Larry Cohen

by Michael Doyle

  2. The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972) is a blaxploitation Western directed by Martin Goldman. Set in pre-Civil War America, three escaped Virginia slaves (Fred Williamson, D’Urville Martin and Don Pedro Colley) seek their freedom in the West. Their arduous journey is made even more treacherous when they discover a gang of whites led by their sadistic slave-owner are in pursuit of them. Although the film was met with mostly negative reviews upon its release, it was successful enough to generate two sequels, The Soul of Nigger Charley (1973) and Boss Nigger (1974).

  3. Across 110th Street (1972) is an American crime drama directed by Barry Shear and starring Anthony Quinn and Yaphet Kotto. Two New York City cops, (one an aging, crooked Italian-American, the other a young, honest African-American) are assigned to track down three Harlem racketeers involved in the murder of seven gangsters and the robbery of $300,000 from a Mafia-owned bank. Featuring a memorable title song by Bobby Womack, this violent thriller benefits from its authentic locations and committed performances but at times is too self-consciously tough and gritty for its own good.

  4. Nigger, the autobiography of comedian, author, and political activist Dick Gregory (b.1932) was co-written with sports journalist Robert Lipsyte during the American Civil Rights Movement. First published in 1964 by E.P. Dutton, it has since sold over a million copies and been reprinted many times. Gregory famously addressed his controversial use of the pejorative term as a title for the memoir in his dedication: “Dear Momma — Wherever you are, if ever you hear the word ‘nigger’ again, just remember they are advertising my book.”

  5. The Molly Maguires (1970) is an evocative adaptation of Arthur H. Lewis’ 1969 historical novel set amidst the coalfields of Pennsylvania in 1876. After an ineffectual strike engineered to improve conditions, Irish-American coalminers form a covert organization dedicated to committing acts of terrorism and sabotage against the exploitative mine owners. Refusing to submit, the mining company hire Pinkerton Detective James McParlan (Richard Harris) to secretly infiltrate the “Mollies” and identify the perpetrators. Adopting the name “McKenna”, McParlan begins an uneasy friendship with “Black Jack” Kehoe (Sean Connery), the leader of the secret society and a man willing to commit murder to meet his objectives. Denounced by some critics as humourless and preachy, The Molly Maguires nevertheless bristles with a textured grittiness and boasts a career-best performance by Harris as the conflicted agent provocateur.

  6. The Tottenham Riots, or England Riots of 2011, occurred between Saturday August 6 and Thursday August 11, 2011, in several boroughs, cities, and towns across England. The disturbances began in protest at the death of Mark Duggan, a twenty-nine-year-old Tottenham resident, who was shot in the chest and killed by police on August 4. Duggan had been suspected of “planning an attack” and was thought to be in possession of a handgun. The upheaval that followed his death included acts of arson, looting, and damage to vehicles and property, as well as violent clashes between rioters and police. Initially concentrated around North London, rioting spread to other areas of London as well as to cities such as Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester in what was described as instances of “copycat violence.” The disorder resulted in five deaths and an estimated £200 million of property damage, culminating with the local economy being severely affected. The family of Mark Duggan condemned the riots.

  7. Directed by Gordon Douglas, Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off (1973) is a sequel to the blaxploitation revenge/crime drama, Slaughter (1972). It features several actors, who would later work with Cohen such as Jim Brown, Gloria Hendry, and Ed McMahon.

  8. American Gangster (2007) is a biographical crime drama directed by Ridley Scott and written by Steve Zaillian. Derived from the article “The Return of Superfly” by Mark Jacobson (which appeared in an issue of New York magazine in 2001), the film embellishes the nefarious exploits of Frank Lucas, a former Heroin dealer who operated in Harlem during the 1960s and 1970s.

  CHAPTER 6: HELL UP IN HARLEM (1973)

  1. Julius W. Harris died of heart failure on October 7, 2004. He was eighty-one years old. Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence was one of his final films.

  2. That Man Bolt (1973) is a violent blaxploitation/chop-socky action film directed by David Lowell Rich and Henry Levin. Fred Williamson plays Jefferson Bolt, a martial arts expert, who agrees to become a courier and deliver a briefcase containing $1 million of syndicated money from Hong Kong to Mexico City via Los Angeles. Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, Bolt realizes he has been double-crossed and becomes embroiled in a series of fights, car chases, and torture by acupuncture. A tired and confused attempt to make a blaxploitation James Bond movie (it was marketed with the clumsy tagline “He’s Bonded!”) That Man Bolt is nonetheless enlivened by some good location filming and Williamson’s brutish charm.

  3. D’Urville Martin died of heart disease on May 28, 1984. He was forty-five.

  4. Cohen is featured in Isaac Julien’s blaxploitation documentary Baadasss Cinema: A Bold Look at Blaxploitation Films (2002) alongside such luminaries as Fred Williamson, Pam Grier, Melvin Van Peebles, Gloria Hendry, Quentin Tarantino, and others. Anybody who is seriously interested in exploring the subgenre should also track down Howard Johnson’s excellent 1984 documentary, Black Hollywood: Blaxploitation and Advancing an Independent Black Cinema.

  CHAPTER 7: IT’S ALIVE (1974)

  1. Saul Bass (1920-1996) was an American graphic designer and director. In a career spanning more than forty years, he designed title sequences for Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954), The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), Saint Joan (1957), Exodus (1960), and The Cardinal (1963); Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1955); Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), North By Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960); and John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1967) and Grand Prix (1968). Bass later worked on Goodfellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), The Age of Innocence (1993), and Casino (1995) for Martin Scorsese in association with his wife, Elaine.

  2. Rick Baker (b.1950) is an American makeup artist and the winner of eight Academy Awards, including the first ever competitive makeup Oscar for the startling illusions he designed and created for An American Werewolf in London (1981). Like many of his contemporaries, Baker was inspired by the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and Dick Smith’s Monster Make-up Handbook (1965), later becoming Smith’s protégé and assisting him on The Exorcist (1973). After making the mutant babies for It’s Alive, Baker created and wore the ape suits for King Kong (1976), The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), and The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981). His other credits include the assorted “cantina scene” aliens of Star Wars (1977), the flesh-stretching hallucinations of Videodrome (1982), the realistic primates of Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), the benign Bigfoot of Harry and the Hendersons (1987), the fat-suit for Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor (1996), and the simians of Planet of the Apes (2001).

  3. An irreverent homage to horror and science fiction movies, Schlock (1973) revolves around a thawed prehistoric creature known as the Schlockthropus (that just might be the missing link between simians and humans). Running amok in a small Californian town and leaving a trail of banana skins in its wake, “The Banana Killer” — as it is dubbed — falls in love with a blind girl, who believes the beast is a rather large dog. Shot for the paltry sum of $60,000, Schlock features an impressive ape-suit by a then twenty-year-old Rick Baker (writer/director/star John Landis was himself only twenty-one at the time) and cameos from Forest J. Ackerman and John Chambers.

  4. Alongside Jack Nicholson and Daniel Day Lewis, Walter Brennan (1894-1974) is the only actor ever to win three Best Actor Academy Awards. Damaged vocal chords and false teeth meant he often played old, cackling, toothless southerners whilst still in his early thirties. Although a capable character actor, he remains best remembered for essaying dependable sidekicks to the rugged Western hero. His memorable turns in My Darling Clementine (1946), in which he played the villainous Ike Clanton, Red River (1948), Rio Bravo (1959) and How the West Wa
s Won (1963) ensured that he quickly became one of the most distinctive performers of his time.

  5. The tragic helicopter crash involving John P. Ryan (1936-2007) occurred during the shooting of Delta Force 2: The Columbian Connection (1990). The accident happened on May 16, 1989, and claimed the lives of the pilot, Capt. Jojo Imperiale, and four crew people: Geoff Brewer (stuntman/Major Anderson), Gadi Danzig (cameraman), Mike Graham (key grip) and Don Marshall (gaffer). The film is dedicated to their memory.

  6. Them! is considered one of the best monster movies of the 1950s and is a certified science fiction classic. After being exposed to massive doses of lingering atomic radiation in the New Mexican desert, ants mutate into an enormous size. They migrate to Los Angeles and infest the sewer system, eventually revealing their nests to a startled city after draining a freight car of its cargo and leaving a trail of formic acid in their destructive wake. Gordon Douglas’ suspenseful, intelligent and atmospheric film boasts a documentary style approach. The oversized, irradiated insects, replete with moving antennae, hardened black carapaces, and terrifying war cries, are also impressive for a low-budget film of this vintage. The affecting scene in which the military discover the queen ant’s egg chamber was an obvious influence on a similar sequence near the climax of James Cameron’s Aliens (1986).

  7. François Truffaut (1932-1984) was a French filmmaker, actor, author and critic, who, along with his compatriots Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Agnès Varda, was one of the founders of the French New Wave. In 1954, he began writing for Cahiers du cinéma and quickly established himself as a ruthless and contentious critic. His highly controversial article, “Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français” (“A Certain Trend of French Cinema”), famously denounced the French film industry and called for the director to be redefined as “the auteur,” or individual author, of a motion picture. Throughout the 1950s, Truffaut supported Andre Bazin in the formulation and promotion of the auteur theory before making his first feature, The 400 Blows (1959), which won Truffaut the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival. His subsequent works include Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Jules and Jim (1962), Fahrenheit 451 (1966), The Wild Child (1970), Bed and Board (1970), Day for Night (1973), The Story of Adele H (1975), Love on the Run (1979), and The Last Metro (1980). In 1967, Truffaut’s book-length interview with Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock: A Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock, was published by Simon & Schuster to great acclaim. He died of a brain tumour in Paris.

  8. It’s Alive won the Special Jury Prize at the 1975 Avoriaz Film Festival.

  CHAPTER 8: GOD TOLD ME TO (1976)

  1. Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? is a best-selling book first published in Germany in 1968 under its original title Erinnerungen an die Zukur ft: Ungeloste Ratsel der Verganggenheit (Memories of the Future; Unsolved Mysteries of the Past). It introduced the theory that an advanced alien race had visited Earth during ancient times and that certain ruins, structures and artefacts of antiquity point to an extraterrestrial intervention having occurred. More radically, von Däniken postulates that the human race itself are the descendants of these first “galactic pioneers” and that the religions and technologies of ancient civilisations were in fact bestowed to humanity by these alien astronauts. Viewed by some as a monumental and profoundly revelatory work, others regard it as nothing more than graspingly speculative, baseless fiction. Predictably, the book’s phenomenal success led von Däniken to quickly spawn several sequels that exploited his theories including Return to the Stars (1970), Gods from Outer Space (1972), and The Gold of the Gods (1973). A German documentary based on von Däniken’s book, also titled Chariots of the Gods, was produced in 1970 and directed by Dr. Harald Reinl.

  2. Created by Chris Carter (b.1957), The X-Files was an American science fiction horror television series (filmed in Canada for the first five of its nine seasons) that ran on the Fox Network from 1993 until 2002. The show revolves around FBI Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) who are appointed to the X-Files, a division of the Bureau that tackles unsolved cases involving the paranormal. Mulder is a believer in the existence of aliens and other unexplained phenomena; whereas Scully is a sceptic assigned by her superiors to observe, analyse and ultimately disparage Mulder’s investigations so that he can be returned to more conventional cases. The X-Files contained an expansive mythology that involved government conspiracies and encounters with extraterrestrials (a key back-story is that Mulder’s sister was abducted by aliens). These central storylines were interspersed with “Monster-of-the-week” episodes that existed outside of the show’s wider story arc and featured the pair confronting vampires, werewolves, ghosts and supernatural serial killers. At the time of this writing, there are plans to resurrect the series with its original stars and creative team.

  3. The Honeymoon Killers (1969) is an American crime drama and the only film directed by Leonard Kastle (1929-2011), a respected composer, librettist, and teacher. Originally titled Dear Martha, Kastle’s screenplay is based on the true story of Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, a serial killer couple dubbed “The Lonely Hearts Killers.” Together, they murdered at least twenty women between 1947 and 1949 after luring them through personal ads placed in newspapers. The homicidal pair was executed by electric chair at Sing Sing prison in 1951, shortly after pledging their love for each other to the assembled observers. Starring Shirley Stoler as Beck and Tony Lo Bianco as Fernandez, The Honeymoon Killers is a disturbing meditation on desire and death. One of the great one-shot efforts by a fledgling filmmaker in American independent cinema, it was greatly admired by Michelangelo Antonioni and Francois Truffaut. The film has been viewed by some critics as the antithesis of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), with Kastle portraying the couple’s tumultuous relationship as a twisted, torrid love story and their unfortunate victims as poor white trash. It should also be noted that the original director hired to shoot The Honeymoon Killers was Martin Scorsese, who was fired after several clashes with producer Warren Steibel (apparently over the time Scorsese was taking to compose his shots).

  4. Taxi is an award-winning American sitcom that ran on ABC from 1978 to 1982 and on NBC from 1982 to 1983. Created by James L. Brooks, Stan Daniels, David Davis and Edwin Weinberger, the show revolves around the staff of the Sunshine Cab Company and the firm’s fleet garage in Manhattan. Andy Kauffman played immigrant mechanic Latka Gravas (derived from the comedian’s “foreign man” character) in all five seasons of the series.

  5. Richard Lynch (1940-2012) was a distinctive-looking American-Irish character actor famed for his many villainous roles in film, television and theater. The incident to which Cohen refers occurred behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Central Park in 1967. Under the influence of LSD, Lynch set himself on fire and sustained serious burns to seventy percent of his body. After spending more than a year recuperating from his injuries, Lynch made a memorable cinematic debut in The Scarecrow (1973). He later appeared in The Seven-Ups (1973), The Premonition (1976), Vampire (1979), The Ninth Configuration (1980), The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982), Invasion USA (1984), Bad Dreams (1988), Little Nikita (1988), Necronomicon (1993), Scanner Cop (1994), as well as Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween (2007). Lynch was scheduled to work with Zombie again on The Lords of Salem (2012), but dropped out through ill health and was replaced by Andrew Prine shortly before his death.

  6. Les Bowie (1913-1979) was a Canadian-born special effects artist who worked primarily in Britain. A pioneer of the “glass shot,” a method of painting additional scenery onto a pane of clear glass which is then positioned in front of the camera, he began his career as a scenic artist for Rank Studios in 1946, working on films such as Great Expectations (1946), Oliver Twist (1948), and The Red Shoes (1948). In 1950, Bowie left Rank and toiled as a special effects artist creating a diverse number of mattes, miniatures and mechanical effects for a variety of productions. His vast array of credits includes The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), X
: The Unknown (1956), The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), The Crawling Eye (1958), The Brides of Dracula (1960), The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), Fahrenheit 451 (1967), Five Million Miles to Earth (1967), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), One Million Years B.C. (1966), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Moon Zero Two (1969), Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974), Star Wars (1977), and Superman (1978). Bowie died shortly before he was to receive a well-deserved Special Achievement Academy Award for his work on Superman.