“Don’t Forget the Flaming Arrows!”

You kids will probably be seeing a lot more of your old man around the house now that the Screengrab, A.K.A. my steady job for the past two years, is no fucking more. I had a good time there this past week, writing about a few things that it suddenly seemed worth writing about before it was too late–Joe Don Baker, The Outside Man, Amy Madigan, Million Dollar Legs, plus this guy who ate this other guy after trying unsuccessfully to bite off his dick–but I was surprised at how depressed I suddenly felt when I put up my last item. Maybe the surprise is that I sense that the money isn’t the worst part of it. I hadn’t realized how nice it was to be a part of something. Thanks to the wonders of electronic self-publishing, I can of course continue to write sometimes maddeningly contrary stuff about movies that nobody cares about to my heart’s content, but now I’m back to being strictly a solo act.

Losing your job is one way to get depressed. Another way might be to look at some of the movies that you were able to project yourself into as a child and get a fresh new perspective on just what a stupid little prat you were. A week or so ago, I happened to notice that TCM was showing Harry in Your Pocket a 1973 movie starring James Coburn as the leader of a team of professional pickpockets. It turns out that it’s the only feature film feature directed by Mission: Impossible creator Bruce Geller; he also produced it and wrote the lyrics of the theme song, one of those tender, time-is-the-cruelest-thief “Try to Remember” rip-off dealies that always used to make my skin crawl when I was a kid and that now make my skin crawl for entirely different reasons now that I’m old enough to understand the sentiment. It’s a cheesy, sleazy movie that I remember seeing on TV a couple of times when I was a kid, and liking, probably because, like a lot of movies that I found fascinating as a pre-teen, I mistook it for a possible game plan for adult life: you finished school, got the hell out of Mississippi, and then wandered around this great country of ours, taking in the sights and swinging by the airport or the town square whenever you needed to lift a little walking-around money from someone else’s wallet. Sobering, really. The cast also includes Walter Pidgeon, who, in his only attempt to portray an aging coke fiend, gets to deliver one of those speeches about how being a professional criminal used to be an honorable craft requiring principles and a hard-earned set of skills before the punks moved in and everything went to hell; Trish Van Devere, who’s supposed to be a vulnerable young chippie with a hard shell and who gives her usual impersonation of a spinster headmistress at a reputable girls’ school who summons Groundskeeper Willie to her quarters every night and breaks out the nipple clips and cat-o’-nine-tails; and Michael Sarrazin. The movie was actually being broadcast as part of TCM’s evening-long salute to Michael Sarrazin. I hadn’t thought about Michael Sarrazin in the longest time, and might never have done so again if it hadn’t been for TCM. Their selection pretty well established that Michael Sarrazin was not one of the movies’ great underutilized talents.

After Harry in Your Pocket, TCM ran The Pursuit of Happiness, a 1971 youth picture that did not figure prominently in the obituaries of its director, Robert Mulligan. I’d never heard of it myself, and everybody knows what a hound I am for early-’70s youth pictures. This one opens with a Randy Newman song that he didn’t bother putting on an album until the box set Guilty, close to three decades later. It’s actually a good way to start a picture like this, because it seems to express a self-generated, self-pitying kind of adolescent misery, not unsympathetically but not unsardonically, either. (“Just let my heart go on beating a little bit longer,” Newman moans, sounding not a day over seventy. “I’m so young, I;m so young.”) Then Sarrazin, who’s been playing with his toy boat in the park, goes home to his college-student bachelor pad apartment. Here’s how you know that Sarrazin is a nonconformist free spirit: he’s in his apartment when his aunt, Sada Thompson, barges in and starts Lovey Howelling it up, until Barbara Hershey, wearing a towel and with her hair wet from the shower, comes out of the bathroom. Aunt Sada is all, Oooooh, is that the time, nevah mind the tea, Michael, I must be going, whoowhoowhoowhoo! Then Sarrazin scoops Hershey up in his arms and drops her on the bed and grabs her and rolls around on the bed with them, both of them laughing and laughing and laughing, while Hershey is careful to use hand to make sure that towel stays in place the whole time. As much as they enjoy doing this, imagine what it’ll be like when they find out how you make babies.

The movie itself is both lame and insane, a real winning combination. Its main source of interest is that its madness seems to be a product of confused people trying to say something about the particular confusions of their time. Sarrazin is apolitical, a nice guy, well-groomed, pleasant, handsome in a clean-cut blue-eyed male angel way, and on top of it all, he’s from money, with a respectable conservative family with immaculate connections. Yet everybody who looks at him seems to see a wild hippie malcontent, and this doesn’t seem meant as a joke. When he gets in trouble, it’s for something that ought to get you into trouble: driving his puke-green car around on a rainy night, he runs into an old lady and kills her. Then the judge (Bernard Hughes) gets the idea that he doesn’t have a lot of respect for the law, because he’s been driving around with 22 unpaid parking tickets, which sounds like a reasonable supposition on the judge’s part to me. But you’re supposed to get the feeling that he’s being railroaded, because E. G. Marshall, as the uncle who arranges his legal defense, sneers at him for having come to a “Republican lawyer…reactionary bastard” and cautions him that being on trial isn’t like having “fun and games at that hotbed of communism you call a university,” and orders him to wear a suit in court.

Sentenced to a year in the jug for criminal negligence, Sarrazin befriends a black prisoner who asks him for help in wording a love letter to another prisoner. When his new friend is knifed in the shower by a romantic rival, Marshall gets another chance to sneer at Sarrazin, this time for being the only witness to the killing to be so “noble” as to offer to testify at the killer’s trial. Somehow, Sarrazin’s time in the witness box turns into a jousting match between him and the defense attorney, who tries to insinuate that there might have been something going on between him and the dead man, because why else would he have been helping him work on his love letters to men? Asked what the dead man ever did for him, Sarrazin says, with a straight face, “He taught me how to shovel coal. Does that make me a queer?” (Somewhere, Tobias Fünke is smiling.) The whole thing goes so badly that the judge seems to threaten Sarrazin with extending his sentence, so Sarrazin excuses himself to go to the little boys’ room and escapes through a handy open window.

The movie ends with Sarrazin and Hershey fleeing the country, lighting out for Canada in a small plane that pointedly soars past the Statue of Liberty on it way to true freedom. Mulligan and company appear to have mixed together half a dozen different paranoid concerns, including some that don’t really go together, such as the Establishment’s crushing rebellious youth and the plight of the poor little rich kid at the mercy of the envious working class bullies, along with a veiled plea for sympathy for those young Americans jumping the border to Canada to evade that part of the national nervous breakdown that had spilled over into Vietnam. Sarrazin finally convinces his girl of the wisdom of getting the hell out of the country by saying that it’s not just that he doesn’t want to go back to prison, but that “there’s a nervous breakdown going on out there, and I don’t want to be a part of it.” It’s weird now to see a movie from a time when rational people were prepared to make a case for just washing their hands of what a mess America had become and even try to make a movie hero of someone who’d rather just run away from it all. Bad as Rush Limbaugh is, even when he seemed all-powerful, he mostly just made people want to stay here and fight him.

Thanks to TCM, I also recently saw my first Jungle Jim pictures. These films, which were based on an Alex Raymond comic strip that I’d actually love to see some time, were what Johnny Weissmuller did with himself after his run as Tarzan petered out. He plays a great white hunter type hanging out in the African jungle, waiting for some white people to blunder through the brush, needing his help. Basically, he’s still Tarzan, except that he gets to wear clothes and speak full sentences, though he’s only adept at one of these innovations. He even still has a chimpanzee sidekick, who for all I know is played by one of the Cheetas. (And after the Jungle Jim series ran into legal problems regarding the rights to the character, he made another string of jungle pictures in which he still did the same basic act, except now, his character was named Johnny Weissmuller.) I was actually impressed with Johnny’s physique in the films I saw. I don’t guess there’s any arguing that he’d lost the steamy animal quality he had as Tarzan, but based on all the descriptions I’d read of Johnny as lost and hopelessly debauched in his post-Tarzan period, I was sort of expecting a bloated, prematurely aged lump with a swollen belly and a triple chin, staggering through the jungle grunting out his lines between belches. For an ex-swimmer in his forties in the pre-Bowflex era, he doesn’t look that bad.

The movies themselves look like shit, I’m afraid. The quality of the jungle itself is less back lot than back yard, and the failure to match the principal photography with the stock footage of animals that’s joined to it borders on a Brechtian device. In one scene, Johnny dives underwater to perform some heroics that are intercut with footage of a shark battling a squid, presumably because Johnny’s heroics were deemed insufficiently exciting on their own. Then Johnny swims to the surface, stopping along the way to knife the shark, which, considering that they’re barely in the same movie, takes some doing. Maybe that squid was an old college friend.) Apparently Jungle Jim was the Scooby Doo of his day, helping ignorant natives in flower-print sarongs who were being harassed by such nasties as the “skeleton warriors”–three guys in Halloween costumes who upset the natives so badly that they’re all but defenseless when their backup arrives and attack the camps. It all turns out to be part of a scheme by Ed Wood regular Lyle Talbot to maintain an assembly line of slaves to mine his beloved Igneous rock. Talbot, whose delivery here rivals Max Showalter’s for superciliousness, tells the heroine, “You’re a very attractive girl. If I were you, I shouldn’t exchange the glow of beauty for the glow of radioactivity.” (The heroine, a sassy girl reporter who’s come looking for a millionaire’s missing son, has earlier addressed the Cheeta stand-in as, “You first cousin to a baboon!”, which as wisecracking insults go would be pretty fair if she weren’t, you know, talking to a monkey.) In the end, Talbot goes over a cliff, the girl reporter embraces and kisses the millionaire’s missing son, and the chimp leaps into Johnny’s arms and extends its own smoochable lips. Johnny’s attempt to appear amused by this while some no-name young bit player is getting all the tail is his manliest act of heroism in the film.

–Phil Nugent