Kick Me!

When I was a kid, David Carradine was my idea of one cool cat. This had nothing to do with his role on the TV series Kung Fu, which is what brought him to the consciousness of most folks about my age; I didn’t get to see that show until I was in my early twenties and in my weird relativist phase, trying to impress myself with how cleverly I could draft theories about how, for example, everything that was clearly cheesy and tacky about that show was in fact part of a deliberate, stylized, near-hallucinatory cross-genre take on the traditional Western. (Some people who write about pop culture enter this phase and get so comfortable there that they never leave.) The show itself was pretty loony. As the hero Caine, Carradine was supposed to be a half-Chinese Shaolin monk who, in the pilot, was moved to express his devotion to pacifist principles by whacking the Emperor’s nephew, who had it coming. He then moved to the American Old West, where he continued to express his code of non-violence by waiting until after the last commercial break to kick the tar out of the guest actors who’d been making life hell for him and some other guest actors over the course of the preceding forty-five minutes. I suspect that the show had its roots in the scene in Billy Jack in which that film’s eponymous half-Native American hero–Indians, in Tom Laughlin’s view, having as much a natural right to claim mastery of the martial arts as Shaolin monks–came upon some small-town roughs bullying the beautiful students of the “Freedom School” and made a speech about how hard he tries to avoid violence, but, boy, when he sees these helpless kids being mistreated it…just…makes…him…so…mad! Whereupon he proceeded to beat the tar out of them. Kung Fu itself must have been designed as a way to graft the emerging audience for Billy Jack‘s style of counterculture vigilantism onto the audience for Gunsmoke; it ultimately went off the air in 1975, the same year as Gunsmoke, though Gunsmoke gave up the ghost at the end of a run of twenty years and Kung Fu after only three.

Although memories of the character of Caine would prove to be a boon to Quentin Tarantino, first in Pulp Fiction and later when he cast Carradine in King Bill (as a replacement for Warren Beatty!), Kung Fu ultimately did Carradine’s reputation no favors. He had won praise for his work on Broadway in The Deputy and The Royal Hunt of the Sun, and he had also played a straight Western hero as the title character in the 1966 TV series Shane, based on the movie. But Kung Fu, with its oddball attempt to splice together a TV Western setting with Bruce Lee action and fortune cookie mysticism and funnel the results into America’s living rooms, left him with an image as a babbling hippie weirdo. So did many of his interviews from this period, in which, whether he was selling himself to the readership of Rolling Stone or the viewers of The Mike Douglas Show, he seemed to enjoy playing the part of the ornery anti-Establishment rebel. And so did his various brushes with the law, one of which culminated with the judge offering his opinion from the bench that the defendant had been arrested while “bombed out of his skull.” (And so will the news of his death today in Thailand, at the age of 72).

The same year that Kung Fu headed off for the last roundup, Carradine was hired to star in Death Race 2000, the exploitation movie classic directed by Paul Bartel for Roger Corman. Bartel later wrote that Carradine was an arrogant diva pain in the ass in the early days of the shoot, and that he tried to talk Corman into letting him fire him. But according to Bartel, when Carradine found out that his job was in jeopardy, he begged the director for another chance to stay on the movie and salvage his career. After that, he was a pussycat, and he and Bartel worked together happily the next year on Cannonball, a movie that had no appeal to anyone beyond the fact that it gave the director of Death Race 2000 another excuse to film the star of Death Race 2000 breaking the speed laws. (Earlier, in 1973, Carradine earned himself some kind of indelible footnote status to the American movie renaissance of the early ’70s by making memorable cameo appearances in two of the great films of that era: as the guy in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets who gets shot in the men’s room–by his younger brother Robert Carradine–and as Elliot Gould’s motor-mouthed cellmate in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. A ywar before, he’d played the male lead in Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha, another Roger Corman production best remembered for two bits of trivia: one, that the star, Carradine’s then-girlfriend Barbara Hershey, introduced the director to the novel The Last Temptation of Christ, and two, Hershey’s later telling interviewers that her and Carradine’s son “Free” had been conceived on-camera during their big love scene.)

The performances that Carradine probably best deserves to be remembered for came later in the 1970s, when he played Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby’s unfocused but stirring epic biopic Bound for Glory (1976), and as Cole Younger in Walter Hill’s 1980 Western The Long Riders, in which he was cast alongside his brothers Keith and Robert. (The cast also included Stacy and James Keach as Frank and Jesse James, Randy and Dennis Quaid as Clell and Ed Miller, and Christopher and Nicholas Guest as Charley and Robert Ford.) The role of Guthrie gave Carradine the chance to escape his period and play a nonconformist agitator-artist of an earlier time, and it’s easy to see how he relished that. Part of the genius of casting Carradine as a man who’d already been sanctitified in the memories of many was that there was no danger of him sweetening the character and trying to turn him into Mr. Nice Guy. His Guthrie is wary and suspicious, a self-contained man who does what’s best for his art, or maybe for his self-sustaining sense of himself as an artist, even if it’s not what’s best for the people he considers friends or the family he’s pledged to support. He brings something the the movie that the director doesn’t seem sure he wants to get into: the paradox inherent in devoting yourself to serving as the voice of “the people”, and loving the people, when you yourself can barely keep from alienating everyone you come into contact. (A recent screening of the movie inspired reports indicating that alienating people is a theme Carradine was well-equipped to address from the heart.)

His work as Cole Younger is even better; I think it’s one of the most sheerly beautiful performances I’ve ever seen a man give. With his long, scraggly hair and mustache and Jed Clampett wardrobe, Cole looks like a swamp rat, but he has a soulfulness that sets him apart from everyone else in the large cast. More than anyone else, he’s the designated grown-up in this film, more so than Stacy Keach’s Frank, who’s meant to be the rational one but who does a little too well at making adulthood look like uninviting hard work. Cole has a sad smile to go with the glint in his eye that’s signals when he’s avid for action. When he signs on for a knife fight with the enormous husband (Sonny Landham) of his old flame Belle Starr (Pamela Reed) –”What’s the winner get?” he asks, and she replies, “Nothing you ain’t both already had.”–he’s aware of how pointless it is, but he knows himself well enough to know that he can’t back down from a challenge, even a stupid one. In his ironic distance and almost regretful attitude towards his own macho impulses, he’s an image of something that I suspect a lot of men, especially smart Southern men, aspire to long after they begin thinking it’s time to outgrow it. Hill tried to get something similar out of Powers Boothe in his next picture, Southern Comfort, and it’s more of a reflection on Carradine’s range than on Boothe’s limitations that he couldn’t get it; he was more uppity, and entertaining but far less affecting.

By the time The Long Riders came out, the signs were already there that Carradine had come as close to enduring stardom as he was going to get. In between Bound for Glory and The Long Riders, he starred in Ingmar Bergman’s 1978 English-language picture The Serpent’s Egg, which may not be the master’s worst movie ever but probably holds the record as the recipient of the more jeering wisecracks than any other, with virtually nothing in the win column to balance them out. That, too, only added to his Bizarro World aura. To look at his IMDB page and scan the titles after 1980 is to glimpse the stuff of nightmares. He was making what were essentially straight-to-DVD films, one after another, almost twenty years before there were DVDs. The only true reprieve came about five years ago, with Kill Bill and a couple of guest spots on Alias that respectfully paid tribute to his place in pop-culture mythology. (And a commercial for the Yellow Pages that played off the fact that you’d maybe seen this guy recently on Alias.) Then it was back to the sludge mines, including a role in Epic Movie and some voice-over work for the Death Race remake. In 1991, he revived the character of Caine for a cameo in a 1991 TV movie that also featured appearances by Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford as Lucas and Mark McCain, Gene Barry as Bat Masterson, and Brian Keith as Sam Peckinpah’s the Westerner, and a year later, he signed on for a syndicated TV series, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, in which he played his own grandson; oddly, it lasted for four seasons to the original Kung Fu‘s three. At the time, I remember a reviewer for that staid journal The Village Voice writing that Carradine was “one of the great character actors of his generation, not because he’s such a great actor, but because he’s such a character.” I loved David Carradine, and I shudder a little when I think of how much time he and his career must have spent at the mercy of people who thought that being a great actor and being such a character were two things that had to be mutually exclusive.

–Phil Nugent