From my piece written for the New Beverly.

What will happen to Debbie? What will happen to Martin? I always ponder this when watching the ending of John Ford’s masterpiece, The Searchers. Most certainly I’ve long soaked in, reflected on and studied the famous final shot of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards, standing outside that beautifully-framed doorway — the warmth and domesticity, darkened, on one side, the light from the frontier of Monument Valley on the other — he’ll roam lonely and damaged, never fitting in civilized society, never fitting in anywhere. The past is the past and he’ll reject it, and he will be rejected from the future (no one invites him inside). Ethan stands solitary in near purgatory, much like the dead Comanche he ruthlessly shoots in the eyes earlier in the picture, wandering “forever between the winds.” Even with his final forgiving act towards Debbie, there’s no redemption for him. There’s no saving him from himself  — he will remain dark and demented and a question mark to Ford lovers: “Do I feel for Ethan?”

It’s one of the most famous shots in film history, inspiring filmmakers from Francis Ford Coppola’s fade to darkness door-shutting scene of The Godfather to Vince Gilligan’s finale of Breaking Bad. The movie is notably worshiped and studied – Ford biographers, notably Scott Eyman and Joseph McBride’s impressive tome dig into the movie and Ford, and directors Jean-Luc Godard, George Lucas, Paul Schrader, Peter Bogdanovich, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese are among the famous, much-discussed, passionate devotees, so much that it’s been a point of annoyance for a few film critics who have reassessed it as overrated, offensive or, worse, boring. Xan Brooks at The Guardian questioned why it’s been so canonized with, “They [those who love the film] misinterpreted a tentative shuffle-step as a giant leap forward and hailed the film as a revisionist masterpiece as opposed to a stumbling reconnaissance.”

One of the most interesting and best essays comes from Jonathan Lethem, who wrote “Defending The Searchers,” which covers his decades-long love of the movie; how he wrestles with the picture at different stages of his life, what it means to him and how he views it. He wrote, “The film on the screen is lush, portentous. You’re worried for it.” Anyone who has seen and admired The Searchers multiple times, drawn into Ford’s poetry and stunning compositions, finds something to think about and drink in, often beyond what they thought of from their previous viewing. Scorsese claims to watch The Searchers at least once or twice a year and in doing so, discovers something more to reflect upon. In a 2013 column for The Hollywood Reporter Scorsese wrote:

“Like all great works of art, it’s uncomfortable. The core of the movie is deeply painful. Every time I watch it – and I’ve seen it many, many times since its first run in 1956 – it haunts and troubles me. The character of Ethan Edwards is one of the most unsettling in American cinema. In a sense, he’s of a piece with Wayne’s persona and his body of work with Ford and other directors like Howard Hawks and Henry Hathaway. It’s the greatest performance of a great American actor. (Not everyone shares this opinion. For me, Wayne has only become more impressive over time.)”

He’s right. The movie is uncomfortable, but not solely because of Ethan, it’s uncomfortable for Debbie and for Martin as well. Because walking through that famous door is teenager, now-a-woman Debbie (Natalie Wood), tentative, traumatized, the widow and “polluted” white woman of the slain Comanche, Scar (Henry Brandon), and her adopted brother, Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), the part Cherokee (one eighth) who spent all those years protecting Debbie from murderous Uncle Ethan while enduring his uncle’s humiliations and racist ridicule (“Blanket head”) and Vera Miles’s hyperactive horniness (which isn’t so terrible, though she’s not exactly a likable character).

Indian-hating Ethan does grow fond of Martin (if you can call it that) along their five-year Homeric quest to find Martin’s sister, Debbie (kidnapped by the Comanche as a young girl after her family is slaughtered and raped), but Martin’s put through so much along the way, made the butt of jokes, in danger, I find myself admiring his resolve more and more every time I watch it. He pushes on in spite of his indignities. He’s not even allowed to drink in a bar. Martin works as the moral center of the picture but defies cliché. Like the intriguingly dark and amoral anti-hero Ethan, a guy who will shoot a man in the back, Martin, who would probably be more typically macho in another picture, is frequently aggravated to exasperation, lovable and comic, almost light, but, no… wait minute, he’s not light. Martin’s been through some heartbreaking hell: himself an orphan, rescued by Ethan years before after an Indian massacre, orphaned again after his adoptive family is killed. “It just happened to be me,” Ethan harshly hollers to the young man he refuses to consider any kind of kin. “You don’t need to make any more of it.”

Resourceful and tougher than he seems, Martin’s passionate, even tortured, a defender of Debbie but also following along, sometimes in awe, to find anything forgiving in Ethan. Just the casting of Jeffrey Hunter (who would later play the most beautiful Jesus Christ in the history of Jesus Christs in Nicolas Ray’s King of Kings) seems a way to complicate Wayne – to irk him beyond his character’s Cherokee blood. Martin’s youth, goodness, beauty, and real liberalism towards his sister (he does not think her virtue destroyed by Indians) is decent and lovely. It’s also somewhat radical and reflects how complex and murky John Ford was on these issues as well.

But Ethan is such a force, he exudes so much presence and fearsome qualities, that he overtakes nearly everything, distracting or perhaps even diluting Martin’s heroism. This is to the picture’s credit since Martin builds and grows on you and grows on Ethan as well, so much that he becomes some kind of sneak attack of intractable sensitivity. Viewing Martin, at first, as a well-meaning greenhorn, hotheaded but insecure and sweet, a sort of apprentice to Ethan, it’s extra moving when he bravely shields his sister from Ethan’s gun. That scene hits you hard; it’s mightily emotional and potent to the point that it takes you aback (don’t forget – this is her brother – and Martin is not some novice). At that moment, Martin is braver than anyone in the movie. If anything happened to him, you’d be brokenhearted. I would be.

The scenes between Debbie and Martin are so touching and, to me, as powerful as Ethan famously holding Debbie aloft at the end of the picture (“Let’s go home Debbie”) – not killing her. Wood and Hunter connect on the screen so lovingly and so strongly, that I’ll transfer what Franzen said about the movie and place it on brother and sister: “you’re worried” for them. What will happen to them? Again, this takes me back to the end, when I think of the two beaten-up beauties walking through that door. The family welcomes them with open arms, but will society? And will the family remain so open? Debbie will now have to learn to live outside of the Native American world she’s become accustomed to and brother Martin will doubtlessly marry Laurie (Vera Miles), who expresses her own racism when she complains of their search for Laurie: “Fetch what home? The leavings a Comanche buck sold time and again to the highest bidder, with savage brats of her own? Do you know what Ethan will do if he has a chance? He’ll put a bullet in her brain… I tell you, Martha would want him to!” Martin answers, “Only if I’m dead.” Laurie throws in Martin’s dead mother on top of her racist repudiation? Jesus. You wonder how Laurie and family reallyare going to treat Debbie once she’s “home.”

Laurie also seems more sexually obsessed with Martin than in love — she can’t keep her hands off of him and delights seeing him naked while he’s demanding privacy during a bath. She’s sexually aggressive to the point of obnoxiousness. There’s nothing wrong with that and who can blame her? She’s lonely out there and it is Jeffrey Hunter after all (who shows up looking like that?) but it’s intriguing just how much Martin is objectified in the movie, much more than the women. Often shirtless, soaking in the bath shielding his body like a bashful woman, rolling around in blankets, or just ridiculously gorgeous, those blue eyes burning a hole through Ford’s lyrical, magnificent frames, Hunter’s beauty occasionally makes you gasp. It’s also a source of Ford’s humor, particularly his romantic mishaps (and the entire wedding sequence that goes haywire), but also underscores his difference from others. When first introduced, Martin, all sprightly and smiling, is riding Indian style –  bareback.

In some ways, he’s more akin to Scar (also handsome, also with alarming blue eyes) whom his sister is sleeping with (never said, but clearly the idea of sex with a savage further fuels Ethan’s murderous fury). According to Hunter in a 1956 Picturegoer Magazine profile, the young actor met Ford in his office with slicked-back dark hair, wearing a “very open-necked sports shirt to display a healthy tan.” John Ford sat at his desk smoking a large cigar, stared at Hunter “for what seemed an endless time, then grunted: ‘Take your shirt off!’ Hunter replied as if Ethan was barking at him and recalled, “I did just that.”

Reading Glenn Frankel’s impressive, exhaustive book, “The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend,” gives insight into the true story and the layered mythologies around the kidnapping that inspired the novel and the movie. And it makes you contemplate Debbie’s fate after going “home.” Cynthia Ann Parker was the real-life Laurie, a Texan girl who in 1836 was abducted by Comanches after they attacked and killed her family. She spent 24 years with the Comanches, married a war chief, presumably loved him and birthed three children. In 1860 the U.S. Cavalry and Texas Rangers came to her village and she once again witnessed the slaughter of her family. When they realized she was white, she and her baby were returned to what was left of her family. But she wasn’t happy. She was now a Comanche, did not want to be a Christian or to live in the white world outside of the Indians. She remained depressed and lonely for the rest of her days –  an absolutely shattered figure.

From that tragic story, a mythology was woven and expanded as her Uncle (who obsessively searched but never found her in real life) was transformed into the protagonist of Alan Le May’s 1954 novel “The Searchers” from which Ford’s 1956 picture was adapted. From real life to mythology to novel to screen, the tale twists and turns and bends but one thing remains: the captivity narrative being a popular western tale, bringing up all kinds of issues and ideas about conquest and even eroticism. As Frankel stated in an interview:

“It raises all of these difficult issues. At the same time, besides all of this sort of personal and psychological tension involved, it becomes a sort of justification for the conquest of the West … So there are these psychological, psychosexual tensions involved, there are these imperial notions, and Americans continue to tell these stories. Around the time Cynthia Ann was kidnapped in 1836, if you look at the bestseller list, three of the four top bestsellers in America are James Fennimore Cooper novels, all of which have captivity themes. And then the fourth one was a non-fiction book about Mary Jamison, a woman who was captured by Seneca Indians in upstate New York in the 18th century.”

He also said, “There’s something about being in this land and having the ‘other’ savages, these people, these natural, scary, people, come and take you, take your family, take your wife, take your children, and haul them off into the wilderness. It’s scary, and it’s a little bit sexy.”

That sexiness horrifies Ethan. Or he’s drawn to it. After all, we’ve no idea what he’s been doing during his long wanderings, learning the Comanche language, understanding their customs. It would not be a surprise if he’d slept with many Native Americans or harbored an attraction (though the poor Squaw who accidentally becomes Martin’s bride is treated with cruel humor, only to be met with selfless tragedy – Martin and Ethan appear visibly guilty). Ethan is the dark heart, perhaps in his case, additionally the broken-hearted (and not just romantically – for his past forbidden love of Martha), blood-soaked history of violence and domination of the West, but a man who must contend with the likes of Debbie and Martin and… soften. He cannot kill Debbie, even if he believes her sullied by savages, and sticks with Martin, whom he spends many a night with, five damn years in fact (as Roger Ebert asked in his review, “What did they talk about?”). Ethan will never really approve of brother and sister, he’ll never be friends with Martin (even after bequeathing everything to him, which Martin rejects on behalf of Debbie), but Ethan has a little in common with those he’s saved, more than he knows. Or perhaps he does know this. These three are not at all “normal” and they are all going to endure some strangeness in their futures. Martin has been through enough to prove his resiliency but… Debbie?

So, that doorway shot, Ethan standing outside representing the past, Debbie and Martin, walking in, the arresting exotics of the future, what will become of them? Thinking of Frankel’s thoughts and deep study of Cynthia Ann Parker, Martin and especially Debbie, whom the picture suggests will be loved by their families (even if Laurie previously proclaimed Debbie better off dead), will likely become objects of sexual fascination and hatred of miscegenation from the outside world. With Debbie “home” protective, liberal Martin has a lot more defense ahead of him. He’ll surely repeat the same he said of Ethan concerning other angry men and in different circumstances: “He’s a man that can go crazy wild, and I intend to be there to stop him in case he does.”

My piece published at The New Beverly.

“Of all the people in Thalia, Billy missed the picture show most. He couldn’t understand that it was permanently closed. Every night he kept thinking it would open again. For seven years he had gone to the show every single night, always sitting in the balcony, always sweeping out once the show was over; he just couldn’t stop expecting it. Every night he took his broom and went over to the picture show, hoping it would be open. When it wasn’t, he sat on the curb in front of the courthouse, watching the theater, hoping it would open a little later; then, after a while, in puzzlement, he would sweep listlessly off down the highway toward Wichita Falls. Sonny watched him as closely as he could, but it still worried him. He was afraid Billy might get through a fence or over a cattle-guard and sweep right off into the mesquite. He might sweep away down the creeks and gullies and never be found.” — Larry McMurtry’s novel, “The Last Picture Show” 

Some of us walk through life as the leading players in our movies. Memories and real life melodrama can intertwine in our minds like our own personal photoplays – we make pictures every day. We see this online, shared photographs and videos, creating story, mystery and art, and sometimes narcissism and pleading. But some of us also do this when we stop for a moment and put away that camera or phone, and we’ve done this ever since feature films have appeared in theaters. Pictures started moving and we starting moving our own pictures. Not with a camera but with eyes and minds – and we still do. Flickering through our brains like vivid Technicolor reminiscences or black and white chiaroscuro, our movie minds also project cinema out into the world, eyes scanning surroundings like cameras, hearts hopeful for something cinematic and exciting to create our own big screen stories. Movies can seep into our souls so much that we often feel we’re walking in a movie – real life should be like a movie – we think. Life can be lonely, a vast expanse of time, experiences behind us, experiences ahead of us, and when we stop to take a look at our environment, a forlorn feeling can flood our thoughts through the most everyday things: out of a car window during traffic, listening to a song, in crowded cities, staring down endless roads and observing barren landscapes. Many of us will be stricken, if even for a minute, with a void or an ache or, to quote Peggy Lee, “Is that all there is to a fire?” Though we study movies for all the reasons people essay and critique them, watching movies can fill and fuel that fire for 90 or 120 minutes or more, an all-enveloping escape, enclosed in dark rooms transported by that large screen. So can transferring those images onto real life, imprinting and even blurring our reality.

There are many passages in Larry McMurtry’s novel The Last Picture Show that exemplify the merging of movies and real life, illustrating why it was so well-suited for Peter Bogdanovich’s tender and heartbreaking big screen adaptation. In the novel, which takes place in 1951 (the 1971 movie does as well), the high school senior protagonist Sonny, admits his affair with an older, sad and married woman to a waitress he’s fond of: “‘Ruth Popper?’ she said, amazed. ‘How do you mean, Sonny? Have you been flirtin’ with her like you do with me, or is it different?’ ‘It’s different,” he said. ‘It’s… like in a movie.’”

That Sonny really is having an affair with Ruth Popper, and one that becomes complicated, raw and emotionally messy to the point that she frightens him even as he desires her, makes it a hopeful yearning on his part – that it’s like a movie. It’s not, not with any kind of glamour or “suitable” romance, but in its own heightened way, of course it is. Peyton Place or a Douglas Sirk masterpiece, though Bogdanovich and McMurtry do not frame it that way. (The picture feels both New Wave and classic, Bogdanovich knowing his Ford and his Hawks and also something less easily definable, then and even now.) But Sonny gets a thrill and peculiar love from Ruth and eventually they don’t care about their audience – all that talk and the looks in the town – everyone knows. And Ruth is nice to kiss. Much nicer than his first disagreeable girlfriend. Earlier in the movie they do some heavy-petting in the theater and Sonny’s eyes are fixated on a close-up of beautiful Elizabeth Taylor, not his date. In the novel it’s Ginger Rogers and he envisions her naked. In Bogdanovich’s version (co-scripted with McMurtry), we can only think that’s what Sonny is thinking. We don’t doubt it.

A perfect place for thinking, projecting, remembering and watching, Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, set in the tiny town of Anarene, Texas, opens on their one movie theater, The Royal (Father of the Bride is on the marquee), panning to reveal a desolate Main Street with one traffic light, all dusty and fading and hanging on for dear life. Wind and leaves blow across the chilly landscape (shot so evocatively in black and white by veteran Robert Surtees) as we hear a car motor chugging. That’s Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) who struggles to get the heap going, freezing his ass off and fixing his radio dial to better receive Hank Williams’ “Why Don’t You Love Me?” Hank Williams will follow these characters all over the movie, commenting on and filling in the quiet they’re intent to avoid. He also matches many of the character’s spirits and Sonny’s especially – “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” The novel’s first two sentences begin: “Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the only human creature in the town. It was a bad feeling, and it usually came on him in the mornings early, when the streets were completely empty.”

Sonny spies Billy (Sam Bottoms, the actor’s younger brother) sweeping the street and gives him a lift, playfully turning the younger kid’s baseball cap backwards, an affectionate refrain throughout the movie and they drive on to the pool hall. Through the detailed, formal but never stodgy, and incredibly lived-in excellence of Bogdanovich’s direction (and production designer Polly Platt) we are immediately transported right into this world that, at the time, was 20 year ago, but we don’t feel simple nostalgia about it (though we wished these places still existed. I do anyway). As beautifully shot and as intriguing as this town is, it also appears hard and unforgiving. Maybe life was simpler? Maybe? But as the picture goes on to show, it certainly wasn’t more innocent (that’s fine, nothing is) or easier (that’s also true). Watching it in 2017, Anarene is such a relic that it’s almost exotic. If these towns were dying then they’re sure as hell not surviving now unless you’re lucky enough to stumble across one on a cross-country road trip. But meeting Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson), a father figure to Sonny and Billy and, as we’ll soon learn, Sonny’s best friend Duane (Jeff Bridges), we feel warmer with his friendship (the place seems too small to say community). Even razzing the boys for their lousy football team, Sam’s a complex, even poetic man (though he’d never describe himself as such).

He’s the heart and soul of the town – and not in any corny way – and we grow so fond of him that it will bring on an almost sick despair to even think of him gone. If he ever leaves, the town will sag down further, almost on top of itself. Not only does Sam own the pool hall (where handsome-hard mystery man, Abilene, played by Clu Gulager, has his own key), but the diner and the movie theater. Sam provides all of the services for escape and joy it seems, but also wisdom and ageless camaraderie, even if he’s decades older than the boys. But he’s missing a piece in his life, and there’s something quite melancholy about him, specifically because he’s so gracious and lovingly worn-in. In a later, powerful moment, he recalls a memory to Sonny that, as spoken by Johnson, is so vivid and cinematic that we can envision the scene almost right there in front of us – his mind rolling a movie reel of the past as we watch him speak:

“You wouldn’t believe how this country’s changed. First time I seen it, there wasn’t a mesquite tree on it, or a prickly pear neither. I used to own this land, you know. First time I watered a horse at this tank was – more than forty years ago. I reckon the reason why I always drag you out here is probably I’m just as sentimental as the next fella when it comes to old times. Old times. I brought a young lady swimmin’ out here once, more than 20 years ago. Was after my wife had lost her mind and my boys was dead. Me and this young lady was pretty wild, I guess. In pretty deep. We used to come out here on horseback and go swimmin’ without no bathing suits. One day, she wanted to swim the horses across this tank. Kind of a crazy thing to do, but we done it anyway. She bet me a silver dollar she could beat me across. She did. This old horse I was ridin’ didn’t want to take the water. But she was always lookin’ for somethin’ to do like that. Somethin’ wild. I’ll bet she’s still got that silver dollar.”

That woman turns out to be his greatest love and, he, the greatest love of the woman (who still lives in the town, Ellen Burstyn’s saucy and soulful Lois Farrow), deepening a character whom we might initially view as simply calculated and alcoholic. Not Lois. She’s hard but sexy as hell here (her opening shot reminded me of Lee Remick in Anatomy of a Murder), but when the ice in her drink cools, Lois seems like one of the wisest women in town. Refreshingly, Bogdanovich and Burstyn (and McMurtry) allow her to be a bitch, but a human-being bitch, and when she opens up and warms us with a smile or simply amuses us with a line, we genuinely like her. Few are simple or shallow in this movie, in fact, not even Lois’s daughter, Jacy (Cybill Shepherd), the prettiest, richest girl in town and girlfriend of Duane. Jacy’s been described by some writers as a cock-tease or even a femme fatale, but she’s a bit more complicated than that (as she is definitely in the novel). She’s a tease but she’s doing it for reasons that may appear cold-blooded, reasons more resourceful, yet confused and, yes again, cinematic. She wants a big story; she wants drama, romance; she wants everyone talking about her. Why not? There’s not much else going on and if she’s the prettiest girl, why sit around waiting for intrigue? So start it. She’s vain (she’s so lovely it’s hard for her not to be) but she’s also unsure of herself, adventurous and curiously sexual, though sometimes scared, without the movie showing her any condescension (her later moment with Abilene boldly proves this). When she finally tries to sleep with lovesick, horny Duane and, baffling to him, he can’t perform, she makes sure those outside the motel room watching in their cars think they just did it. She has an audience and she is going to be the star, virgin or no virgin, dammit. When her girlfriends excitedly bounce into the de-flowering chamber asking her how it was, she gives them her best movie star face, looking up, liquid eyes all dreamily: “I just can’t describe it in words.” Jacy really should get out of Anarene and move to Hollywood.

Sonny’s lover is not so Hollywood – the aforementioned Ruth Popper (Cloris Leachman) – wife of the one the most unlikable characters in the movie – the coach. She’s pretty, frail, nervous, middle-aged, prone to crying or occasional anger, apologizing to Sonny, mad at him, then mad at herself. You feel for her, you want her to find happiness, but you’re not sure what to make of their union; if it should last at all. Sonny is still growing up even after growing up so fast. You grow up quickly in a town like this – working, running a pool hall, smoking, whoring, maturing past sexual interludes with bovine (mentioned in passing in the movie, in much more detail in the novel) – but he’s not weathered the 40 years Ruth has yet. And, yet, she seems like she’s done absolutely nothing in her life save for changing her bedroom wallpaper and serving cookies to kids. She hates her husband, she gets sick, she falls for Sonny. A lot more pain is in store for her and the Picture Show of Sonny – that lovely romance that makes her swoon and escape her depressing little house – could not be sustainable. But what’s wonderful about this movie is, hell. It very well could be, for good reasons or bad reasons or reasons somewhere in between. Sonny, nearly an orphan, loves (maybe, we’re not sure) and desires Ruth, but he also makes her feel childlike, and gives her an underage kind of paternal care. She’s less a mother figure (his mother is deceased), and more like the sweet, drug-addicted father he can’t count on. In the novel McMurtry writes of Sonny looking at Ruth: “There was something wild in her face that made Sonny think of his father – when she smiled at him there was a pressure behind the smile, as if something inside were trying to break through her skin.”

But Sonny is just so young, and in a final scene, as Ruth gazes at his innocent-looking eyes, his youth so strong, it’s both strangely upsetting and tenderly poignant. Bogdanovich lingers on this long enough for the viewer to truly feel that age gap. And Bottoms plays all of this with a quiet charm and longing, a longing for something (what is it?). His longing is so powerful that, in some cases, it’s simply his eyes, those cinematic eyes, looking as we look with him – surveying the land, the town, a face or even a tumbleweed – that gives us an overwhelming surge of beautiful heartache. Sonny’s already experienced two other beloved people die: one young (which he sees), the other old (offscreen, which feels so jarring since Sonny views everything) and both unexpectedly, that you wonder how much he’s truly processed in his mind. What is he thinking? He seems like the type who might get out of the town (and he tries, briefly) but, nope. Looks like he’s gonna stay. Will he always? Bogdanovich and McMurtry will not answer that. Not in this picture (you’ll need to read and watch Texasville to find out).

And now the movie theater has closed down (Sonny and Duane watch Howard Hawks’s Red River the final night before Duane heads out for Korea, another loss). No more time staring at the screen (TV is taking over) but Sonny will likely listen to more music and drink in whatever is in front of him or comes his way – the pool hall, the residents, newcomers, cars, random excitements, girls. Maybe he’ll go crazy. Whatever he’s doing or wherever he’s going, the fading town is still standing while he matures into another year. Sonny will continue to make his own movie memories through living, however that goes. One day he’ll likely weave a vivid impression of a time to one younger than him, just as Sam the Lion did. Maybe he’ll fall for another woman, hard. Wonder if it’ll be different? “Like in a movie.”

Out today! The first of my monthly essays for Ed Brubaker's acclaimed "Kill or Be Killed" with artwork by the great Sean Phillips. Read my take on Alan Arkin's adaptation of Jules Feiffer's darkly comic Little Murders starring Elliott Gould (with a brilliant scene by Donald Sutherland, as well standouts by Vincent Gardenia, Marcia Rodd and a hilariously strange Jon Korkes).

Pick it up or order here: https://imagecomics.com/comics/releases/kill-or-be-killed-5

 

 

From my New Beverly piece on the trials, tribulations and tragedies of Leo Gorcey & Bobby Jordan and looking at Kid Dynamite.

Leo Gorcey was once a plumber. He was in his last year of high school and worked for his Uncle’s plumbing business earning six dollars a week. He didn’t like that kind of money. It was 1935 and though, not dirt poor, times were tight for the divorced family living in New York City. His dad (Bernard Gorcey) was a respected stage actor who, according to Richard Roat’s “Hollywood’s Made to Order Punks,” used a bit of reverse psychology, telling his son he couldn’t act, luring the pugnacious kid to audition for the play Dead End. He came in his plumber’s clothes. In an interview with Richard Lamparski shortly before his death, Gorcey claimed his dad knew someone involved in Dead End. He said his dad could have used connections early on to help the kid along with acting but Gorcey wasn’t interested in that. Still, he wasn’t interested in being a plumber either. The money was negligible and he complained that he couldn’t “buy a pair of slacks or a pair of shoes in a month.” (Hearing him utter this with distinct Brooklyn Gorcey-speak, I thought of all those depression-era youngsters, wanting more out of life and being proud of it when they got it – Paul Muni showing off his shirts in Howard Hawks’ Scarface. Gorcey didn’t find the work (to use one of his favorite words) remunerative. He got the part, wound up lucky to take over for the bigger role of Spit. Gorcey was now earning 35 dollars a week. 35 dollars a week? “Big deal,” he said in the interview, “I want 50.” The producers told him, Nope. They could locate any damn kid in New York City to play that part. “Find one,” Gorcey challenged. They gave him 50 dollars a week.

He moved up in the world, taking Spit to screen in various incarnations, names and studios (including, and most famously, Spit, Slip, Muggs) in The Dead End Kids, The East Side Kids and The Bowery Boys from 1937-1956 (he was never in The Little Tough Guys, which also slide into this original punk history). Some of the early pictures were beautifully directed social commentaries – William Wyler’s Dead End (with Humphrey Bogart), Michael Curtiz’s Angels With Dirty Faces (with James Cagney) and Busby Berkeley’s They Made Me a Criminal (with John Garfield) with a cast including Huntz Hall, Bobby Jordan, Gabriel Dell, Billy Halop and Bernard Punsly. Through time the kids became more comedy than commentary (which was fine, Gorcey and Hall are a terrific comic duo) and the pictures became weirder, they were often still assuredly shot by some interesting filmmakers (notably The Big Combo, Gun Crazy director Joseph H. Lewis). Not bad, as some might say, but as time went on, wonderfully fucking weird with, perhaps, accidental commentary (who wants to grow up?) and definite surrealism holding the plots together. To use a word Gorcey would probably like as a malapropism and mispronounce  (I can’t even pronounce it) they feel hypnagogic.

A movie like Hold That Baby! (one of my favorites, starring Gorcey, Hall, William Benedict, David Gorcey and Bennie Bartlett) is magnificently bizarre. The fellows looking more boozed-up than boyish, all world-weary while running around like maniacs, helping a baby abandoned in a Laundromat (they own the place!), while gangsters and a mental institution fall into the scenario (naturally) – it’s the cinematic equivalent of something you’d dream up after ingesting too much narcotic cough syrup one night. These little comedies starring multiple-divorced men still burlesquing as tough guys when some of them actually are tough guys, or at least, little shits, now with arrest records, are marked with a peculiar darkness, as if Diane Arbus somehow took over direction. Gorcey once shot a gun in a toilet, got the boys to glue it back together, which then caused Martha Raye to fall in and injure her nether-regions. That’s a true story, according to Gorcey. Why not just put that in one of the movies?

From 1940-1945 the series cranked out pictures through Monogram (which introduced Our Gang veteran, the great ‘Sunshine’ Sammy Morrison into the club, the only African-American in the group). Gorcey left the studio, quarreling over more money, formed The Bowery Boys with Huntz Hall and Bobby Jordan and owned 40 percent of the company. That was smart. He wouldn’t die broke (though this pissed off some cast members, including Morrison who declined to join, reportedly due to Gorcey’s more remunerative control). Gorcey was a “kid” deep in his 30s when making his last picture, Crashing Las Vegas, remnants of the original boys hanging on – Hall and his younger brother, David. Pops, who, without much hullabaloo, had been playing Louie Dumbrowski, the guy who ran the ice cream parlor and co-starred with his son in 44 pictures, died in 1955. He crashed into a bus. Leo drank more, became problematic and was replaced by Stanley Clements. He lived a hell-raising, hard-drinking, multi-married life, writing an entertaining, damn near poetic memoir about it with a tongue twisting title: “An Original Dead End Kid Presents: Dead End Yells, Wedding Bells, Cockle Shells and Dizzy Spells.” He died the day before his 52nd birthday – liver failure.

This is a long walk down Gorcey lane before discussing Wallace Fox’s Kid Dynamite, the 1943 East Side Kids picture when they’re still young and fresh, but pertinent since the talented, tragic Bobby Jordan (playing Danny) is Gorcey’s lead co-star. He is also a reluctant rival to Gorcey’s Muggs who is, for lack of a better word, an asshole. As the picture moves along briskly with a nicely shot boxing match and an entertaining, gleefully odd jitterbug contest within, we come to feel for shitheel Muggs – the world’s not nice to him. Gorcey always played it more acerbic, nastier and Stooges-like slap happy, but there’s an extra edge here. He’s so mean to moist-eyed, tall and gracious Danny that he becomes less funny and more aggressively unpleasant. And he’s jealous.  This is not a criticism; it makes the movie deeper and more poignant as we root for both guys. We want them to figure out their issues; we know it’s based on power and acceptance and looks and everything society throws at kids growing up, and we know it’s probably not going to be solved by the film’s conclusion – joining the service. But the surge of patriotism at the end of the movie makes you question if the picture even believes its own message. Even Muggs’ mother cautions her son to join (and won’t let him at first, he’s too young) if he’s doing so for the wrong reasons.

The whole misunderstanding begins when teenage boxer Muggs believes Danny set him up. Gangsters kidnap Muggs when he won’t throw a fight (such is the life of an East Side Kid) and he misses the match, stuck in a scary car, fast-talking guttersnipe sass. Out of shape Danny (who does not appear to be out of shape) has to fill in for Muggs and in a sweet surprise, wins the fight. Danny is innocent, a nice guy (he is also dating Muggs’ sister), but never mind that – Muggs is so pissed off and distrustful, he can’t accept his friend wasn’t in on it, and he kicks him out of the gang: “Danny’s name is gonna stricken from the record. He’s outta the club intimately, ultimately and forever.” Other members, notably Huntz Hall as Glimpy (“Why don’t you play ping pong with a time bomb?”) and “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison as Scruno are nicely featured and likable (also Benny Bartlett as Benny ‘Beanie’) but they too are following along with the bullying Muggs. Tensions increase – Danny gets the job Muggs wants (for being a “gentleman”) and in a scene that opens with Mike Riley’s Orchestra and Marion Miller doing the most intriguing, craziest and even creepiest rendition of “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye” (did J.D. Salinger see this picture? Did Davd Lynch?) wins the jitterbug contest after Muggs is disqualified for bringing a professional dancer (Kay Marvis, Gorcey’s first wife, who later married Groucho Marx).  Well, that’s it.

It will get all resolved – Muggs finally believes Danny, but anger enflames yet again, and he continues being a jerk. There’s a lot of desperation to Jordan here that feels utterly believable – we might want to join with Muggs deeming him a fake goody-goody but Danny is too sincere. At the same time, Muggs is such a sore loser and so obviously insecure, that we can’t stay mad at him, especially when he starts looking inward, thinking of the War, understanding he’s being a heel, maybe even a coward, and his jealousy is more at play than truly believing Danny’s a bad person. But, again, the patriotic WW2 closer where the boys are sauntering through town in uniform is strangely sad. And thinking of Bobby Jordan is sad too. He was drafted.

Jordan wasn’t happy with the last incarnation of The Bowery Boys whom he helped form with Gorcey and Hall. He was becoming less prominent on screen, making less money and angry with Gorcey and Hall for pushing him out of any kind of light. He left after eight pictures. He still worked, did some movies and television, but supplemented his income as an oil driller; photograph salesman, nightclub act and bartender – not a good profession for an alcoholic.

According to various sources, in 1958 he was briefly jailed for not making child support payments. Before that, in 1945 the poor guy was in an elevator accident, forcing removal of his right kneecap (really?). The talented young kid who went to the Professional Children’s School and started out in Dead End with the name Angel, who served in the Army during WWII (drafted in 1943, the 97th Infantry) – he died at age 42 in 1965 in a Veteran’s hospital in Los Angeles  – cirrhosis of the liver. Nearly four years before Gorcey and six years younger.

Gorcey says of Jordan in Kid Dynamite, “He’s presently out, henceforth, etc.” Reportedly, in real life, Gorcey mused, “Bobby Jordan did not have had a guardian angel.” Jordan might have “depreciated” that sentiment.

 

I took this photo in Lincoln City, Oregon after the seagull hovered…