The Screengrab : phil karlson

That Guy! Joe Don Baker

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

It's possible that Joe Don Baker's name is as well known as his face, which sort of goes against the grain of those featured in the "That Guy!" franchise. However, one reason the name is well-known is that, in the last several years, it's picked up some currency as a punch line. Any name that starts out "Joe Don" and keeps going for another couple of syllables is apt to strike some people as that of a thuggish redneck hick, and that's how Baker was caricatured by the wisecracking robots of Mystery Science Theater 3000 when they ran a couple of his tackier starring vehicles in the 1990s. Is it out of deference to the fine tastes and sensibilities of the robot critical community that Joe Don has yet to appear on Inside the Actors Studio? This is one thing that sets him apart from, say, Billy Joel and Ricky Gervais. Another is that Joe Don actually attended the Actors Studio.

There is always cause to be wary whenever a white male claims to have suffered from discrimination based on his physical appearance. Usually there is cause to be openly derisive. Still, back in the 1980s, Joe Don Baker told an interviewer that it was very hard for him to get Hollywood to see him as anything other than a violent cracker with a pea-sized brain, and he told the interviewer this in response to a question about why he had taken to spending so much of his time working in England. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. In the '60s, Baker appeared in movies and on TV, in Westerns (Guns of the Magnificent Seven, Wild Rovers) and working-guy parts (Adam at 6 A.M.). He got a boost from the 1971 TV film Mongo's Back in Town, which served notice that he could bring a compelling degree of sensitivity to a tough-guy part, and also served notice that he might have to spend a certain amount of his career playing guys with names like "Mongo." He got a bigger boost the next year, playing Steve McQueen's brother in Sam Peckinpah's Junior Bonner, although he would later assure interviewers that he and Peckinpah were not the best thing that had ever happpened in each other's lives.

The success of his next film, Walking Tall, made him a star of a specialized, B-movie sort, and led to him taking pre-emptive measures against all many of unsavory types in a string of films, including Phil Karlson's Framed and the notorious Mitchell. His fling as a leading man burned out with the TV film To Kill a Cop and the short-lived TV series spun off from it, Eischied. After that, he settled into the familiar That Guy! routine of long patches of honest labor with the occasional stretch of lying in clover. He played a fictionalized Jimmy Hoffa in the TV film Power (1980), threatened Chevy Chase in Fletch, jousted with James Bond in License to Kill, got throttled by De Niro while attempting to enjoy a midnight snack in Cape Fear, had a high old time playing Joseph McCarthy to James Woods's Roy Cohn in Citizen Kane, stood viciously accused of being Winona Ryder's father in Reality Bites, did the dirty work for the man in Panther, took seeing his son get killed by evil white gorillas really well in Congo, kissed and made up with James Bond in Goldeneye and Tomorrow Never Dies, and showed, in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!, that he could make fun of his trailer-park image as well as any robot. For TV, he played Governor "Kissin' Jim" Folsom in the biopic George Wallace and buckskinned superlawyer Gerry Spence in The Siege of Ruby Ridge.

Where to see Joe Don Baker at his best:

WALKING TALL & CHARLEY VARRICK (1973)

Like it or not, the role of Buford Pusser, scary Tennessee lawman extraordinaire, will always be the first thing that leaps to most people's minds when Baker's name comes up. There are reasons enough to like that fine: Baker gives a strong star performance that endows the club-swinging sheriff considerable dignity. Like Dirty Harry, Pusser has to be portrayed as self-righteous, but Baker also gives him a quality that would be unthinkable in an Eastwood character: a longing for a peaceful life, a desire to just settle down and raise his family and tend to his own back yard, which the villains, by the sheer spreading force of their wickedness, have made an untenable option. (The movie opens with Buford bringing his wife and kids back to their country home, presumably to escape the corruption of the cities. If someone doesn't step up, the small-town corruption may make the country culture just as dangerous and unlivable.) Walking Tall is a primitive, pro-head-cracking movie, but Baker gives it its human dimension: he's the hero partly because he suffers for his actions, never because he happens to be the one who looks coolest when blowing people's heads off.

Even in the wake of the film's success, there were signs that Baker might not be looking to retire from acting and get into the more profitable business of Charles Bronson imitations. One was that he followed up Walking Tall with the supporting role of the Mafis enforcer Molly in Don Siegel's The title character is played by Walter Matthau; he's a bank robber who has chosen his bank recklessly and wound up with several hundred thousand dollars that Molly's employers very much want back. Baker swaggers through the role with a vast grin on his face, as if he never quite got over the kick of seeing his character's name in the script. The film is one of those twist-upon-twist capers in which the omniscient hero is always at least a couple of steps ahead of everyone else, which could easily become tiresome. It benefits greatly from Baker's way of making it clear that, as far as he's concerned, Molly is very much the undefeatable star of the movie playing out in his head. His confidence almost makes you think that he might just turn out to hold the winning hand after all, whereas the glee with which he looks forward to indulging in his full capacity for sadism when he dispatches the hero makes you glad that he doesn't.

THE NATURAL (1984)

In the early '80s, Baker had dropped far enough off the radar screen that his cameo here as "the Whammer"--i.e., Babe Ruth--amounted to a juicy comeback. The movie is a travesty of Bernard Malamud's baseball novel, but Baker does full justice to his end of it: he tears into the role of parodying the Babe as if he were playing a contemporary figure who had seized control of the globe's supply of penicillin. He gives the Whammer a magnified version of Molly's gloating self-satisfaction in what a hot shit he thinks he is, and some of Molly's sadism, too: engaging the green kid Roy Hobbs in a contest, batter versus pitcher, in order to impress a mystery woman (Barbara Hershey), he sums Hobbs up, wrongly, as an innocent hick, and still licks his chops at the prospect of humiliating him. Yet you can't help rooting, or at least feeling for him a little. He lives up to the descriptions of Babe Ruth as the ultimate Jazz Age celebrity, a one-man parade through Times Square.

EDGE OF DARKNESS (1985)

This six-hour British TV miniseries is the proudest accomplishment of Baker's time across the pond. It was directed by Martin Campbell, who later made Goldeneye, as well as the Daniel Craig Casino Royale and the Antonio Banderas Zorro pictures, and who is now readying a big-screen remake of Edge of Darkness with Mel Gibson and Ray Winstone. For the love of God, try and get your hands on the original so that when you see the remake, you can better appreciate all the ways in which they're certain to fuck it up. The TV series is a Thatcher-era paranoid thriller about the dangers of nuclear proliferation. The late Bob Peck plays a Yorkshire police detective who witnesses the murder of his daughter (Joanne Whalley), which he and his colleagues assume must have been a botched attempt on his own life; it turns out that she was active in anti-nuclear politics and involved in what the government considered to be terrorist activities.

Baker enters the picture playing Darius Jedburgh, a CIA agent stationed in the country who is aware of some sort of skulduggery that might be connected to the daughter's murder. Baker, who took a cut in his usual salary for the chance to be a part of this, took full advantage of the opportunities that acting in a miniseries can provide for fleshing out the odd little corners of a character's range of personality. The memory of his big climactic moments, bawling out the assembled guests at a NATO conference while disintegrating from radiation poisoning and brandishing a pair of plutonium bars, stays fresh in the mind, but so does the image of him sitting in front of the TV in his house in London, cradling a huge bowl of popcorn in his lap and watching the ballroom dancing competitions, marveling, "How do they move like that?"

The Rep Report (May 22--26)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 22 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

SEATTLE: The 34th Seattle International Film Festival opens tonight and runs through June 15. The opening night attraction is Battle in Seattle, directed by Stuart "Mr. Charlize Theron" Townsend and starring an ensemble cast led by Charlize Theron. The movie is a "semi-fictionalized account" of the 1999 meeting in Seattle of representatives of the World Trade Organization, which was plagued by demonstrators who thought that globalization sucks, man. (As part of the movie's celebration of down-with-the -street anti-capitalist action, the festival organizers promise an "unforgettable opportunity to walk the red carpet with the stars" to be followed by a "fabulous gala party will follow with live entertainment, and complimentary champagne cocktails and hors d'oeuvres.") For more information and a lot of laughs, check out The Stranger's festival blog.
CAMBRIDGE: Of all movie genres, film noir may be the one that ascribes the most value to the low-rent and obscure and unloved, but by now the contents of the vaults have been through the sluice many times by wild-eyed men looking for the last hidden gold nugget of intense sleaze. So cultists are bound to impressed by the people who assembled Harvard Film Archives's Unseen Noir series (May 23-26) just for making good on their billing. It's a long weekend full of titles you may have heard of but probably haven't seen by directors you know you need to catch up on: Joseph H. Lewis's My Name Is Julia Ross with Nina Foch and Dame Mae Whitty; Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall with Brian Keith, Aldo Rey and a young Anne Bancroft; Andre' de Toth's Pitfall; and a double bill of Phil Karlson pictures: The Brothers Rico, starring Richard Conte in a loose adaptation of a Simenon novel, and 99 River Street, which has a great poster showing a rabid-looking John Payne apparently being restrained from chain-whipping a street sign that has the effrontery to bear the film's title.

NEW YORK: Anthology Film Archives celebrates Memorial Day with a four-day weekend's worth of Korean films about the Korean War and its aftereffects, from May 22 through the 25th. Included are Lee Man-Hui' The Marines Who Never Returned, the 1984 Warm Winter Was Gone, and 2000's Joint Security Area, directed by Chan-wook Park, who has since become best known in the West for the films in his "venegance trilogy", including Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance.

For those balmy summer nights, the IFC Center launches a series of Friday and Satuday midnight screenings of sci-fi cult classics, to run through June. Things kick off this weekend with the scientifically accurate Alien before taking a massive nosedive in the plausibility department with the original 1978 TV pilot-turned-"feature film" Battlestar Galactica and John Boorman's giggle-a-minute Zardoz. Also on tap: David Lynch's love letter to the city of Philadelphia Eraserhead (he didn't film it there, but it was his way of telling it that he wasn't coming back), Woody Allen's Sleeper, and the original, feral Mad Max.

Take Five: True Crime

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Getting wide release this weekend is Roger Donaldson's The Bank Job, also known as the movie that seems like it should be directed by Guy Ritchie but isn't. It is, however, based on an infamous 1971 vault heist which has gained recent noteriety not so much for the unsolved crime — although it was one of the biggest bank jobs in British history at the time — but the circumstances of its aftermath: what seemed to be an incredibly newsworthy story was hardly written about in the days following thanks to a "D notice" that served to gag the press. Speculation as to why this would be the case has raged for thirty-five years, and now, Donaldson's film (informed by a newly popular conspiracy theory involving a royal sex scandal) attempts to answer the question definitively, if fictionally. Nothing makes for an exciting movie like crime, and nothing makes a crime movie have that little extra edge than the slightest elements of truth. True crime movies have been a fixture of the silver screen almost since their inception; there's so many to choose from that we don't even begin to pretend this list is definitive. It's just a few of our favorites, each for a different reason. Line them all up on a cold night, watch them in a row, and thank your lucky stars this never happened to you...

THE PHENIX CITY STORY (1955)

A little-seen and underrated noir thriller from the genre's waning days, Phil Karlson's The Phenix City Story eschews the highly stylized approach of many of its contemporaries and goes for an understated, gritty style that allows it to function almost like a documentary. The story is built around the then-infamous case of Phenix City, Alabama, which at the time was so thoroughly controlled by mobsters (who became fat from prostitution and gambling fed by nearby military bases) that they operated with near-complete impunity. When Alabama's attorney general was assassinated there, it became the first city since the Civil War to have martial law declared without the occurence of a natural disaster. Raw, exciting, and remarkably violent for its time, The Phenix City Story is a forgotten classic of its time.

BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967)

Sometimes, what makes a true crime masterpiece so powerful isn't its proximity to the truth, but its distance from it. Arthur Penn's brilliant crime drama, which made a handful of careers and set the tone for the highly personal studio filmmaking of the 1970s, was based on the real story of outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, but only insofar as it gave him pegs on which to hang his story. In real life, Bonnie and Clyde were considerably less attractive than Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, and even more morally unappealing; they were, in fact, vicious and contemptible heels, little more than brutal murderers, whose legend grew out of a nation obsessed with pulp fiction and crime as escapism. It's a testament to the magic of storytelling that they came to the big screen so completely altered.

THE KRAYS (1990)

For nearly a decade during London's Swinging Sixties, the undisputed overlords of the organized crime underworld were the brothers Ronald and Reginald Kray. Before their own penchant for bloody mayhem brought them down, they were the most feared individuals in the criminial demimonde, ruling their empire through torture and intimidation. Peter Medak's colorful, engaging biopic about the brothers is bouyed by its enjoyable evocation of London in the '60s as well as a remarkable performance as the twins by real-life brothers Gary and Martin Kemp — like the Krays, fraternal twins, but unlike them, best known to the world as the leaders of the 1980s New Romantic pop band Spandau Ballet! It's the first major role for both Kemps, and they tackle it with such gusto and skill it's surprising they never became major stars, though both stuck with the acting game.

DAHMER (2002)

Serial killers are a staple food of horror and thriller directors, and in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a spate of low-budget psychological chillers all based on the real-life exploits of actual mass murderers. Most of them were little more than slightly pretentious splatter flicks, but Dahmer — written and directed by David Jacobson — stood out as the class of the bunch. Resting on a smart script, a genuinely stark and chilling mood, and a fantastic lead performance by Jeremy Renner as the infamous Milwaukee cannibal, Dahmer is a compulsively watchable and truly terrifying movie. Its power comes not from gore or mayhem, but from the simplicity of its vision and the way in which it involves us emotionally with Dahmer while all the time creeping us ever closer to a full revelation of the depths of his madness.

CRAZY LOVE (2007)

One of the most bizarre true-crime documentaries ever made, this astonishing film from last year relies for its watchability on the fact that it's a story so unbelievable, it could only be true. It traces the improbable relationship of influential New York attorney Burt Pugach, who carried on an affair with a lovely young woman named Linda Riss. In 1959, Riss broke off the affair with the married Pugach, after which, enraged and terrified that she would start seeing someone else, he hired thugs to throw lye in her face, blinding and permanently scarring her. This hideous act would be the end of many true-crime movies, but here, it's only the beginning: sentenced to fourteen years in prison, Pugach went on to write Riss constantly while he served his time — and eventually, when he was released, the two were married!

Rep Report (February 28 - March 6)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Sunday, March 2 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of King Kong's debut appearance in New York City, and to honor the event, Film Forum is running the 1933 classic for two matinees, one day only. Those attending the 1:00 P.M. screening are automatically eligible to stick around and participate in the Fay Wray Scream-alike Contest, to be judged by a crack panel of experts that includes Film Forum repertory program director Bruce Goldstein, film critic Elliott Stein, and Ms. Wray's actress daughter, Susan Riskin. One lucky, leather-lunged winner will receive a two-disc DVD set of the movie, a one-year membership to Film Forum, (trust me on this — if nothing else, it pays for itself!), and a romantic trip for two the top of the Empire State Building. Jeez, you'd think it would be thrill enough just to get to be in the same room as Elliott Stein...

Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2008" (February 29 - March 9) kicks off with Claude Lelouch's Romain de gare with Fanny Ardent and Audrey Dana, introduced by the director. There are also new films by Sandrine Bonnaire, Claude Miller, Sophie Marceau, and — this sounds interesting — Fear(s) of the Dark, a black-and-white animated omnibus film that incorporates material from such comics artists as Charles Burns and Lorenzo Mattotti.

SAN FRANCISCO: "The Unabridged Coen Brothers" (February 28 - March 2) at the Castro was apparently assembled for the benefit of anyone who's just landed here from Mars and is curious about these fellows who just won the Oscar. Of course, it might also be useful to any Coen fans who see this as a fine time to have themselves a wallow. Includes Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, The Man Who Wasn't There, Fargo, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, and O Brother Where Art Thou?, which, it says here, includes "Southern folklore, slapstick stunts, cinematic tributes, religious ritual, political satire, and social commentary." All that and dancing Klansmen too!

SEATTLE: The Grand Illusion Cinema brings back four of "the No-Nonsense Films of Phil Karlson in the '50s". Karlson was a specialist in hard-nosed, low-budget action noirs whose resume of grungily efficient little knuckle-busters makes Don Siegel look like Busby Berkeley. (After decades of scuffling from one small-time gig to the next, Karlson hit the jackpot with his next-to-last picture, the rabble-rousing 1973 blockbuster Walking Tall, which he had the foresight to own a piece of.) Starting February 29, the theater is showing the fifties films Five Against the House with Kim Novak and Brian Keith and The Brothers Rico with Richard Conte; on March 6, it trades them in for the Western Gunman's Walk and the newspaper melodrama Scandal Sheet with Broderick Crawford.