Gangster Story

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day....

Gangster Story (Walter Matthau, 1959) An odd one, this.  And not a very good one, but still an oddity. A capital "B" B-movie, directed by Walter Matthau, and the only movie he ever directed (someday I want to see the one Cagney directed, too), done very early in his career. At the time, Matthau was a stage actor, but since 1950 he'd been doing small parts in TV series, and didn't make his first film until 1955's The Kentuckian (starring Burt Lancaster and, as we're on a theme here, directed by him, as well) and would start becoming a fixture in films with Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd.   

It's not known whether it was done on a dare, or out of desperation. The script wasn't much, but Matthau took the job, starring in and directing, because he had gambling debts. His co-star was his wife, Carol Grace, and instead of New York, it was filmed in sunny Los Angeles, mostly during the day, unusual for a supposed film-noir, and where the most shadows are seen in, of all places, a library.

Matthau is fine, his performance, at least, is professional, but loose and schlumpy, and plays well, even in scenes that are patently absurd...like the one where his con character Jack Martin stages a bank-vault robbery by posing as a movie director rehearsing a scene—distracting the guards to "stay in character" and convincing the bank president to open the vault. (Really? It's that easy? Everyone is that dumb and star-struck, not even asking for a filming permit and with no cameras, no crew, nothing?), while most of the other performers range from merely amateurish to a painfully charitable "at least they remembered their lines." 

Wouldn't have mattered if they didn't. The entire movie is post-dubbed, the dialogue replaced in the studio after the fact—whether because they had no sound recordist during filming (it was a five-man crew...and edited by future porn director Radley Metzger) or background sounds are so pervasive. It does create a rather unnerving sequence, late in the movie (when nobody was paying attention?) where dialogue is punctuated a few times by the sound of the timing "beep" that alerts the actor when to talk—no one bothered to take them out...it wasn't in the critical first or last reels, and maybe it was just overlooked. 

Professionalism aside, what this movie most resembles is the 1973 film Matthau made with director Don Siegel, Charley Varrick, about "the last of the independents" (criminal division). Both Martin and Varrick are bank-robbers, who get caught up in a situation they're not accustomed to: not only avoiding the police, but also the organized crime lord attached to the last institution Matthau's perp robbed. Both involve a good amount of time on the lam and hiding out, although Martin capitulates and, to settle differences, joins the organized bad guys to save his neck. The quirky, nastily-funny Siegel film is full of invention and colorful characters; everything about Gangster Story is pure black-and-white, and is really worth watching only for the curiosity factor. Matthau moved on, and when this vampire of a movie rose from the dead in conversation he'd crack wise in interviews saying the film "premiered at Loew's in Newark and never crossed the Hudson." He never was tempted to direct again.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Joseph Sargent, 1974) Taut, no-frills caper thriller about the hi-jacking of a New York subway train by a group of color-named conspirators. Veteran director Joseph Sargent and cinematographer Owen Roizman create a gritty landscape of dark passages and harsh fluorescent lighting while the Transit police try to negotiate with the hi-jackers, and the hi-jackers deal with their internal squabbles and a subway car of jumpy New Yorkers. 

It's like anything: Nothing's easy. 

This one's the first of more adaptations than necessary (a TV version was broadcast in 1999 with Edward James Olmos and Vincent D'Onofrio, and Tony Scott is making a new one with Denzel Washington and John Travolta*) of John Godey's rather spare novel, but is the best of the bunch, having the advantage of a witty script penned by Peter Stone, screenwriter of Charade and the musical "1776." Stone realized the bare-bones plot of the novel wouldn't sustain a movie, and fleshed out the characters with a jokey, schlumpfy "attitude" that keeps the slow parts entertaining, especially when played by two wily character actors like Walter Matthau and Jerry Stiller.

Matthau gets the advantage of playing a fairly straight character with a muffled humor, while Stiller makes the sarcasm of his dispatcher as dry as Brooklyn dust. By contrast, the hi-jackers (Hector Elizando, Martin Balsam, Earl Hindman, and led by Robert Shaw, who plays it cold as ice) are twitchy no-nonsense cyphers cloaked in anonymity. For a change, it's the cops who are the interesting ones, as they race against time to secure a million dollars in ransom and deliver it before hostages begin being killed.

The direction and lighting take their cues from the documentary style of The French Connection,** as does the funky score by David Shire. The film employed a new process of "flashing" the film, allowing the filmmakers to still get detail in the dimly lit (and graffiti-less by MTA request) subway tunnels without having to set up extensive lighting that would have delayed production—and due to the grimy, rat-infested locations—risked the health of cast and crew (who wore masks when cameras weren't rolling).

But Stone's script is the factor that nudges the film beyond its thriller origins and give it a cynical style. 

In fact, it is so well done, that one questions the need to do another version.

* We'll put that one up next week.

**Owen Roizman was the DP for that film, as well.

A Face in the Crowd

A Face in the Crowd (Elia Kazan, 1957) The cyclical rise and fall of media pundits makes this prescient movie diatribe against the dangers of television consistently fresh and relevant. Sure, it might have been talking about Arthur Godfrey (at the time), but it fits the bill for "The Glenn Beck Story," too. A rube gets built up as a "voice of the people," and then, given money, power and a platform turns into a little  cathode-ray god, his TV-face just being make-up over a manipulative withered soul drunk for power...or love...or advantage over his neighbor. It's why Keith Olbermann always referred to Beck as "Lonesome Rhodes" on his old MSNBC show—that's the "aw-shucks" nom-de-tube of the character in the movie—but it could be any of the flash-in-the-pan sensations over the years, like Morton Downey, Jr. (Remember him? Good, if you don't), briefly, Jerry Springer, or any of the kiss-and-televangelists who've grabbed the spot-light, only to have scandal take it back, shine it on them, and see them scurry back, cockroach-like into the wood-work ...until they think people have forgotten. Alex Jones is merely the latest example and, showing that life reflects art, spends a goodly amount of time during his meltdowns huckstering "health" formulas and other shiny objects.

So, in celebration of the latest "Lonesome" Rhodes, let's take a look back at A Face in the Crowd...even though the story is still being played out ad nauseum by Jones and his inevitable future issue in an endless cycle of hucksterism and snake-oil.

It's the dark side of a Frank Capra "every-man" movie.  Capra always flirted with fascism in those films, but Budd Schulberg's screenplay tackles it head-on: Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) discovers an Arkansas drunk, Larry Rhodes (Andy Griffith, never more brilliant than he is here) in a small-town jail, and coerces him to sing on a local radio station. He develops a following, and soon wins a sponsored television gig in Memphis, then moves up to New York. His folksy homilies and willingness to make fun of his sponsors endears him to the public at large, and soon his influence begins to spread, attracting political machines who want to attach their candidates to "a man of the people." In a time before "red states" and "blue states" divided rural and urban political boundaries, it was still a goal to reach the "real" America in the heartland. While Rhodes gains his following, he also starts to spend his capital in his sequestered private life: he begins an affair with Jeffries, then throws her under the tour bus for a cheerleader. At this point, Rhodes thinks he's Teflon, and nothing can besmirch his reputation. 

But, he who lives by the sword, dies by it. A microphone deliberately unmuted shows his true colors to a public fed only the rouged mask, and "Lonesome" Rhodes begins the quicker descent down the hill of notoriety. No homily can save him. No tears. No hysterics. No more. Hopefully, he has some gold stashed away.

It's a cautionary tale...for everybody. Edward R. Murrow not only suggested television could be "merely wires and lights in a box," but that it could also be a weapon. And in a world where to exploit can lead to success, it's primed and cocked. It's just an instrument, at the beck and call of those who would use it to reach into our homes and our hearts. The message of A Face in the Crowd, although a might heavy-handed in presentation at times, still applies today, just as it did in the past, and just as surely as it will in the future.