Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison

  The latest in the genre of loathsome flicks—and I don't want to overlook McCabe and Mrs. Miller or Hammersmith Is Out, which former I hated and latter I adored—is a very interesting nightmare from Cinerama Releasing under the title Payday.

  Starring the too-seldom-seen Rip Torn as country & western semistar Maury Dann, the film was written by Don Carpenter, whose 1966 novel, Hard Rain Falling, should be familiar to you. It was directed with a firm hand by Daryl Duke and marks the producing debut of jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason. In arresting supporting roles Ahna Capri, Cliff Emmich, Jeff Morris and Frazier Moss—most of which are names you may not know but ought to remember—add tone and expertise as solid background to Torn's bravura performance.

  When I call this a "loathsome" film, I want you to understand I'm not talking about the quality or entertainment levels of the production, which are high; I'm talking about the philosophy presented as the viewpoint of the central character. He is a swine. An utterly amoral, mean and despicable swine whose sycophantic fans long for nothing more than to be fucked and/or fucked-over by him. I mean, when you're watching a film about a segment of show biz, and the most likeable dude in sight is a road manager, for Christ's sake, you know you're observing a barnyard full of genuine slop-swillers!

  The plot is a rambling one, moving through two days in the road tour life of Maury Dann and culminating with "payday." During those two days the filmgoer is treated to an intimate evisceration of the squamous lifestyle of a contemporary god, one of the uncrowned American nobility—the musical idol. (And having traveled with The Rolling Stones and Three Dog Night, I can assure those naïve few of you who've never been to a rock concert, that the brutal meat-into-meat couplings, the ravenous groupies, the sudden maniac-flashes of anger and violence, the constant stench of machismo exhibited in this nice nice script are far from exaggeration.) The power of utter adoration with which popular musicians are gifted by their vampiric followers forces even the most gentle and ethical into attitudes of callousness and brutality. For those who are already twisted . . . it is a blank check to demean other human beings and develop a messianic view of the entire human race.

  God knows it isn't a new story; we've seen it to telling effect in Citizen Kane, A Face in the Crowd, The Great Man and other fables, but it is a story that needs to be told again and again, a lesson that needs to be relearned (apparently) with every change in cultural mores.

  This latest incarnation is a healthy one, and Rip Torn as Maury Dann will chill you to the spine. Ahna Capri as his toothsome little trollop-of-the-moment gives the best performance of her spotty career and is only less horrifying because she has less power in Dann's ego-world. There are special scenes that leap from the screen with telling impact: a moral blackmail encounter with a rural dj, a fight scene culminating in a kind of murder, and a scene following the slaughter in which Torn purifies himself by creating a country tune so sickly-sweet it could give you diabetes.

  But it is the overriding miasma of loathsomeness that makes Payday a memorable film. It is a despicable film, in the most positive senses of the word. Positive, in that it holds up the mirror of life and wrenches us around by the hair, and demands, "Look at yourself!"

  It is a vision only the most honest will admit has veracity. For the others . . . merely purgative.

  Bud Yorkin has produced and directed a swell film going under the title The Thief Who Came to Dinner. It is swell. It is dandy. It will make you smile. It will produce wonders before your very eyes such as Ryan O'Neal actually acting, Jacqueline Bisset actually becoming invisible, Warren Oates actually getting a chance to show his stuff and—oh oh what an and—the remarkable, sensational, bewildering, blindingly talented Austin Pendleton stealing an entire motion picture away from the heavymoney stars.

  Walter Hill's screenplay of the Warner Bros. caperflick has O'Neal as a former Establishment computerschlepp who decides as long as everyone is stealing from everyone else under the mantle of Big Business, he will become an independent operator. And to the strains of Henry Mancini music that is ultimately interchangeable with the score he wrote for Charade, O'Neal becomes "the chess burglar," a second-storey cat who leaves a chess piece and a note describing his next gambit at the scene of his high society ripoffs.

  Oates is his Inspector Javert, an insurance dick with a stiff neck and an unbendable ethic. And for the first time in more films than I care to consider, someone has turned Oates loose. To telling effect. He is a pillar of strength throughout the film. But it is the character actors who enrich this pudding: Jill Clayburgh as O'Neal's former wife, so true and right in one touching scene that you can hear the ganglia of your familiarity mechanism twanging; pudgy Ned Beatty as the fence; Deams, locked in partnership with Gregory Sierra as his Chicano side-boy; Dynamite . . . each of them rising above the briefness of their parts to carve themselves forever in the cliff-face of your memory; and Austin Pendleton as the chess editor of the Dallas newspaper . . .

  Oh my. Austin Pendleton ought to be on exhibit in the Smithsonian. He is a national treasure. People ought to come pouring out of the studios and bury him in money to make film after film, starring Pendleton as whatever he wants to be. He is so good, it's like the first time you saw Falk act, or the best evening you ever spent with George C. Scott, or the moment when you realized Lee Grant could act any other cinematic lady she chose under the table. Austin Pendleton is a winged wild wonder, and Bud Yorkin has had the good sense and good taste to let him gambol freely.

  It is a helluvan evening's entertainment, and if you don't find yourself applauding and cheering the ending, have yourself fitted for daisy-space at Forest Lawn . . . you're neck-upward dead.

  And I know you're going to think I've been bought off with nothing but rave reviews in this column, but what the hell can I do? Last time two out of three were shit, this time all four are sensational. It runs that way. So just shrug and accept the rolls of the dice as I launch into my final rave, in celebration of MGM, director Richard Sarafian, scenarists Rodney Carr-Smith & Sue Grafton, and a group of memorable players headed by Rod Steiger, Robert Ryan, Kiel Martin, Katherine Squire, Scott Wilson, Ed Lauter, Jeff Bridges and a sparrow named Season Hubley, all of whom have formed an unparalleled artistic gestalt to bring forth Lolly-Madonna XXX. (You can read that: Lolly-Madonna kiss kiss kiss.)

  I don't want to tip the plot too much, save to advise you it is a terrifying story of mounting violence between two present-day Tennessee hill families, a feud film, if you will, but one that far outstrips the usual Hatfield-McCoy nonsense cityfolk conceive of as representing rustic animosities.

  Steiger and Ryan play the heads of inimical households, and Wilson, Timothy Scott, Lauter, Bridges, Martin, Gary Busey, and Paul Koslo play the various siblings. Randy Quaid also plays one of the sons, and Joan Goodfellow plays the lone daughter. Their performances require special note, of which more later.

  There is so much to say about this film, it is sui generis, I hesitate to say much more than don't miss it. But thoroughness compels me to note that the sole jarring note in the film is Steiger, toward the end of the story, whose thespian mannerisms rankle and attack the carefully-woven skein of everyone else's non-Hollywood performances. Scott Wilson is by turns brutally effective and soul-wrenchingly pathetic; Ed Lauter is simply superlative as Hawk and he brings off a death scene that a lesser actor would have found beyond him; Ryan is understated, totally in control of his characterization, and continues to be one of the masters of his craft, as worthy a player as has ever been ignored by the vagaries of a fickle industry; Season Hubley, in her virgin outing feature-wise, functions with charm and individuality as the catalyst of the feud, the girl who is taken for the mythical Lolly-Madonna—and after the many skin-exposures of esthetically disastrous bodies such as that of Glenda Jackson's, it is a pleasure to gaze upon Ms. Hubley in the buff; but now we come to Joan Goodfellow (Robert Ryan's 16-year-old daughter) and Randy Quaid.

  Ms. Goodfellow plays Sister K, a breast-heavy country girl
of simple desires and thwarted dreams. She is the only character in the film whom we know for certain escapes the debacle of the Feather-Gutshall Families' charnel house. Her performance is skillful and highly promising of a long and honorable career. The rape scene in which Lauter and Wilson taunt and finally toss her is a directorial and acting masterpiece; Ms. Goodfellow manages to convey all the terror and bravery of a bird stalked by ruthless hunters. I commend her to your attention.

  And Mr. Quaid, as the retarded Finch, is so awfully good you will find yourself clenching your fists, rocking back and forth with empathy, marveling at how one so young could know so much about the torment of the human condition.

  I will say no more about Mr. Quaid, save to add that if there were nothing else in this film to recommend it, his performance alone would be worth the price of admission.

  Lolly-Madonna XXX is neither a happy film, nor an easy one to forget. It is one of the most obstinately compelling films I've ever seen, and a credit to all involved.

  This is your week to go to the movies: the treasures are littered everywhere, from the mansions of Dallas to the hills of Tennessee. If you have a dull week, it's your own fault; I told you where to go.

  The Staff/March 2, 1973

  4th INSTALLMENT

  So this schlepp wakes up in a hospital bed and the doctor leans over him and grins and says, "Mr. Traupman, I have some bad news for you . . . and some good news for you."

  And Traupman, wincing, says, "Give me the bad news first, Doc."

  And the doctor says, "Well, we had to amputate both your feet . . . " and Traupman breaks down and starts to cry piteously.

  And when he gets hold of himself, snuffling tragically, he says, "Wh-what's the good news?"

  And the doctor says, "The gentleman in the next room wants to buy your slippers."

  Ugh.

  Which brings me to the film reviews. I have some bad news for you, and I have some good news for you.

  The bad news is Lady Caroline Lamb. The good news is Slither and The Long Goodbye. And just plain news is I Love You Rosa, which is neither good nor bad, but just is.

  (The really bad news, like an incurable case of the pox, is Clint Eastwood's new flick, High Plains Drifter, which I saw but ain't allowed to talk about till release date April 6th; but two weeks from now, when I emerge from the primordial slime once again, I'll devote an entire column to that little bundle of charm. Watch for it; I don't get killing angry very often, but when I do it makes for juicy nibbling.)

  Anyhow. Lady Caroline Lamb. Out of United Artists by way of The Edge of Night. Midwife at the Caesarean, Robert Bolt—he of A Man for All Seasons, Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago—who wrote and directed. And a bloody birth it is, indeed indeed. Disastrous. Better a two-headed calf.

  Where to begin, oh Lord, where to begin? Jon Finch—he of Polanski's wretched Macbeth—as William Lamb, M.P. (That's Member of Parliament, not Military Police: this is a costume drawmuh of Regency England.) No. Begin with (giggle snicker) Richard Chamberlain as Lord Byron (tee hee titter), his eyes dripping with kohl. No. Sarah Miles, her gnome's mouth wrenching and contorting more hideously than even Jennifer Jones's mouth at its most histrionic . . . Miles of mouth as Lady Caroline Bird, Chicken, Thing, whatever . . . ! No!

  Not to begin at all. To ignore. To pretend that Bolt was denied access to his wife's bed—Ms. Miles is wife to Mr. Bolt, you see—until he cobbled up this historically wayward and artistically hebephrenic lacrimulae amphora. To forget that even the most talented, most heroic among us occasionally go bananas with a Fulton's Folly. To warn the unwary that this is what used to be called—in pre-lib days—a "woman's movie." To catalogue words like tearjerker, childish, simplistic, dishonest, tedious, portentous, laughable, ludicrous, silly spectacular and bathetic, with hopes that no one will be unwise enough to defy the endless bum reviews this overblown satin-bag of trash has garnered for itself. To end with a weary shake of the head. To move on to the good news. At a dead run.

  Or, more appropriately, to move on with a SLITHER.

  Which has got to be the world's longest, funniest Polack joke.

  The characters are named Kopetzky, Fenaka, Kanipsia . . . and what they are engaged in here is a kind of orchestrated berserkoid behavior that must have caused the bank that put up the money for its filming many a sleepless night. MGM didn't release this film, as the saying goes, it escaped. Directed by Howard Zieff, written by W.D. Richter, photographed by the brilliant Laszlo Kovacs (another Polanie), Slither is what Cornell Woolrich would have written had he been reborn as Donald Westlake. It's one of those "no one ever found the embezzled money" yarns, but beyond that point of departure the landscape ceases to be terra familiaris and instantly becomes Cloud-Coo-coo-Land.

  Dick Kanipsia—James Caan—gets out of the slammer after doing a stretch for car boosting, takes pause for a beer at the home of a con sprung along with him, and seven minutes into the film his ex-cellmate gets machine-gunned to death before Caan's eyes. Then Caan hides in the cellar of the house as his riddled buddy tells him there's this boodle of loot and "no one ever found the embezzled money," so he should go to such and such a town and look up Barry Fenaka and tell him "the name is Vincent Palmer." Down cellar slithers Caan, and his buddy pulls a bouquet of TNT out of an old trunk and blows the house to flinders. Next day Caan comes up out of the root cellar and starts thumbing his way to Barry Fenaka. Except he's being followed by this huge motorvan all flat-black and ominous (whose appearance onscreen is invariably accompanied by the kind of Saturday morning serial music you knew meant the bad guys were coming). And Caan gets picked up by this dingdong post—Flower Power freakette played by Sally Kellerman in her most manic phase, a freakette who, when they stop for lunch, for no particular reason, decides to armed rob the lunch counter. And then . . .

  Oh, hell, why spoil it for you. There's the incomparable Peter Boyle as Barry Fenaka, resplendent as a Polish emcee with cornucopial lore about rec-V's, and his entire terrific collection of Big Band sides transferred to tape. There's Allen Garfield as Vincent J. Palmer, adding another chunky characterization to the store of memorables that are rapidly causing him to be recognized as a character player in the grand tradition. There's crazy Sally Kellerman in cutoffs, batty as a hundred battlefields, stealing every scene Caan doesn't use a big stick to beat her away from.

  There's wildness and weirdness and some of the funniest sight gags since Chaplin's Modern Times; there's dialogue that you'll miss because you'll be convulsed with laughter from the one that just whizzed past; there's a lunatic celebration of systematized madness; and the emblematic line is delivered by Caan when he tells Sally Kellerman she'll like living in these here parts because, "Everybody's crazy."

  Slither is not to be missed. It's not often you get to see what certifiable nuts can do when they're turned loose with cameras.

  And if Slither sounds too wild for you to tackle cold turkey, you can go at it slantwise by catching Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe in Leigh Brackett's sensational adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel, The Long Goodbye; call it a feeder dose of insanity that'll sustain you into the big time.

  There's so much to be said about The Long Goodbye that aficionados of both cinema and the Raymond Chandler mystique will be kicking this around for years.

  For those of you who aren't familiar with Chandler or his private eye hero Philip Marlowe, be advised this is the sixth of the seven extant Chandler novels to be filmed. Farewell, My Lovely was made in 1944 with Dick Powell as Marlowe; in 1946 Bogart assayed the Marlowe role in The Big Sleep; 1947 saw The High Window filmed as The Brasher Doubloon; 1948's The Lady in the Lake with Robert Montgomery as the private eye was the most stylistically interesting of the Chandler translations onto film (till The Long Goodbye, that is) using the camera as point of view, the audience seeing Marlowe/Montgomery only when he looked in a mirror; in 1969 The Little Sister was made, badly, and titled Marlowe, with James Garner looking ill at ease in the characterization. (There was
also a short-lived Philip Marlowe TV series in 1959 with Granny Goose Phil Carey in the title role, but it was abortive at best.) Still unfilmed: a sad little thing titled Playback that Chandler published in 1958, just one year before his death.

  (There are also assorted short stories that have been collected in volumes variously titled Killer in the Rain, Trouble Is My Business, Pick-Up on Noon Street, though most of them were originally published in the marvelous volume called The Simple Art of Murder, containing Chandler's brilliant essay on mystery writing under the latter title.)

  Of the three giants of the detective story genre—Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich and Chandler—Marlowe's creator has always seemed to me to be the best. (Though since the Fifties, Ross Macdonald and John D. MacDonald have inherited the crowns, not merely by default and the death of the three masters from whom they learned their trade, but also on the basis of their impressive writings.) Chandler was smooth, dealt with the undercurrents of venality and weakness that riptide through society's seamier depths, and in Marlowe eschewed the larger-than-life image of the detective as cultural hero, choosing rather to make Marlowe an average man with an above-average fascination for low-life. Because of the clarity of delineation of Marlowe, even the worst of the films made from Chandler's novels has had a je ne sais quoi, a vitality, a verve that detective films made from lesser sources could never touch.