Tag Archives: Ken Jenkins

October True Crime: In Broad Daylight (dir by James Steven Sadwith)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

On July 10th, 1981, Kenneth Rex McElroy was gunned down in Skidmore, Oklahoma.  He was shot while sitting in his truck.  Over 40 bullets were fired into the truck but only two actually hit McElroy.  His fourth wife, Trena (who Kenneth first met when she was 12 and he was 35), was sitting beside him at the time but was not hit by any bullets.  McElroy was 47 years old when he was gunned down in broad daylight.  There were reportedly 46 witnesses who saw the shooting occurred.  When interrogated by the police, not a single one said that they saw anything.  Quite a few did mention that Ken McElroy had gotten exactly what he deserved.

Ken McElroy was a high dropout, a barely literate career criminal who rustled cattle, burned down houses, raped his fourth wife when she was just 12, and then killed her family’s dogs in order to intimidate them into not pressing charges against him.  He was known as the town bully, a surly man who had 17 children with 6 different women and who would shoot anyone who disagreed with him.  Whenever he was charged with a crime, he would intimidate the witnesses into not testifying against him.  In 1980. he got angry at a store owner after one of his kids was accused of shoplifting candy.  McElroy shot the man and was put on trial for attempted murder.  For once, he was convicted but he was freed on bail while awaiting appeal.  When it become apparent that McElroy would not be going to prison for a while, the citizens of Skidmore….

Well, I should probably chose my words carefully.  The truth of the matter is that no one has even been charged with or convicted of killing Ken McElroy.  It is known that several citizens did have a meeting a few night before McElroy’s death and that they discussed what they could best do to keep McElroy from hurting anyone else.  It’s also knoqn that, a week before he was shot, McElroy walked into the local bar with his rifle and dared anyone who wanted him dead to come get him.  Does that mean that a group of concerned citizens took it upon themselves to dispense vigilante justice?  That’s what Trena always claimed but again, no one was every charged, indicted, or convicted.  The death of Ken McElroy remains officially unsolved.

Perhaps that’s why the names were changed for the 1991 made-for-television movie In Broad Daylight.  Brian Denney may be playing a character named Len Rowan but, for anyone familiar with the case, it’s obvious that he’s playing Ken McElroy just as Marcia Gay Harden is obviously playing Tena McElroy, even if her character is called Adina.  The film doesn’t change the name of the town and it doesn’t change the circumstances that led to McElroy’s death.  W watch as McElroy intimidates the owners of a grocery store (played by Cloris Leachman and John Anderson) and even attempts to bully the local police (represented here by Chris Cooper).  The film features a gun-toting crowd surrounding Len Rowan’s vehicle but it’s shot in such a way that their faces are blurry.

In Broad Daylight was filmed in Texas and it definitely captures both the beauty and the potential danger that comes with living in a rural community.  Everyone in town knows everyone else.  There’s a strong sense of community but, because the community is so small and isolated, it’s easy for a man like Len Rowan to bully the entire town.  Some of the actors lean a bit too hard into their country accents.  (Lord protect us from Yankees trying to sound Southern.)  But the main members of the supporting cast  — Cloris Leachman, John Anderson, Chris Cooper, Marcia Gay Harden — all give convincing performances.  As for Brian Dennehy, he’s absolutely horrifying as the astoundingly cruel Len Rowan.  Dennehy plays Len as being a man who might not exactly intelligent (the real Ken McElroy dropped out of school early) but who is positively brilliant at intimidating people.  Dennehy plays Rowan as if he has a death wish.  All of his threats and his speeches make it clear that he’s just daring someone to shoot him.  Even when he realizes he’s about to get shot while sitting in his truck, he sit there and accepts the inevitable.  Perhaps even he was getting sick of dealing with himself.

After watching In Broad Daylight, it’s easy to understand why no one came forward as a witness.  By his own actions, Ken McErloy was destined to die violently.  A few people just decided to speed things up a little.  Who knows who?

Review: By Dawn’s Early Light (dir. by Jack Sholder)

Posted on by Arleigh

1990’s By Dawn’s Early Light is a film adaptation by HBO of William Prochnau’s novel Trinity’s Child. The film, when it first aired on HBO, seemed dated since the Soviet Union was ultimately going through its death throes as the military build-up initiated during the Reagan Administration crippled the USSR economically (they too tried to match the build-up in conventional and nuclear forces). Yet, despite the ending of the Cold War, recent events domestically and around the world has shown that the world never truly left behind the shadow of nuclear war.

The film is simplicity in the way the plot unfolds. A failed coup by dissident Soviet military commanders fails, but it’s after-effects of creating a “hot war” between the US and the USSR succeeds as both US President and Soviet Premiere make mistakes in their decisions. Decisions heavily influenced by their military commanders who see only black and white in how their respective nations should respond militarily. By Dawn’s Early Light shares some similarities to the classic 60’s Cold War films like Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe. Both films deal with the human frailties and flaws helping influence events that could lead to nuclear Armageddon for the whole planet. By Dawn’s Early Light concentrates on several storylines to highlight the stress and difficulties individuals must face to either follow their orders to their inevitable conclusion or allow their conscience to help make the moral decisions in trying to stop the madness spiraling out of control. Though some people’s decisions are left wanting, the film ends with a glimmer of hope that may just bring the world from the brink of annihilation.

The acting by the cast of Rebecca DeMornay, Powers Boothe, James Earl Jones, Darrin McGavin, Martin Landau and Rip Torn are well done. Rebecca DeMornay and Powers Boothe anchor one of the subplots as romantically involved B-52 crew pilots whose conflict comes from their own intimate closeness affecting command decisions and from the stress of families lost by the rest of the bomber crew. Darrin McGavin, Rip Torn and Martin Landau anchor the other subplot of competing Presidents. One a physically incapacitated US leader trying to avert escalating the conflict to the point of no return with another recently sworn in who fears of losing a nuclear war and thus wanting to strike back full and hard. In between these two leaders is the diabolical performance by Rip Torn as a warmongering Army colonel who sees only winning the war as the only objective. At times, the performances do become hampered by the simplicity of the script, but the cast power through to the end.

In the end, the film might look a bit dated in its production design (this was 1990 and many years before HBO became known for premiere television production) but the story itself is very current and relevant.  What might have been a nice Cold War relic fairy tale when it first aired in 1990 on HBO has taken on more of a cautionary tale as more nations begin to acquire nuclear weapons with some of these nations not just enemies of the US and the world in general, but also led by men whose hold on sanity seem tenuous at best. By Dawn’s Early Light is a great piece political “what if” that hopefully remains just that and not a prediction of reality to come.

Last Man Standing (1996, directed by Walter Hill)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

During the 1920s, at the height of prohibition, a mysterious man named John Smith (Bruce Willis) arrives in the dusty town of Jericho.  Jericho sits on the border, between Texas and Mexico, and it is the site of a gang war.  The Italian mob, led by Fred Strozzi (Ned Eisenberg) and Giorgio Carmote (Michael Imperioli), is trying to move in on the Irish mob, led by Doyle (David Patrick Kelly) and his fearsome gunman, Hickey (Christopher Walken).  After the members of the Irish mob destroy his car and leave him stranded in town, Smith offers his services as a gunman to the Italians.  Strozzi hires him but it turns out that Smith has his own agenda and soon, he is manipulating both gangs against each other.

Last Man Standing was Walter Hill’s remake of Yojimbo, with Bruce Willis playing an Americanized version of Toshiro Minfune’s wandering ronin.  (Hill does the right thing and gives Kurosawa credit for the film’s story.)  Now, it should be understood that this is in no way a realistic film.  It makes no sense for two Chicago-style gangs to be fighting over a ghost town in Texas.  Even when it came to smuggling in liquor during the prohibition era, most of it came over the Canadian border rather than the Texas border.  But Walter Hill has always been more about filming the legend than worrying about realism.  He’s the ultimate stylist, creating movies the come together to create an American mythology.  Last Man Standing is a work of pure style, a combination western/gangster movie that pays tribute to the ultimate samurai film.  Gangsters meeting in the desert while tumbleweed rolls past may not make sense but Hill knows a good visual when he sees one and he makes it work.  The plot is taken from Yojimbo.  The western setting is taken from A Fistful of Dollars.  And the gangsters are pure Americana.

Willis, back in his action star heyday, is quick with a gun and a quip and he gets a few scenes that show that, while he may be bad, he’s not as bad as the gangsters in charge of the town.  Hill surrounds Willis with a cast of great character actors, including Bruce Dern as the cowardly sheriff and William Sanderson as the owner of the hotel.  Though he might not be as well-known as some members of the cast, I especially liked Ken Jenkins as the Texas Ranger who informs Willis that he has ten days to finish up his business before the Rangers come to town and kill whoever is still standing.  And then you’ve got Walken, in one of his best villainous roles.  Hickey doesn’t show up until pretty late in the movie but we’ve spent so much time hearing about him that we already know he’s the most dangerous man in Texas and Walken gives a performance that lives up to the hype.

Unappreciated when it was first released, Last Man Standing has stood the test of time as one of Walter Hill’s best.

Film Review: Executive Decision (dir by Stuart Baird)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1996’s Executive Decision, terrorists hijack an airplane.  Their leader, Nagi Hassan (David Suchet) demands that the U.S. government not only give him and his men safe passage but that they also release Hassan’s commander, Jaffa (Andreas Katsulas).

In Washington D.C., it is decide to use a stealth plane to transport Col. Austin Travis (Steven Seagal) and his men into the passenger plane.  Accompanying them will be Dr. David Grant (Kurt Russell), a consultant for U.S. Intelligence.  Dr. Grant is the world’s leading expert on Hassan, even though neither he nor anyone else is even sure what Hassan looks like.  Travis distrusts Grant because he’s a civilian and also because he holds Grant responsible for a botched raid on a Russian safehouse in Italy.  Dr. Grant is going to have to prove himself to Col. Travis because Travis doesn’t have any time for people who can’t get the job done.  And Travis is determined to get on that plane and save all those passengers.

In other words, Travis is a typical Steven Seagal character and, for the first fourth of this movie, Seagal gives a typical Steven Seagal performance.  He delivers his line in his trademark intimidating whisper, he glares at everyone else in the film, and essentially comes across as being a total douchebag who can still handle himself in a fight..  However, when it’s time to board the airplane through a docking tunnel, something goes wrong.  Everyone — even nervous engineer Dennis Cahill (Oliver Platt) is able to slip through the stealth plane’s docking tunnel and get into the hijacked airplane cargo hold without being detected.  But the two planes are hit by severe turbulence.  Suddenly, it becomes apparent the one man is going to have to sacrifice his life and close the hatch before the docking tunnel decompresses.

David, already in the cargo hold, looks down at Austin in the tunnel.  “We’re not going to make it!”

“You are!” Austin replies before slamming the hatch shut and getting sucked out of the tunnel.  (There’s your Oscar Cheers Moment of 1996!)  After all that build-up, Steven Seagal exits the film early and now, it’s up to Kurt Russell and what’s left of Austin Travis’s men to somehow stop the terrorists.  Not only do they have to stop Hassan but they also have to do it before the Air Force — which has no way of knowing whether or not any of their men were able to get on the plane before the tunnel fell apart — shoots down the airliner.

(If the airplane looks familiar, that’s because Lost used the same stock footage whenever it flashed back to the plane crash that started the show.)

It’s actually a rather brilliant twist.  When this film came out, Seagal was still a film star.  He played characters who always got the job done and who were basically infallible.  He wasn’t a very good actor but he did manage to perfect an intimidating stare and that stare carried him through a lot of movies.  No one would have expected Seagal to die within the first 30 minutes of one of his movies and when Col. Travis, who the film has gone out of its way to portray as being the consummate warrior, is suddenly killed, there really is a moment where you find yourself wondering, “What are they going to do now?”  In just a matter of minutes, Executive Decision goes from being a predictable Steven Seagal action film to a genuinely exciting and clever Kurt Russell thriller.  For once, Russell is not playing a man of action.  He’s an analyst, a thinker.  And, to the film’s credit, he uses his mind more than his brawn to battle Hassan’s terrorists.  With excellent support from Halle Berry (as a flight attendant who discreetly helps out David and the soldiers), Oliver Platt, B.D. Wong, Whip Hubley,  David Suchet, Joe Morton, and even John Leguizamo (as Travis’s second-in-command), Executive Decision reveals itself to be an exciting and ultimately rewarding thrill ride.

And to think, all it took was sacrificing Steven Seagal.

Film Review: And The Band Played On (dir by Roger Spottiswoode)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

I live in a very cynical time.

That was one of my main thoughts as I watched 1993’s And The Band Played On.

Directed by Roger Spottiswoode and featuring an all-star cast, And The Band Played On deals with the early days of the AIDS epidemic.  It’s a film that features many different characters and storylines but holding it all together is the character of Dr. Don Francis (Matthew Modine), an epidemiologist who is haunted by what he witnessed during the Ebola epidemic in Africa and who fears that the same thing is going to happen in America unless the government gets serious about the mysterious ailment that is initially called “gay cancer” before then being known as “GRID” before finally being named AIDS.  Dr. Francis is outspoken and passionate about fighting disease.  He’s the type who has no fear of yelling if he feels that people aren’t taking his words seriously enough.  In his office, he keeps a track of the number of HIV infections on a whiteboard.  “Butchers’ Bill” is written across the top of the board.

Throughout the film, quite a few people are dismissive of Dr. Francis and his warnings.  But we, the audience, know that he’s right.  We know this because we know about AIDS and but the film also expects us to trust Dr. Francis because it’s specifically stated that he worked for the World Health Organization before joining the Center For Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia.  As far as the film is concerned, that’s enough to establish his credentials.  Of course, today, after living through the excesses of the COVID pandemic and the attempts to censor anyone who suggested that it may have begun due to a lab leak as opposed to some random guy eating a bat, many people tend to view both the WHO and the CDC with a lot more distrust than they did when this film was made.  As I said, we live in a cynical time and people are now a lot less inclined to “trust” the experts.  To a large extent, the experts have only themselves to blame for that.  I consider myself to be a fairly pragmatic person but even I now find myself rolling my eyes whenever a new health advisory is issued.

This new sense of automatic distrust is, in many ways, unfortunate.  Because, as And The Band Played On demonstrates, the experts occasionally know what they’re talking about.  Throughout the film, people refuse to listen to the warnings coming from the experts and, as a result, many lives are lost.  The government refuses to take action while the search for a possible cure is hindered by a rivalry between international researchers.  Alan Alda gives one of the best performances in the film, playing a biomedical researcher who throws a fit when he discovers that Dr. Francis has been sharing information with French scientists.

It’s a big, sprawling film.  While Dr. Francis and his fellow researchers (played by Saul Rubinek, Glenne Headly, Richard Masur, Charles Martin Smith, Lily Tomlin, and Christian Clemenson) try to determine how exactly the disease is spread, gay activists like Bobbi Campbell (Donal Logue) and Bill Kraus (Ian McKellen) struggle to get the government and the media to take AIDS seriously.  Famous faces pop up in small rolls, occasionally to the film’s detriment.  Richard Gere, Steve Martin, Anjelica Huston, and even Phil Collins all give good performances but their fame also distracts the viewer from the film’s story.  There’s a sense of noblesse oblige to the celebrity cameos that detracts from their effectiveness.  All of them are out-acted by actor Lawrence Monoson, who may not have been a huge star (his two best-known films are The Last American Virgin and Friday the 13 — The Final Chapter) but who is still heart-breakingly effective as a young man who is dying of AIDS.

Based on a 600-page, non-fiction book by Randy Shilts, And The Band Played On is a flawed film but still undeniably effective and a valuable piece of history.  Director Roger Spottiswoode does a good job of bringing and holding the many different elements of the narrative together and Carter Burwell’s haunting score is appropriately mournful.  The film ends on a somber but touching note.  At its best, it’s a moving portrait of the end of one era and the beginning of another.

White Mile (1994, Directed by Robert Butler)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In this HBO movie, Alan Alda plays the biggest asshole in the world.

Alda is cast as Dan Cutler, an ad exec who books a corporate retreat to Canada’s White Mile.  He tells the nine men who accompany him, some of whom are clients and some of whom work for him, that it’s going to be a weekend of fishing and male bonding.  What he doesn’t reveal is that the trip is also going to require whitewater rafting.  Despite the fact that the majority of the men are out-of-shape and hardly any of them have any rafting experience, Dan insists that they all take part.  When their guide says that they’re going to need to take two boats, Dan refuses.  He wants everyone in one boat, the better so they can all work together to prove their manhood by conquering the river.

The trip starts out well but, when the raft hits a rock and turns over, five of the men end up dead.  Despite injuring his leg, Dan survives and, when he returns to work, he’s hailed as a hero.  However, one of the widows of the men who didn’t survive is now suing the company.  While Dan tries to cover his own ass, one of the survivors — Jack Robbins (Peter Gallagher) — is faced with a dilemma of his own.  As one of the few people who knows that Dan demanded that the guide only use one boat, will Jack testify to the truth at the trial or will he follow Dan’s orders and keep quiet about what really happened?

Based on a true story, White Mile features some brief but exciting (and harrowing) rafting scenes but the film is less about what happened in the wilderness and instead about what’s happening behind the closed doors of corporate America.  White Mile does a good job of taking Alda’s sensitive male persona and pushing it through the looking glass.  As played by Alda, Dan is the type of tyrannical boss who we’ve all had to deal with.  His friendly smile barely disguises a bullying streak.  Even after the accident leaves five of his colleagues dead, Dan is still convinced that the trip was a good idea and that everyone was having the best day of their lives until they hit that rock.  When the river guide initially finds Dan stranded on a rock, Dan makes a show of telling the guide to come back for him later and to find the others.  When Dan later comes across one of the dead men, he says, “He must have had a bad heart,” as he grasps at any way to avoid taking responsibility.  Though White Mile is dominated by Alda’s villainy, it also features good performances from Gallagher, Robert Loggia, Bruce Altman, and Jack Gilipin.  When Gilpin demands to know if anyone at the ad agency has shown any true remorse for what happened, he is speaking for the entire audience.

White Mile was an early HBO film and, because it was released before HBO became known for its original programming, it’s often unfairly overlooked.  When it was released on DVD, it was advertised as being an action-adventure film, which it definitely is not.  Instead, it’s a look at the type of head games that far too often act as a substitute for responsible and ethical management in corporate America.  It’s a good movie and you’ll never look at Alan Alda the same way again.