The end of the year,
and its attendant scourge (the holiday season), is such an emotional
burden that some of us decide to
slip away rather than confront it again. Thus, the death toll of
seniors does seem to rise as we head toward Xmas and the New Year.
I'm going to try to cover a few of the recently departed performers
whose work definitely falls into the “Funhouse favorite”
category. Herewith three gents who played “tough guys” in the
movies and on TV.
The first was a
multifaceted character actor who had quite an interesting career.
Mickey Knox was a New Yorker who had small or supporting roles in 16
films in a period of three years – he played thugs, hoods, and your
garden variety gang guy in items like Knock on Any Door,
City Across the River, and White Heat.
After he was
blacklisted in the early Fifties, Knox began acting in Italy. His
most prominent credits in that country were as the English dialogue
scripter for the classic Sergio Leone Westerns The Good, The
Bad, and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the
West. In an online interview he notes about the great
filmmaker “he didn't have any ideas that he wanted to convey [in
his work].”
He also noted that
Leone wasn't a nice man – “he had very little concern for
others.” Knox's finest Leone story involves the time he was present
when one of the actors in a Leone film committed suicide by leaping
from the window of his hotel room. Leone immediately yelled “Get
the costume – we need the costume!” (The guy in question was
wearing his outfit from the movie when he took his fatal dive.)
Knox's most
mind-bogglingly odd performances occur in Norman Mailer's improvised
crime pictures Wild 90 and Beyond the
Law (both 1968). The second film is moderately competent,
an ambitious cops-and-crooks saga that finds a rather decent-sized
ensemble going through all kinds of play-acting as policemen and the
mob and gang figures they're cracking down on.
Wild 90,
on the other hand, is just an amazing mess. A good deal of it is
inaudible (since the soundman reportedly had the boom mic facing the
wrong way), but the sequences featuring Norman, Knox, and Buzz Farber
in an apartment cooking up a crime is startlingly, wonderfully awful.
Mailer apparently didn't know the proper way to use improvisation in
film (you do it in rehearsal, not on camera), and so the film is
loaded with weird bits of proto-street-talk.
One of the odder bits
of trivia encountered when researching Knox is that he tried to get
his ex-brother-in-law (Mailer and he were married to two sisters) a
job as the screenwriter of Leone's Once Upon a Time in
America. Mailer handed in a 200-page screenplay, but his
work wasn't used.
No isolated clips of
Knox's work are available online, but you'll find endless references
to his name, since the lead character (played by Woody Harrelson) in
Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers was named
after him.
****
Like Knox, Tony Musante
was an actor from the “tri-state Metro area” (born in
Connecticut) who found a “second life” in Italian films. He also
was extremely adept at playing criminal characters, even though his
best-remembered role on TV was his one-season stint as the star of
Toma.
Musante was an
Italian-American actor who “looked ethnic” and thus could play
characters from many different backgrounds. His first notable part
was as one of two thugs who take over a subway car in the
still-disturbing drama The Incident. Musante had
played the same role in the drama that was adapted for the film a TV
production called “Ride with Terror” (on The DuPont Show
of the Week in 1963).
I saw the film again a
few months back at a repertory house in which the patrons *love* to
laugh at what they consider dated or melodramatic films (no
suspension of disbelief for these folk – they're hipper-than-thou).
What was interesting is that, while the opening segments leading up
to the characters boarding the same subway train were chuckled over,
the moment in which a gay character is harassed by Musante and his
cohort (played by Martin Sheen in his movie debut) struck a chord in
the audience and everyone shut up for the rest of the picture.
The film is still
unsettling for big-city dwellers, especially those who have ridden
the subway late at night or on weekends when the cars are empty as
hell. The film's message may be specifically linked to the time it
was made (three years after the Kitty Genovese incident proved that
NYCers will not come to each other's aid, even when one could safely
do so). But it is so well-acted and its situation so primal that it
still packs a punch today.
One of the many cult
movies Musante starred in was The Mercenary
(1968), a spaghetti Western directed by Sergio Corbucci (who has been
put in the “Pantheon” of Western directors by a deluded, jumpy
filmmaker who shall not be mentioned here). The film’s best moments
all feature Jack Palance in a ridiculous curly wig, but Musante is
equally memorable as a sleazy Mexican revolutionary who is dressed as
a rodeo clown in the final shoot-out.
Another key role for
Musante in Italian genre cinema was the lead in Argento’s debut as
a director, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
(1970). As with much of the best Argento, the film has stylish
visuals and a memorable soundtrack (this time by the inimitable Ennio
Morricone).
In the same, very
active period, Musante was part of the gang who kidnap Kim Darby in
Robert Aldrich’s wonderfully jarring The Grissom Gang
(1971).
Although he worked
steadily for over half a century (running the gamut in his TV work
from Alfred Hitchcock Presents to Oz,
most of Musante’s obits centered on a cop show that he did for only
one season (1973-’74), Toma. The show was based
on real-life Newark, N.J., detective Dave Toma, who was well-known
for having a high arrest rate during his years as a police – and
for the fact that he was a “master of disguise.”
After the first season
Musante quit the show and it was turned into Baretta
with Robert Blake. Musante went on to work regularly in TV (soaps and
crime shows), the movies, and onstage, playing good guys and bad,
always with a maximum of intensity.
*****
The most notable tough
guy to leave us was definitely Tom Laughlin, who became a cult
sensation in the Seventies, and then branched off into several
“quixotic” branches of endeavor that were far from filmmaking.
After 1973, however, he was best known by another name: Billy Jack!
Laughlin was a very
unusual figure in show business, since he started out as a kind of
James Dean clone, but wound up (as some of his obits noted) mixing
the indie-filmmaker methods of Cassavetes with the savvy exploitation
showmanship of Roger Corman. His films were morality plays with
violence, self-righteous tracts that were on the “good side” of
history and supply us with a fascinating window into the mind and
emotions of middle America in the Seventies.
Laughlin began his
public life as a high school and college football star. He said his
life was changed by seeing a stage production of Streetcar
Named Desire, and there never was any doubt that he was
totally influenced by both Brando and Dean. He appeared in a few
small TV and movie roles in the Fifties, but two events were the most
important: his marriage to Delores Taylor in 1954 (the pair remained
married right up until Laughlin's death last week) and his being cast
in the starring role of the low-budget potboiler The
Delinquents.
The 1957 film is just
another juvenile delinquent saga, but it has developed a small cult
for two reasons: because Laughlin stars in it, doing his best Dean
disaffected-teen shtick, and the film was the fiction-feature debut
of a Kansas City native named Robert Altman. Altman went on the
record as saying that Laughlin was “an unbelievable pain in the
ass,” but the film is important because Altman delved into the Dean
mythos with his documentary The James Dean Story
(also made in '57) and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy
Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982).
You can see the full
film below. It's definitely B-movie fun, but don't expect anything on
the order of Rebel Without a Cause....
Laughlin continued on
as an actor after The Delinquents, even making his
bow as a writer-director with the campus drama The Proper
Time in 1960. Here's a wonderfully lurid trailer for the
film:
Laughlin's official
bios and obits point out that he took a six-year hiatus from acting
to run a Montessori school with his wife (1959-65). Apparently the
school went bust in '65, which found him again making a low-budget
potboiler, this time with him playing a high school athlete (at 34
years of age). His official bios also note that the film, The
Young Sinner (aka “Like Father, Like Son”), was intended
as the first part of a trilogy called “We Are All Christ.” (No
comment.)
He reportedly wrote the
screenplay for Billy Jack back in 1954, but
couldn't find money to produce it until 1971. In the meantime, he
made his debut as the character in the action flick The Born
Losers (1967).
I haven't seen the film
in years, but remember that, upon viewing it after Billy
Jack, one is struck by how nasty and exploitative it is,
compared to the later BJ films. There's a *lot* of rape in the film –
all of which is present so that Billy Jack can dole out revenge to
the rapist bikers.
By 1969 Laughlin
finally had the money to shoot his Billy Jack screenplay, and in the
process created a very memorable cult picture that expresses its
peacenik message in a very entertaining way (read: with violence!).
At the time the film
was shot Laughlin was already 38 years old, so his martial arts
displays were even more impressive, as was the fact that he
produced the film independently with additional funding from three
different distributors (American International, Fox, and Warner
Bros). The film did decently for a low-budget production upon its
first release in '71, but exploded in '73 when Laughlin bought it
back from Warners and four-walled (read: rented) 1,200 theaters
around the country to show it.
The film grossed 80
million dollars in that run and became an instantly recognizable part
of the pop culture of the time. Some critics questioned the fact that
Laughlin was proposing dealing with racism and close-minded
right-wing ideology by “whopping” the villains in the face with
his feet (BJ did also use guns in his countercultural campaign). The
notion that a peace-oriented half-Native character could kick the
shit out of rednecks clearly appealed to the youth demographic, as
seen in these “testmonial” ads Laughlin shot for TV:
There are several
super-memorable scenes in the picture, most of them involving BJ
“whopping” the villains (I'm fascinated by the fact that Laughlin
chose the word “whop” to indicate kicking). The two “greatest
hits” from the pic are definitely BJ's face-off with the racist
sheriff (Bert Freed):
And the scene in the
ice cream parlor in which BJ comes to find that the racist fuckers
have been mocking the Native American kids in the local “freedom
school”:
As I noted in my blog entry on the band Coven, I hadn't realized that Laughlin
truly did take over aspect of the film's promotion, to the extent
that he became the “manager” of that great band, having them
perform outside the movie theaters where the film was playing.
He also produced their
second album, which has some great vocals by Jinx Dawson, but is very
weak compared to their other two LPs. Something also occurred between
the time of the recording and the album release, in that the band
member's names are nowhere on the record cover, and their faces were
taken out with White Out from the cover photo!
So Laughlin didn't do
much for the band's progress in the business, but Jinx Dawson did do
a helluva lot for his movie, with her superb vocal on the “One Tin
Soldier” theme (that had been written and performed first by the
Canadian band The Original Caste). The “Coven” recording (Jinx
credited the song to her band, even though she was the only band
member to appear on the soundtrack version of the song) charted in
1971 (in the Top 40) and then again in '73 and '74 (since the film
was still in circulation, and the song was so damned catchy).
The first real sequel
(since Born Losers is almost too unpleasant to be
classified as a true Billy Jack picture), The Trial of Billy
Jack was release in 1974). The film is quite strange,
including trippy Native American content that predated the stuff
found in Oliver Stone's The Doors by 17 years.
It's an odd film, running an epic 170 minutes and containing much too
much plot.
The storyline involves
the titular trial, Billy Jack's prison stay, the efforts of the
“freedom school” to run their own news service, and the eventual
confrontation between the bad guys and Billy.
Laughlin's master
stroke with this film was two-fold: he had a nationwide release of
the picture on its opening day (unheard of for a smaller production
at that time), and he bought out ad time during national news
programs (which, of course, were nightly viewing rituals for folks
back in the Seventies).
At some point I have to
rewatch Trial, but I remember vividly thinking it
was half of a great action/message film, made unwieldy by its running
time. The “vision quest” sequences are very odd – remember that
the scenes that don't fully come off in Scorsese's The Last
Temptation of Christ are those depicting Christ's 40 days
in the desert. So if a master filmmaker like Scorsese couldn't carry
it off there, in Trial we wind up having moments
like this:
Laughlin directed one
non-Billy Jack film in the Seventies, The Master
Gunfighter (1975) with Ron “Superfly” O'Neal (No clips
of that online at all!). In the Bicentennial year, he decided that
the next vehicle for BJ would be a remake of Capra's Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington.
The result was a film
that never got a regular release in theaters and was first seen by
the public in a VHS release many years later. I remember Laughlin
discussing it on various TV interviews (including a few stints on
Merv Griffin). I confess I haven't yet caught up to Billy
Jack Goes to Washington, but it has a good supporting cast
of sympathetic figures and villains (E.G. Marshall, Peter Donat,
Lucie Arnaz). There are fights in the film, but obviously Laughlin
wanted the film to deliver a contemporary message (including an
anti-nuclear-power plot thread) using the model of the Capra film:
After the
Washington debacle, Laughlin continued to be
active but was effectively almost finished in the film industry. His
filmography lists two British productions he had uncredited roles in
(or was that another Tom Laughlin?), and includes two small roles he
had in mainstream American productions: the Mitchum version of The
Big Sleep (1978) and The Legend of Long Ranger
(1981).
For the next three
decades Laughlin would show up in the press and on interview shows
every so often, either speaking out on political issues or pitching
the notion of another Billy Jack film. The non-cinematic aspect of
his life is covered heavily online. You can find videos on YT of him
discussing a book he wrote on cancer; there are also several
interviews about his runs for president in 1992 (as a Democrat), in
2004 (as a Republican), and in 2008 (as a Democrat again).
In 1986 he started a
film called The Return of Billy Jack that found
the character cracking down on child pornographers in New York City.
It's not clear what scuttled the production – the film was
unfinished – but it was reported that he injured himself on the set
of the film, and also that the financial backing just wasn't there.
Over the last few years he had been discussing online another BJ
feature (one possible title, when he was very pissed off at G.W.
Bush: Billy Jack's Crusade to End the War in Iraq and Restore
America to Its Moral Purpose).
He
finally hit on the title “Billy Jack and Jean” and pitched the
film in a few videos on YT:
Some
of his recent videos had found him praising people in contemporary
Hollywood (as with a video-rant about how great both Spielberg and Ben Affleck are as directors). The notion of the “last film”
is a perennial concern for
older filmmakers. I remember when I interviewed Budd Boetticher and
he discussed how his dying friend John Ford was certain he was going
to get well enough to make “one more film”:
One
watches the YouTube videos that Laughlin put up and gets this same
impression. (There was one online that I can no longer find where he
namechecked a whole bunch of contemporary actors, from Sean Penn to
George Clooney, in what seemed like a plea for them to become
involved in his Billy Jack sequel.) He had a number of medical
travails in his final decade, from tongue cancer to several strokes,
and so his efforts to continue his work as a writer and filmmaker are
quite touching, no matter ill-starred they seemed.
Thus,
I would recommend checking out the blog run by his children, called
“Billy Jack Rights.” The name is a bit formal (and way too
legal) perhaps, but the content is quite nice, with the entries
including rare photos from Laughlin and Taylor's lives and much rare
info and documentation about the Billy Jack features. The blog can be
found here.
In
a 2005 New York Times piece, producer Gavin Polone
(Curb Your Enthusiasm, Gilmore Girls)
was asked about his possible work with Laughlin: “[Polone]
approached Mr. Laughlin years ago about making a sequel to his
trademark film. But, he said, Mr. Laughlin was unwilling to work
within the Hollywood system, and his new project would probably
suffer as a result.”
It
did become clear during interviews with Laughlin (several of which
can be found on YouTube) that he didn't want to work with the
mainstream of Hollywood in any way, shape, or form (except for those
actors he'd mention in his video-chats). While this clearly can be
seen as self-destructive, it also is of a piece with his self-reliant
philosophy of the Seventies, the kind of thinking that made him a
cult figure and also compelled him to continue his quixotic quest for
self-sufficiency in a world pretty much run by corporations.
