Aaron’s back with another Shelf Life, reporting on his ongoing efforts to clear his ever-growing backlog of unwatched movies. This time around he unearths some double-crossing jewel thieves, a wasted country singer and a scuffed-up 1940s film noir in three pictures you’ve probably never heard of but now, like us, need to track down and check out.
The Cats
Big kudos to Warner Archives for digging up this 1968 Euro-crime rarity*, starring Rita Hayworth in one of her final roles. At this stage in her career she had definitely seen better days – she’s pretty much in crazy-cat-lady mode here – but at least it’s not as embarrassing and cringey as her fellow ‘40s screen beauty Veronica Lake’s twilight plunge into Z-grade dross like Flesh Feast.
Spending most of her screen time either ranting maniacally or feeding her cats whiskey-laced grub, Hayworth plays Martha, the hard-boozin’ momma of Jason (Giuliano Gemma) and Adam (Klaus Kinski), both thieves who have fallen out over a stash of stolen jewels. Adam has double-crossed Jason, stolen his girlfriend Karen (Margaret Lee) AND left his baby bro with the tendons of his right arm severed. Nice. On the upside, Jason gets a little sweet R&R thanks to Barbara (former Bond girl Claudine Auger), a sexy rancher who nurses him back to health so he can seek revenge on Adam.
Plot-wise, The Cats (a weird retitling of I Bastardi/The Bastard) is very standard, and despite all its romantic entanglements, sibling rivalries and crime-caper duplicities, it’s a dramatically flat movie. But at the same time, it’s dang fun to watch, and just nutty enough to elevate itself from being another disposable B-level melodrama. Italian genre journeyman Duccio Tessari (who co-wrote A Fistful of Dollars) fills the screen with eye-catching psych/pop-art touches, the soundtrack keeps the action chugging along to killer Hammond organ grooves and the New Mexico desert locations often make the film feel like it’s a spaghetti western in disguise. The entire thing also climaxes with a bizarrely random natural disaster that has nothing to do with anything that’s come before, and I kinda love it for that. Gemma’s a bit vacant in the lead, but it helps having the unhinged presences of Hayworth and the reliably creepy Kinski around whenever things slacken a bit.
* previously only available in English via a chopped-down 67-minute Japanese TV broadcast!
PAYDAY
An early contender for my Favorite Discoveries of 2013 year list! Daryl Duke’s Payday (1973) is an exceptional slice of seedy low-life Americana that casts the underrated Rip Torn (Men in Black, The Man Who Fell To Earth) as Maury Dann, a country singer on a path of self-destruction while he’s on tour. Don Carpenter’s script narrows the focus to 36 hellish hours in Maury’s life, and though on paper it has the trappings of a music-oriented biopic, Payday is more about what happens OFF-stage than on. And boy is it unglamorous, reeking of low-rent desperation as Maury reveals himself something of a slovenly, self-servin’, pill-poppin’, egomaniacal creature who chews up and spits out everyone who has the misfortune of being in his entourage.
Torn is mind-blowingly good as Maury. It’s a pitilessly abrasive and irredeemably unpleasant role to play, but Torn’s mesmerizing charisma is such that we can even understand why all these people would put up or want to have anything with him: teenage groupie Rosamond (Elayne Heilveil) who doesn’t seem to care that only his penis gives a shit about her; his loyal “chaffeur” Chicago (Cliff Emmich) who offers to take the fall for a crime he didn’t commit; a young wannabe singer-songwriter who, at the drop of a hat, quits his waitering job in the hopes that Maury will help him get to the big time. Full of great, memorable, well-acted vignettes, Payday might be the least “scenic” road picture ever, rubbing our faces in sweat, grimy sex, grungy motels, drug abuse and a general feeling of awfulness and hopelessness like a bad, slowly percolating hangover.
Warner slipped this onto DVD in 2008, and it can be picked up for fairly cheap online. Also worth seeking out is Duke’s The Silent Partner, a terrific, unsung 1978 crime thriller starring Elliot Gould as a bank teller playing a deadly, twisty cat-and-mouse game with bank robber Christopher Plummer.
SHED NO TEARS
Watching films like Jean Yarbrough’s Shed No Tears (1948) reminds me there’s something entrancing about speckly, scratched-up black-and-white prints of film noirs. Obviously crappy print quality is rarely intentional on the filmmakers’ part, but there is a positive aesthetic side effect to this: the cruddy texture heightens the unease, tension, paranoia of the noir world.
Previously considered “lost” but now rescued by public domain label Alpha Video, this diverting, ultra-low-budget programmer operates in the tradition of barely-over-an-hour noirs like Detour and The Devil Thumbs a Ride, with a brisk plot involving dead-eyed femme fatale Edna Grover (June Vincent) and her hubbie (Wallace Ford) swindling their insurance company of $50,000 by faking his death. Of course, nothing goes as smoothly as they planned.
Nothing amazing here, but noir completists will be stoked that it’s available at all, and if you need an hour to kill in the dead of night and don’t mind watching a bunch of characters scheming and pulling switcheroos on each other, this’ll do the trick. Johnstone White is hammy fun as an eccentric private eye who becomes a devious foil in the proceedings.
