The Price of the Ticket

In all of Frank Tashlin’s work, there is nothing quite so boldly staged as the delirious sequence in 1961′s THE LADIES MAN, in which Jerry Lewis, the film’s director and Tashlin’s nominal pupil, deconstructs a panic attack in twenty five seconds.

Framed against an enormous set that resembles the interior of a gargantuan and painstakingly detailed dollhouse, Lewis’ character, a terrified schlemiel by the name of Herbert H. Heebert, is in the midst of a mad dash up the set’s elaborate staircase when suddenly he’s literally beside himself with fright, splitting into two, then three, then four similarly fearstruck replicants, zig-zagging about the hallways until they all disappear one after another into the safety of their bedroom, the door slamming in quick succesion with four emphatic bangs.

No, there was nothing close to this deft and dizzy blend of Psychology 101 and slapstick in Tashlin’s portfolio, but it’s safe to say that Lewis could never have designed and delivered it so well without his mentor having blazed the trail. Continue reading →

Produced by Peter Lawford, starring Henry Silva, Sammy Davis Jr. and Joey Bishop but with Frank Sinatra nowhere in sight, JOHNNY COOL is like a Rat Pack movie without the head Rat. Even sans Sinatra, the film packs a mean, surly punch as the bad-tempered, well-dressed Silva, a suitable surrogate for the absent crooner, jet-sets between Los Angeles and New York, glowering his way through a succession of bloody and brutal murders set to a killer big band score. Continue reading →

Released in America as PARADISE LAGOON, Lewis Gilbert’s THE ADMIRABLE CRICHTON is one of the most enduringly satisfying movies ever made. A gentle dissection of class struggle and sexual politics, it manages to be both levelheaded and starry-eyed, deftly flipping the bourgeoisie on its powdered wig while swan-diving head-first into a wellspring of politically incorrect romantic entanglements.

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Groucho Marx once grumbled about one of Victor Mature’s muscle-bound action-fests, ”I don’t like any movie where the leading man’s chest is bigger than the leading lady’s.” By that measure, Groucho would have loved ZARAK, in which the leading lady’s chest belongs to the panoramic spectacle that was Anita Ekberg, an actress built for Cinemascope. Continue reading →

An absurdist take on the private eye genre, THE MANCHU EAGLE MURDER CAPER MYSTERY, stars Gabriel Dell, Huntz Hall, Vincent Gardenia, Anjanette Comer, Barbara Harris, Jackie Coogan and Will Geer, an oddball cast worthy of the fever dream inhabitants of Welles’ TOUCH OF EVIL. This film could only have happened in the wild and wooly year of 1975 when the most eccentric personal projects and the most expensive studio productions shared the same adventurous (and slightly unhinged) spirit. Even so, this peculiar curio flew under the radar and has only now been unleashed on an unsuspecting public by MGM’s limited edition label. Continue reading →

At the same John Cassavetes was tearing up the highway as a conflicted biker in Daniel Haller’s DEVIL’S ANGELS, he was working on his own film about another set of conflicted characters, the art-house breakthrough FACES. Cassavetes made a habit of taking roles beneath his talents to finance his own productions and DEVIL’S ANGELS is surely one of those. Continue reading →

Martin Sloan, a harried advertising man out for a Sunday drive, is low on gas and his engine is running hot. More than a little overheated himself, Sloan blows into the nearest gas station swatting the dust from his jacket and barking for service. An easygoing mechanic assures the high-strung ad man that his car will be rejuvenated in just an hour or two. Not coincidentally, so will Martin.

The very image of an upwardly mobile businessman circa 1959 (Brooks Brothers suit, glossy hair, narrow tie), Martin Sloan is nevertheless damaged goods. He walks with a painful limp, the result of an adolescent accident, and that persistent ache is the only real connection this unhappy adult has to his childhood.

He has some time to kill while waiting for his car and ‘Homewood’, the boyhood town he hasn’t seen in twenty five years, is just down the road. And so Martin sets off to confront his past and the birthplace of his lingering pain. Continue reading →