteous, but Baker also gives him a quality that would be unthinkable in an Eastwood character: a longing for a peaceful life, a desire to just settle down and raise his family and tend to his own back yard, which the villains, by the sheer spreading force of their wickedness, have made an untenable option. (The movie opens with Buford bringing his wife and kids back to their country home, presumably to escape the corruption of the cities. If someone doesn't step up, the small-town corruption may make the country culture just as dangerous and unlivable.) Walking Tall is a primitive, pro-head-cracking movie, but Baker gives it its human dimension: he's the hero partly because he suffers for his actions, never because he happens to be the one who looks coolest when blowing people's heads off.

Even in the wake of the film's success, there were signs that Baker might not be looking to retire from acting and get into the more profitable business of Charles Bronson imitations. One was that he followed up Walking Tall with the supporting role of the Mafis enforcer Molly in Don Siegel's The title character is played by Walter Matthau; he's a bank robber who has chosen his bank recklessly and wound up with several hundred thousand dollars that Molly's employers very much want back. Baker swaggers through the role with a vast grin on his face, as if he never quite got over the kick of seeing his character's name in the script. The film is one of those twist-upon-twist capers in which the omniscient hero is always at least a couple of steps ahead of everyone else, which could easily become tiresome. It benefits greatly from Baker's way of making it clear that, as far as he's concerned, Molly is very much the undefeatable star of the movie playing out in his head. His confidence almost makes you think that he might just turn out to hold the winning hand after all, whereas the glee with which he looks forward to indulging in his full capacity for sadism when he dispatches the hero makes you glad that he doesn't.

THE NATURAL (1984)

In the early '80s, Baker had dropped far enough off the radar screen that his cameo here as "the Whammer"--i.e., Babe Ruth--amounted to a juicy comeback. The movie is a travesty of Bernard Malamud's baseball novel, but Baker does full justice to his end of it: he tears into the role of parodying the Babe as if he were playing a contemporary figure who had seized control of the globe's supply of penicillin. He gives the Whammer a magnified version of Molly's gloating self-satisfaction in what a hot shit he thinks he is, and some of Molly's sadism, too: engaging the green kid Roy Hobbs in a contest, batter versus pitcher, in order to impress a mystery woman (Barbara Hershey), he sums Hobbs up, wrongly, as an innocent hick, and still licks his chops at the prospect of humiliating him. Yet you can't help rooting, or at least feeling for him a little. He lives up to the descriptions of Babe Ruth as the ultimate Jazz Age celebrity, a one-man parade through Times Square.

EDGE OF DARKNESS (1985)

This six-hour British TV miniseries is the proudest accomplishment of Baker's time across the pond. It was directed by Martin Campbell, who later made Goldeneye, as well as the Daniel Craig Casino Royale and the Antonio Banderas Zorro pictures, and who is now readying a big-screen remake of Edge of Darkness with Mel Gibson and Ray Winstone. For the love of God, try and get your hands on the original so that when you see the remake, you can better appreciate all the ways in which they're certain to fuck it up. The TV series is a Thatcher-era paranoid thriller about the dangers of nuclear proliferation. The late Bob Peck plays a Yorkshire police detective who witnesses the murder of his daughter (Joanne Whalley), which he and his colleagues assume must have been a botched attempt on his own life; it turns out that she was active in anti-nuclear politics and involved in what the government considered to be terrorist activities.

Baker enters the picture playing Darius Jedburgh, a CIA agent stationed in the country who is aware of some sort of skulduggery that might be connected to the daughter's murder. Baker, who took a cut in his usual salary for the chance to be a part of this, took full advantage of the opportunities that acting in a miniseries can provide for fleshing out the odd little corners of a character's range of personality. The memory of his big climactic moments, bawling out the assembled guests at a NATO conference while disintegrating from radiation poisoning and brandishing a pair of plutonium bars, stays fresh in the mind, but so does the image of him sitting in front of the TV in his house in London, cradling a huge bowl of popcorn in his lap and watching the ballroom dancing competitions, marveling, "How do they move like that?"

Fat Actor Watch at New York Times: Paper of Record Alleges That When Russell Crowe Sits Around the House, He Really Sits Around the House

Phil Nugent — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Always looking for a fresh angle on the really important movie news of the day, Michael Cieply uses his perch at Thew New York Times to ask" what's with all the male movie stars who are porkers? Who does he have in mind, exactly? Russell Crowe and Jeff Daniels, sharing a screen in State of Play ("Two men. One notebook. Four chins."); Denzel Washington, going "cheek-to-jowl with the bulky John Travolta" in the trailer for the remake of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three; Hugh Grant; and "Even Leonardo DiCaprio, the young heartthrob from Titanic"--Photos from the set of Shutter Island, a thriller on tap from Paramount Pictures and the director Martin Scorsese in October, show a little bit more to love." Oh, snap! Are they handing out chocolate bunnies to whoever can be the biggest bitch at the Times these days?

Cieply briefly notes that there's a gender-based double standard regarding the weight and age rules in Hollywood so far as leading players are concerned, but after dropping Kathleen Turner's name, he seems to feel that he's discharged his duty, as if the subject bored even him. He seems more taken with the idea that this is an utterly new phenomenon, but despite the historical examples he digs up, that may be a non-starter. "Photos of midcentury stars — Humphrey Bogart, James Stewart, Clark Gable and others — show them to have remained rather gaunt at an age when many of the current crop are anything but." Good thing those photos are handy, since it's not as if movie actors left behind filmed records of their performances so we'd be able to remind themselves what they looked like. That said, it seems a little callous to drag Bogart, one of the best-known victims of cancer sticks ever to go down coughing, into a discussion of how movie stars used to keep themselves svelte. (One well-circulated story has it that, when illness had left Bogie too weak to handle the stairs in his own home, he used to navigate from one floor to another by stuffing himself in the dumb waiter.) It's also worth remembering that Gable, who died of a massive heart attack after completing his last film, The Misfits, had lost 35 pounds on a crash diet to get his weight below 200 before shooting began. If there's any less of that sort of thing going on nowadays because more stars feel comfortable about appearing in public looking something other than whisper-thin, surely it's for the better.

It's also true that, as Cieply would have known if he'd put down the "photographs" and spent a couple of days watching Turner Classic Movies, there have always been counter-examples one could offer to his role call of manly waifs. Wallace Beery never looked as if he'd had trouble locating the desert cart, Spencer Tracey rolled into his onscreen middle age looking as if he'd swallowed a tether ball, James Cagney was getting pretty squared-off by the time of Yankee Doodle Dandy, Robert Mitchum often had an amorphous mass surrounding his midsection that he used to abruptly suck up into his chesticological region whenever he was required to take his shirt off, Gene Hackman's weight always flunctuated, sometimes wildly, depending on just how regular his latest "regular guy" character was supposed to be, and as for Jack Nicholson, in his mid-forties when he more or less officially entered his "middle-aged" period with Terms of Endearment--please. Of course, with movies as with everything else, memory can be a great deceiver. Lawrence Turman, "a veteran film producer who is chairman of the Peter Stark producing program at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts", told Cieply that "“John Wayne always looked a bit portly." I find it disturbing that the Peter Stark producing program at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts can do no better for its chairman than a guy who's never seen Stagecoach. It may be a tribute to the lingering effect of the image that Wayne cast from around the mid-1950s until his death in 1979 that even some professionals think he always looked like that, but I would propose that, unlikely though it may seem, that if Wayne had looked in his youth like a guy who was fated to someday look the way he did in True Grit, he never would have gotten the chance to grow into that later incarnation--at least, not on movie screens.

This still leaves the question of whether some of these stars, heavier though they may undeniably be, are as hideous to behold as Cieply seems to be implying they are. I will confess that when I saw Travolta, say, in the trailer for Pelham, I did not catch myself thinking, "Here comes Wide Load." (I did catch myself thinking, "Get a load of Weird Hairline with his Fu Manchu mustache. Each of us has his issues.) One possibility worth considering is that such stars as Travolta, Washington, and Hanks, who came up in the 1980s, when a perfect storm of society-embraced body issues and new technology in the gym led to a new species of Americans who seemed to be armor-plated in their own skin and muscle, some of whom hastened to show off their new packaging on the covers of magazines, such as that infamous shot of Travolta on the cover of Rolling Stone to promote Stayin' Alive, looking as if his abs were about to jump out of his torso and his brains had already leaked out of his ears. Maybe, having fallen for that when you had the energy and free schedule to pursue it all the way, you have to let yourself go a little later on or else you'll explode. But then, in the interests of full disclosure, I should concede that I am from The South, where we deep fry our veggie plates and the lost causes that we love to get misty-eyed about include our own arteries in their pre-clotted state. Because of my own cultural conditioning, if I had my way, every other movie made since 1984 would have starred Joe Don Baker, and the others would have been divided between Randy Quaid and the late Dub Taylor, with the result that Michael Cieply would be even more confused.

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)

The Screengrab Top Ten: The Baseball Movie All-Stars, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Spring is here! Okay, not in my apartment, but I've read that it's here, some places, apparently, and with it, the return of what's left of baseball, the American game. Sports in general, and baseball in particular, have a spotty history in the movies. I think I've been reading that sports movies are box-office poison since before I'd ever seen a sports movie and maybe before I had any clear grasp of the concept of "box-office poison." (Then I saw a trailer for Catwoman.) But anything that inspires the kind of passion, excitement, despair, and apoplexy that baseball inspires in its hardcore adherents has got to inspire some great characters. Here's a bullpen's worth of them.

Ty Cobb (Tommy Lee Jones), COBB (1994)

In this poorly received and actually rather amazing movie, Jones gives a fine, fire-breathing performance as a man who, perhaps more than any other figure in the history of his sport, gives fans cause to weigh the value of his contribution to the game against the less positive effects of having had to share a planet with him. In his prime, Cobb competed as if he thought that the members of the losing team, and the less productive half of the winning team, would be rounded up after the game and beaten to death with sticks; seen in his comfortable, lonely old age, he's still a man who can only relate to the world as something to be fought, but crowds will no longer pay to see him fight on the baseball field and most people would rather not get close enough to fight him off the field, not even for ready money. Most of the movie is set in the early 1960s, when Cobb hired a sportswriter with the sportswriterly name of Al Stump (played here by Robert Wuhl) to ghostwrite his memoir, promised to let him tell the truth, and then bullied him into composing a sanitized version called My Life in Baseball. More than thirty years later, in conjunction with the movie, Stump published a more honest version of his encounter with the monster, Cobb: A Biography. Stump died a year to the month after the movie and book came out. One hopes that during that last year of his life, his dreams were a bit more peaceful.

Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), BULL DURHAM (1988)

It's easy to love baseball if you're a hot prospect riding a greased rail to the show. It's another entirely when you're a woman living a going-nowhere life in a minor league town. Most female baseball fans in this position would be content to be groupies, frequenting the games and keeping the players company. But Annie Savoy, played by Susan Sarandon, is another case entirely- a true devotee of the game who has as much passion for baseball as any character (male or female) ever to grace the silver screen. As she states at the beginning of the film, ""I believe in the Church of Baseball." And she takes her faith seriously, singling out a promising player with a chance to make it to the big leagues, and providing him with spiritual guidance- and yes, sex- for an entire season. Her methods (reading poetry in bed, making her men wear women's underwear under their uniforms, and so on) may be unorthodox, but they seem to work. As she says, "there's never been a ballplayer slept with me who didn't have the best year of his career." In the season chronicled in Bull Durham, her man of choice is young pitcher "Nuke" Laloosh (Tim Robbins), an undisciplined kid with a killer fastball, and he gets the full Annie Savoy treatment. Yet despite her monogamous-for-a-season principles, she's thrown for a loop when she comes face to face with her male counterpart, journeyman catcher "Crash" Davis (Kevin Costner), a veteran who's been brought in to teach Nuke some lessons of his own. Crash's experiences have given him a hardened shell, but deep down he's just as much of an idealist about baseball as Annie is, and his presence in the film only underlines how pure Annie's love for the game truly is. At the end of the season, Crash is gone and Annie is still in Durham, but they will always worship at the same altar.

The Whammer (Joe Don Baker), THE NATURAL (1984)

This Robert Redford movie mostly makes a hash of the Bernard Malamud novel on which it's based, but it does have the niftiest film portrait ever of Babe Ruth, a monumental figure whose onscreen portrayers have included John Goodman, William Bendix, and, in the Lou Gehrig biopic The Pride of the Yankees, Babe Ruth. As in the book, he's called simply "the Whammer", as if it would be a blasphemous insult to refer to this celebrity demigod by the mere name his mama gave him. Joe Don Baker, who may have been the third least likely American actor to be cast as a great baseball player (after John Goodman and William Bendix), tears into the role as if it were what he'd been practicing for when he spent all that time swinging a homemade bat upside the heads of misguided lawbreakers in Walking Tall. Swaggering around the fairgrounds with a crowd of reporters at his heels and a babe in his line of sight, he captures the self-satisfied, bullying entitlement that many have attributed to the actual Babe, along with the magnetic, childlike delight in himself that made them love him anyway. Redford, in the title role, is supposed to be the new kid on the block, a country naif who's so green and self-assured that he doesn't know better than to regard himself as the old pro's equal. Getting a load of this idjit, the Whammer regards him with a sadistic, teasing dismay--as well he might, given that Baker and Redford were actually only born six months apart.

Charlie Snow (Richard Pryor), THE BINGO LONG TRAVELING ALL-STARS AND MOTOR KINGS (1976)

For the first half of the twentieth century, America's national pastime had a little problem: most of the nation wasn't allowed to play it. Not professionally, not in the big leagues, where the racial barriers overseen by the first Commissioner of Baseball, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, held so firm that they didn't budge even during World War II, when crowds turned out to watch the short-lived women's leagues play. (For more, see A League of Their Own, or rather don't, because it sucks.) Bingo Long, which stars Billy Dee Williams as a pitcher-manager of a barnstorming all-black team during the pre-segregation period, is perhaps the only Hollywood movie to take as its subject the baseball of the Negro Leagues, and the mixed feelings experienced by those stars who had the chance to delight audiences with their superb play and showmanship but sometimes felt degraded both by being excluded from white baseball and by the clowning that their fans came to expect. (It also captures the mixed feelings experienced by the Negro Leaguers when the color bar dropped and the all-black teams died off.) Pryor has one of his better movie parts in the supporting role of Charlie, a player who schemes to break into the big leagues by posing as a Cuban (named "Carlos Nevada") and then, after that doesn't pan out, as a Native American. For his later hustle, he adopts a Mohawk haircut, just like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, which was released a few months earlier. We would further explore the long-hidden connections between this engaging light period comedy and Scorsese's febrile urban masterpiece, except that there aren't any.

Ring Lardner (John Sayles), EIGHT MEN OUT (1988)

John Sayles has often allowed as how he takes acting roles in the movies he writes and directs because that makes for one less actor he has to pay, but in the right role, his cameos are sometimes the best thing in his movies. Here he found the role of his lifetime in the saturnine, long-faced sportswriter, casually wisecracking his way to a permanent place in American letters. Though it's the Chicago newspaperman Hugh Fullerton (played here by Studs Terkel) who actually breaks the story of the Black Sox scandal, it's his sidekick Lardner, glumly observing the chicanery and nodding in recognition of the crass absurdity of it all, who gives the proceedings a carefully judged moral weight that modern-day observers of the baseball scene will look for in their sports pages in vain. In his show-stopping big number, he entertains the crooked, self-hating ballplayers by performing, a capella and to tune of "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles", a little song of his own composition that begins, "I'm forever blowing ball games..." and ends with the (inaccurate) line, "And the gamblers treat me fair." All the while, the players can only sit there in self-incriminating silence, though there's no mistaking how much they wish they could kill him, or maybe kill themselves. Maybe a little from column A and a little from column B.

--Paul Clark, Phil Nugent

Click here for Part 2!