Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Mondays, I will be reviewing Miami Vice, which ran on NBC from 1984 to 1989. The entire show can be purchased on Prime!
This week, things get bleak.
Episode 2.9 “Bought For Paid For”
(Dir by John Nicolella, originally aired on November 29th, 1985)
This is a dark episode.
It opens with Gina’s friend, a Haitian immigrant named Odette (Lynn Whitfield), being attacked and raped in Gina’s apartment. The rapist is easily identified as Nico Arroyo (Joaquim de Almeida), the sociopathic son of a Bolivian general (Tomas Milian) who has been exiled to Miami after a failed coup attempt. Odette used to work as a maid in the general’s Art Deco mansion and Nico is obsessed with her.
Gina is able to convince Odette to testify against Nico but then the general brings Odette’s mother to America and offers her a good deal of money in return for Odette agreeing to testify that the encounter with Nico was consensual. Because her family is poor and desperately needs the money, Odette agrees. With the charges dropped, Nico goes to Odette’s home and kills her.
Gina goes to the general’s mansion and confronts Nico, knowing that it will lead to him trying to attack her in her apartment. When Nico shows up, he’s carrying a switchblade but he drops it as soon as he sees that Gina has a gun. Gina shoots him dead.
Watching this show, one gets the feeling that being a supporting player on Miami Vice could be a thankless task. Switek, Zito, Trudy, and Gina are in every episode but they rarely get to do much. This week Gina gets to have a moment and Saundra Santiago makes the most of it. This episode exists in the shadow of the first season’s Give A Little, Take A Little, in which Gina was raped by Burt Young and, at the end of the episode, shot him dead as well. At one point, when Sonny is arguing that Gina needs to accept that Odette is not going to press charges against Nico, Gina says that he knows why she can’t do that. Later, after Odette dies, Gina fears that, because of her own experience, she may have pushed Odette too hard. In the end, Gina shoots and kills an unarmed man, just as she did in Give A Little, Take A Little. It’s a ruthless move but both of the men were scum who totally deserved it. It’s hard not to appreciate the idea of Gina serving as Miami’s version of Ms. 45.
As I said at the start of this review, this is a dark episode. Nico’s father committed war crimes in Bolivia but now he’s remade himself as a respectable member of Miami society. Nico and his father live in a fabulous mansion and Nico spends his day lounging by the pool. Meanwhile, Odette struggles day-to-day and is essentially sold out by her own mother. (One of the things that gives Nico away as the rapist is the fact that Sonny recognizes the smell of his extremely expensive — and apparently rather pungent — cologne on Odette’s clothes.) Nico feels that he can do whatever he wants to Odette because he’s rich and she’s “bought and paid for.” The system fails and Gina is forced to put her life at risk to get some sort of justice for Odette. This is Miami Vice at its bleakest. The world under all of the glitz and glamour is a dark one.
There is one funny moment though. Gina and Sonny go out to a club with Tubbs and Odette. Sonny watches Tubbs dance with Odette and he starts laughing. And he simply can’t stop. It feels like such a spontaneous moment that I have to wonder if it was scripted or if Don Johnson really did think Philip Michael Thomas was just a terrible dancer.
The story behind the making of 1971’s The Last Movie is legendary. It’s also a bit of a cautionary tale.
In 1969, Hollywood was stunned by the box office success of an independent, low-budget counter-culture film called Easy Rider. Easy Rider not only made a star out of Jack Nicholson but it was also the film that finally convinced the studios that the way to be relevant was not to continue to crank out big budget musical extravaganzas like Doctor Doolittle and Hello, Dolly! Instead, it was decided that the smart thing to do would be to hire young (or, at the very least, youngish) directors and basically just let them shoot whatever they wanted. The resulting films might not make much sense to the executives but, presumably, the kids would dig them and as long as the kids were paying money to see them, everyone would continue to get rich. Because Dennis Hopper had directed Easy Rider, he suddenly found himself very much in demand as a director.
Of course, almost everyone in Hollywood knew Dennis Hopper. Long before he became an icon of the counter-culture, Dennis Hopper had been a part of the studio system. John Wayne even referred to Hopper as being his “favorite communist.” Everyone knew that Dennis could be a bit arrogant. Everyone knew that Dennis was very much into drugs and that, as a result, he had a reputation for being a bit unstable. Everyone knew that Dennis Hopper deliberately cultivated an image of being a bit of a wild man and a revolutionary artist. But Dennis Hopper had just directed Easy Rider and Universal was willing to give Hopper some money to go down to Peru and direct his follow-up.
The Last Movie was a film that Hopper had been planning on making for a while. The film’s original script told the story of an aging and broken-down stuntman named Kansas who retires to Mexico and searches for a gold mine with a friend of his. Hopper first tried to get the film going in 1965, with Montgomery Clift in the lead role. After Clift died, Hopper tried to interest John Wayne in the starring role but, though Wayne enjoyed having Hopper in his films so that he could threaten to shoot him whenever Abbie Hoffman said something shocking, he had no interest in being directed by him. When Universal finally agreed to put up the money for the film, Hopper offered the lead role to Jack Nicholson. Nicholson turned it down and told Hopper that it was obvious that Dennis wanted to play the role himself. Dennis decided that he agreed with Nicholson and he cast himself as Kansas. Dennis also made the fateful decision to not only change the story’s setting to Peru but to also film on location.
Dennis and a group of friends flew down to Peru, which, at that time, was the cocaine capitol of the world. Drug use was rampant on the set, with Dennis reportedly being one of the main offenders. The cast and crew filmed during the day and partied at night and no one was particularly sure what the film was supposed to be about. Amazingly, Hopper finished filming on schedule and within budget but, much as he did with Easy Rider, he also overfilmed and ended up with 40 hours of footage. Not wanting to be bothered by the studios, Hopper edited the footage in his compound in Taos, New Mexico. Working slowly and continuing to consume a large amount of drugs and alcohol, Hopper still managed to put together a film that had a straightforward storyline. When Hopper showed his initial cut to filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, the director of El Topo accused Hopper of being too conventional in his approach, which led to Hopper chopping up the film and reassembling it. Finally, after spending over a year working with the footage, Hopper turned in his final edit.
Universal had no idea what to make of the film that Hopper delivered to them. Still, they released it with the hope that the same crowd that loved Easy Rider would embrace The Last Movie. While the film did win an award at the Venice Film Festival, critics hated it and, even worse, audiences stayed away. The film’s reception was so overwhelmingly negative that Hopper found himself largely exiled from Hollywood, with only a few directors (like Francis Ford Coppola) willing to take the chance of working with him. It wasn’t until the 80s, when he finally got clean and sober, that Dennis Hopper was able to reestablish himself as a character actor and, ultimately, a beloved cultural institution.
But what about The Last Movie? Was is it really as bad as the critics claimed? Or was it, as some more recent reviewers have suggested, an unacknowledged masterpiece that was ahead of its time? I recently watched The Last Movie to find out for myself.
Despite its reputation, The Last Movie gets off to a pretty strong start. Samuel Fuller (playing himself) is directing a hilariously over-the-top and violent western in the mountains of Peru. Kansas (Dennis Hopper) is working as a stuntman. He’s fallen in love with a local sex worker named Maria (Stella Garcia). Kansas is meant to be an aging Hollywood veteran, someone who has broken a lot of bones and who carries a lot of aches as a result of his line of work. (One can see why Hopper initially imagined an actor like John Wayne in the role.) He knows that this is going to be his last job and, as we see over the first 25 minutes of the film, he feels alienated from the rest of the cast and crew. Admittedly, Hopper does appear to be a bit too young for the role. The ideal Kansas would have been someone like Ben Johnson, L.Q. Jones, or perhaps Warren Oates. But, still, Hopper does a good job of capturing Kansas’s mixed feelings about the western that’s being filmed around him.
A lot of familiar faces pop up in the film’s fictional western. Dean Stockwell plays an outlaw. Jim Mitchum, Russ Tamblyn and Kris Kristofferson plays his associates. Peter Fonda is the youthful sheriff. Michelle Phillips is the daughter of the town’s banker and apparently, she’s also the girlfriend of one of the outlaws. We watch as the actors pretend to shoot guns and kill each other while the cameras are rolling, just to get up off the ground once “Cut” is yelled. When a local Indian who has been cast as an extra grows upset at the violence, an assistant director explains to him that no one really dies while the cameras are rolling. When shooting wraps, the film company goes home but Kansas stays behind with Maria. One day, the local priest (Tomas Milian) warns Kansas that the local indigenous people have moved into the abandoned film set and are trying to shoot their own movie. Kansas discovers that they have built wooden cameras and wooden boom mics and that their chief is giving orders in the style of Sam Fuller. They’re also firing the guns that the Americans left behind.
The first part of the film works quite well. Hopper’s camera captures the beautiful and isolated Peruvian landscape. The violent western is a pitch perfect and affectionate parody of a generic studio film. Though Hopper is a bit too young for the role, he still does a good job of capturing Kansas’s alienation from his fellow Americans. Even more importantly, the first part of the film seems to have an identifiable theme. The American film crew invaded an isolated part of Peru and changed the culture of the natives without even realizing it. Now, they’ve left but the natives are still dealing with the after effects of the American “invasion.” It’s easy to see, within that part of the story, a critique of both American culture and American foreign policy.
The second part of the film is where things start to fall apart. Kansas meets an old friend named Neville (Don Gordon). Neville has discovered a gold mine in the Peruvian mountains. With Kansas as his partner, he tries to get a businessman named Harry Anderson (Roy Engel) to invest in it. Kansas and Neville try to impress Harry and his wife (Julie Adams, best-known for being stalked by The Creature From The Black Lagoon). Kansas and Neville take the Andersons to a brothel and, in the process, Kansas offends Maria. Kansas then paws Mrs. Anderson’s fur coat and mentions that human beings are covered in hair. For all of their efforts, Harry will not invest, no matter how desperately Neville begs him to reconsider.
The second part of the film drags, with many of the scenes being obviously improvised between Hopper, Gordon, Garcia, Engel, and Adams. Unfortunately, the improved conversations aren’t particularly interesting and they tend to go on forever. Usually a reliable character actor, Don Gordon ferociously chews the scenery as Neville and it doesn’t take long before one grows tired of listening to him yell. (Gordon was far more impressive in Hopper’s Out of the Blue.) With the use of improvisation and overlapping dialogue, the second half of the film tries to feel naturalistic but instead, it’s a migraine-inducing method exercise gone wrong. It’s also during the second part of the film that a “scene missing” title card flashes on the screen, an indication that the discipline that Hopper showed as a director during the beginning of the film is about to be abandoned.
Finally, the third part of the film — well, who knows? The final 25 minutes of the film is collection of random scenes, some of which may be connected and some of which may not. The natives have decided that the only way to properly end their “film” is to kill Kansas. Kansas is shot several times and rides away on his horse. Suddenly, Kansas is back at his home and Maria is taunting him for getting shot. Then, Kansas is riding his horse again. Then suddenly, Dennis Hopper and Tomas Milian are laughing at the camera. A script supervisor tries to get Dennis to look at the shooting schedule while Dennis drinks. This happens:
Milian points out that the blood on Hopper’s shirt is dry. Hopper looks at his shoulder, where Kansas was previously shot, and says that someone needs to add his scar before he can shoot the scene. Ah! So, now we’re acknowledging that it’s all just a movie. Thanks, Dennis! Suddenly, Dennis is Kansas again and he’s collapsing over and over again in the dust. He appears to be dead but no, now he’s Dennis again and he’s standing up and smiling at the camera. And now, he’s singing Hooray for Hollywood. And now, suddenly, Kansas and Neville are talking about The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and then….
Well, let’s just say that it goes on and on before finally ending with a scrawled title card.
It’s a disjointed mess and it’s all the more frustrating because the first 30 minutes of the film is actually pretty good. But then, Dennis apparently remembered that he was supposed to be the voice of the counter-culture and he gave into his most pretentious impulses. Of course, just because a film is a mess, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be entertaining. And again, the first part of the film is entertaining and third part of the film is weird enough that it’ll hold most people’s attention for at least a few minutes. But the middle section of the film is so slow and pointless that it pretty much brings down the entire film.
In the end, what is The Last Movie about? In The American Dreamer(a documentary that was filmed while Hopper was editing The Last Movie in New Mexico), Hopper spends a lot of time talking about revolution and taking over Hollywood but The Last Movie is hardly a revolutionary film. The film is at its most alive when it is focused on the shooting of its fictional western. For all the satirical pokes that The Last Movie takes at the studio system, it’s obvious that Hopper had a lot of affection for Old Hollywood and for directors like Sam Fuller. Kansas may say “Far out,” but he’s hardly a hippie. Even the film’s jumbled finale seems to be saying, “It’s all Hollywood magic!” In the end, the film’s call for a new style of cinema is defeated by its love for the old style of cinema.
Instead, I think The Last Movie works best when viewed as a portrait of paranoia. Hopper himself admitted that he was naturally paranoid and the heavy amount of drugs that he was doing in the 70s didn’t help. One reason why Hopper filmed in Peru and edited in New Mexico was so the studios couldn’t keep track of him and, while directing, he worried about being arrested by the Peruvian secret police. As an actor, Hopper plays Kansas as being someone who views the world with caution and untrusting eyes. He doesn’t trust the other members of the film crew. He loves Maria but he’s still convinced that she’s going to betray him. Even the natives ultimately try to destroy him and the script supervisor tries to get him to stick to the shooting schedule. The film works best as a disjoined portrait of one man’s paranoid and fatalistic world view.
The Last Movie pretty much ended the studio’s attempts to harness the counter-culture by giving money to self-described revolutionaries. The new wave of directors — like Spielberg and Lucas — may have shared Hopper’s then-politics but they weren’t looking to burn down the system. (Hopper himself later became a Republican.) The Last Movie may not have been the literal last movie but it was, for a while at least, the last of its kind.
Nico Giraldi (Tomas Milian) was once one of Rome’s top thieves. He stole handbags and briefcases and he sold them through a network of underground sellers. Now that Nico has grown up, he’s turned over a new leaf. Though he still bristles at authority and is just as quick to break the rules, Nico is now a member of the Rome police, assigned to the anti-mugging squad. He’s a tough cop who has no problem beating the Hell out of a mugger after he captures him. However, Nico knows that arresting the muggers is only half the job. To Nico, the real enemies are the sellers who employ the muggers. Nico wants the men at the top of the criminal food chain, men like the mysterious Baron (Guido Mannari) and the sadistic American crime boss, Richard Russo (Jack Palance).
It’s not just his background that’s unconventional. Dressing like a slob and sporting an unkempt beard, Nico is a strong contrast to his more conventional co-workers. Nico even carries a mouse named Captain Spaulding in his front shirt pocket. The ladies, of course, love Nico. His girlfriend (played by the beautiful Maria Rosaria Omaggio) is a literary agent who is hoping the publish a manuscript that is being smuggled out of Russia. The Russians try to sabotage her efforts by switching a briefcase. It’s a pretty good thing that Nico still remembers how to pull off the perfect mugging.
Though Nico is obviously based on Al Pacino’s performance in Serpico, The Cop in Blue Jeans has little in common with Sidney Lumet’s classic. Instead, The Cop in Blue Jeans is a mix of action and comedy. The action comes from Nico’s attempts to capture the members of Russo’s gangs and Russo killing anyone who displeases him. (A scene in which Russo has a man suffocated in a car is far stronger than anything you would ever see in an American comedy.) The comedy comes from Nico being such a slob that even his fellow police officers often attempt to arrest him. Nico insults everyone and everyone insults Nico. It’s actually not that funny but I liked how every fight turned into an elaborate brawl and Tomas Milian, who was always well-cast as scruffy iconoclasts, gives a good performance as Nico. Add to that, it’s always entertaining to see Jack Palance play the bad guy, even if this was clearly just a film that he did to pick up a paycheck.
The Cop in Blue Jeans was a big hit in Italy and, coming out a time when Milian’s career was struggling after his early Spaghetti Western successes, it helped to revive his career. Milian went on to play Nico in ten sequels before then establishing himself as a character actor. (The role that most modern audiences know him from is as the corrupt Mexican general in Traffic.) Milian died in 2017 and today would have been his 87th birthday. The Cop in Blue Jeans features him at his best and shows why he was a star for such a long time.
What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!
Earlier today, If you were having trouble getting to sleep around one in the morning, you could have turned over to TCM and watched the 1990 action film, Revenge.
Revenge is an almost absurdly masculine film about two men who are in love with the same woman and who, as a result, end up trying to kill each other and a lot of other people.
Jay Cochran (Kevin Costner) is a U.S. Navy aviator who, when we first see him, is doing the whole Top Gun thing of flying in a fast jet and making jokes while his navigator worries about dying. Interestingly enough, Top Gun and Revenge were both directed by Tony Scott so perhaps this opening scene was meant to be a self-reference. Well, regardless of intent, it’s a scene that goes on forever. This is Jay’s last flight, as he’s due to retire. We go through an extended retirement party, where everyone has a beer and Jay gives one of those bullshit sentimental speeches that men always give in films like this.
Jay has been invited to estate of Tibbey (Anthony Quinn), who is a Mexican gangster. Tibbey and Jay are apparently old friends, though it’s never quite explained how the youngish Jay knows the not-very-youngish Tibbey. Tibbey is one of those gangster who is incapable of doing anything without first talking about what an amazing journey it’s been, going from poverty to becoming one of the most powerful men in Mexico.
Tibbey apparently wants to play tennis with Jay and take him hunting. Jay decides that he’d rather have an affair with Tibbey’s much younger wife, Miryea (Madeleine Stowe). Miryea is upset that Tibbey doesn’t want to have children because he feels that pregnancy would ruin her body. When Tibbey finds out about the affair, he sends Miryea to a brothel and Jay to the middle of the desert. That’s Tibbey’s revenge!
Except, of course, Jay doesn’t die because he’s Kevin Costner and if he died, the movie would end too quickly. So, Jay fights his way back from the desert, intent on not only finding Miryea but getting his own revenge on Tibbey!
(It’s hard to take a bad guy named Tibbey seriously, even if he is played by Anthony Quinn.)
Revenge goes on for way too long and neither Tibbey nor Jay are really sympathetic enough to be compelling characters. You never really believe in Tibbey and Jay’s friendship, so the whole betrayal and revenge aspect of the film just falls flat. On the plus side, youngish Kevin Costner is not half as annoying as cranky old man Costner. Anthony Quinn was one of the actors who was considered for the role of Don Corleone in The Godfather and, watching him here, you can kind of see him in the role. He would have been a bit of a crude Corleone but Quinn had an undeniably powerful and magnetic screen presence. In Revenge, Quinn chews up and spits out all of the scenery and is not subtle at all but it’s entertaining to watch him because he’s Anthony Quinn.
Anyway, Revenge ends with a tragedy, as these things often do. Anthony Quinn never says, “Revenge is a dish best served cold,” and that, to me, is a true missed opportunity.
(Lisa is currently in the process of cleaning out her DVR! It’s taking her longer than it took Saint Malachy to transcribe The Prophecy of the Popes! She recorded the 1982 film, Monsignor, off of Retroplex on March 8th!)
Maybe it’s because I’m a fourth Italian and I was raised Catholic but Monsignor amused the Hell out of me.
See, Monsignor is a big, sprawling epic about the Church and the Mafia. I don’t know much about the production of this film but, having watched it, I’m going to guess that it was made by people who were neither Catholic nor Italian. This is one of those films that is so full of clichés and inaccuracies and yet so self-important that it becomes oddly fascinating to watch.
It tells the story of Father John Flaherty (Christopher Reeve, an Episcopalian who gives a performance so wooden that one worries about getting splinters just from watching it). When we first meet Father Flaherty, he’s just taken his orders. He’s a good Irish kid from Brooklyn. The neighborhood’s proud of him, because he has volunteered to serve as a chaplain in the army. (The film opens during World War II.) The neighborhood is even prouder when he performs a Mafia wedding. Don Appolini (Jason Miller), who may be a mobster but who still loves the Church, is especially impressed. He expects big things from Father Flaherty.
(The father of the bride, incidentally, is played by Joe Spinell, who played Willy Chicci in Godfathers One and Twoand who achieved a certain infamy when he starred in Maniac.)
Father Flaherty goes to war and discovers that it’s not easy to be a man of God in a war zone. Everywhere around him, soldiers are either dying or losing their faith. (Perhaps it would help if Father Flaherty knew how to properly conduct a Requiem Mass but the movie screws that up, with Flaherty saying, “”Requiescat in pace” when he clearly should have said, “Requiescant in pace.”) After trying, in vain, to comfort a mortally wounded man, Flaherty snaps, picks up a machine gun, and starts blowing away Germans.
Having broken the Thou Shalt Not Kill Commandment and indulged in one of the seven deadly sins, Father Flaherty apparently decides to commit every other sin as well. Or, at least, it seems like that’s his plan. The thing is, Christopher Reeve’s performance is bland that it’s difficult to guess what could possibly be going on inside of Flaherty’s head. Is he disillusioned with the church or does he still have faith? When he says that he feels guilty over his transgressions, is he being sincere or is he lying? It’s impossible to tell because, when it comes to Father Flaherty, there’s no there there. He’s literally an empty vessel.
That, of course, doesn’t stop him from becoming a powerful man in the Church. Through his Mafia connections, he makes a fortune on the black market and launders money for the church. He also has sex with a cynical, nymphomaniac postulant nun, who is something of a stock figure in films like this. In this case, the role is played by Genevieve Bujold. Despite the stereotypical nature of her character, Bujold comes the closest of anyone in the cast to giving a nuanced performance but her character abruptly vanishes from the film. One can literally hear the producers in the background saying, “Okay, we’ve indulged in the sexy nun thing. Send her home now.”
Towards the end of the film, there’s a flash forward that is so abrupt that I didn’t even realize it had happened until I noticed that Christopher Reeve and Jason Miller now had a little gray in their hair. The flash forward doesn’t really accomplish much. Father Flaherty has lost a lot of the Mafia’s family and the Mafia’s not happy about it. It’s kinda like the Vatican subplot in The Godfather Part III, just with less interesting actors.
Anyway, Monsignor obviously thinks that it has something to say about both the Church and the Mafia but it’s actually remarkably empty-headed. Strangely enough, for an epic film that cost 10 million dollars to make (that’s in 1982 money), the whole film looks remarkably cheap. If a community theater decided to put on a production of Otto Preminger’s The Cardinal, the end result would probably end up looking a lot like Monsignor.
And yet, I really can’t hate Monsignor. It’s so bad that, as I said earlier, it’s also oddly fascinating. You watch and you ask yourself, How many details can one film about Catholicism get wrong? How many Italian stereotypes can be forced into a movie with a Mafia subplot? Now, I should point out that, at no point, does Don Appolini say, “Mama mia!” but, if he had, I wouldn’t have been surprised. It’s just that type of film.
Anyway, Monsignor is so sordid and stupid that it becomes entertaining for all the wrong reasons. If you’re into that, you’ll enjoy Monsignor.
I have some sad news to report. The great Tomas Milian, an actor beloved by fans of Italian cinema everywhere, has died. He was 84.
Perhaps because of the type of films that he made, Milian was never the household name that he deserved to be. In the United States, his death is not even trending on twitter. #ThickThighTwitter, which is essentially a bunch of people bodyshaming anyone who happens to be slim, is trending. Tomas Milian is not.
And it’s a shame because Tomas Milian was one of the best. He may have been beloved by fans of Italian cinema but Milian was truly an international actor. He was born in Cuba, the son of a general who committed suicide after being jailed. Milian left Cuba after his father’s death. He moved to New York City, was a member of the Actor’s Studio, and became naturalized citizen in 1969.
Milian’s acting career took off when he started making movies in Italy. He appeared in everything from spy movies to spaghetti westerns to horror films to 1970s police dramas. Whenever I see one of the many films that Milian made in the 60s and 70s, I’m struck by his intensity. Milian was one of those power actors who often seems like he might leap off the screen at any moment. He played driven and often haunted men. Along with an undeniable charisma, Milian radiated danger.
Of the many Westerns he made, The Big Gundownmay be his best known. Here’s Milian with co-star Lee Van Cleef:
My personal favorite of his spaghetti westerns? The surreal Django Kill:
For me, Tomas Milian was at his most menacing in Lucio Fulci’s underrated (and not for the faint-of-heart) Four Of The Apocalypse:
Four of the Apocalypse was not the only film on which Milian would work with Fulci. He also played the hero in Fucli’s classic giallo, Don’t Torture a Duckling:
In the 70s, Tomas Milian appeared in several Poliziotteschi, Italian cop films that were largely designed to rip off the success of gritty cop films like The French Connection and Serpico. Milian was always the ideal rebel cop, though he could play a dangerous criminal just as easily. Check him out in The Cop In Blue Jeans, perhaps parodying Al Pacino in Serpico:
The films weren’t always good but Milian always commanded the screen. It’s hard to think of any other actor who was always so much consistently better than the material he had to work with.
With the decline of the Italian film industry, Thomas Milian relocated his career to the United States. In his later years, he was a character actor who frequently appeared as corrupt military men and politicians. His best known performance from this time may be his quietly sinister turn in Steven Soderbergh’s Oscar-winning Traffic:
Earlier today, Tomas Milian died of a stoke in Miami. Rest in peace.
I have mixed feelings about Steven Soderbergh. On the one hand, his talent cannot be denied and you have to respect the fact that he’s willing to take chances and make films like The Girlfriend Experience and The Informant. On the other hand, he’s also the director who has been responsible for overrated messes like Contagionand utter pretentious disasters like Haywire. And it doesn’t help that Soderbergh’s fanbase seems to be largely made up of the type of hipsters who end up leaving comments under the articles at The A.V. Club. Some people mourned Soderbergh’s retirement. Personally, I think he made the right decision. He retired before his misfires ended up outnumbering all of his masterpieces.
The thing about Soderbergh is that his good films are so good that it makes it all the more frustrating to watch his failures. If Soderbergh was just your typical bad director than a film like Contagion wouldn’t be as annoying. But this is the man who also gave us Traffic!
And Traffic is a very good film.
First released in 2000, Traffic attempted to deal with the American war on drugs, a war that the film suggests might not even be worth fighting. (Full disclosure: I support the legalization of drugs and, for that matter, just about everything else. And yes, I am biased towards films that agree with me. So is every other film critic out there. The difference is that I’m willing to admit it.) Traffic won four Oscars, including Best Director and Best Supporting Actor for Benicio Del Toro. It was also nominated for best picture but lost to Gladiator.
Traffic tells three, barely connected stories. Each story is given its own distinct look, feel, and color scheme. And while it takes a few minutes to get used to film’s visual scheme, it ultimately works quite well. Though all of the film’s characters share the same general existence, they live in different worlds. The only thing linking them together is drugs.
Judge Andrew Wakefield (Michael Douglas) is a judge on the Ohio Supreme Court who has recently been named as the new drug czar. However, while Judge Wakefield is going around the country and talking to politicians (Harry Reid shows up playing himself and is just as creepy as always), his daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen) is dating Seth (Topher Grace) and getting addicted to cocaine and heroin. When Caroline run away, Judge Wakefield recruits Seth and, using him as a guide, searches the ghetto for his daughter.
The Wakefield scenes are bathed in cold and somber blues. They’re beautiful to look at but, in some ways, they’re also some of the weakest in the film. The whole plotline of Caroline going from being an innocent honor’s student to being a prostitute who sells her body for heroin feels a lot like the notorious anti-drug film Go Ask Alice. At the same time, it’s interesting and a little fun to see Topher Grace playing such a little jerk. Grace gets some of the best lines in the film, especially when he attacks Wakefield’s feelings of smug superiority.
In the film’s second storyline, two DEA Agents (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman) arrest drug trafficker Eddie Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer). Eddie works for the Ayala syndicate and, once he’s arrested, he turns informant. Drug lord Carlos Ayala (Steven Bauer) is arrested. While Carlos sits on trial, his pregnant wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and his sleazy business associate (Dennis Quaid) struggle to hold together the business and find a way to kill Ruiz before he can testify.
This storyline is filmed in bright and vibrant colors and why not? The Ayalas are rich and, unlike the Wakefields, they don’t feel the need to hide their material wealth. This is actually probably my favorite storyline, largely because it’s the best acted and the most entertaining. Miguel Ferrer, in particular, steals every scene that he’s in. The scene where he explains the economics of being a drug trafficker is fascinating to watch.
The Ayala storyline may be my favorite but the film’s most thought-provoking storyline is the third one. Taking place in Mexico, it stars Benicio Del Toro as Javier Rodriguez, a casually corrupt police officer who gets recruited to work for General Salazar (Tomas Milian), who is heading up Mexico’s war on the cartels. Following the orders of Salazar, Javier captures assassin Frankie Flowers (Clifton Collins, Jr.) who is then savagely tortured by Salazar until he turns informer. Javier comes to realize that Salazar is actually working for one of Mexico’s cartels. When he decides to inform on Salazar, he puts his own life at risk.
The Mexico storyline is also the harshest and visually, it reflects that fact. The heat literally seems to be rising up from the desert and the streets of Tijuana. It takes a few minutes to adjust to the look of the Mexico scenes but, once you do, they become enthralling.
And Traffic, as a film, is undeniably enthralling as well. Soderbergh deftly juggles the multiple storylines and brings them together to create a portrait of a society that’s being destroyed by the efforts to save it. Hopefully, if Soderbergh ever does come out of retirement, he’ll give us more films like Traffic and less films like Contagion.
Yesterday, I took a look at Executive Action, a 1973 docudrama about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Today, I want to take a look at another film inspired by the Kennedys, the 1979 satire Winter Kills.
As the film opens, it’s been 16 years since a popular and dynamic President named Tim Kegan was assassinated in Philadelphia. Despite constant rumors of conspiracy, the official story is that Kegan was killed by a lone gunman and that gunman was subsequently killed by another lone assassin. The President’s half-brother, Nick (played by Jeff Bridges, who looks so impossibly young and handsome in this film), has disappointed his father (John Huston) by declining to follow his brother into politics. Instead, he spends most of his time sailing on corporate oil tankers and dating fashion editor Yvette (Belinda Bauer). This all changes when a dying man named Fletcher (and played, underneath a lot of bandages, by Joe Spinell) asks for a chance to speak to Nick. Fletcher reveals that he was the 2nd gunman and that he was hired by to kill President Kegan. Before dying, Fletcher tells Nick where he can find the rifle that was used to kill the President.
Following Fletcher’s directions, Nick finds both the rifle and proof that his brother’s death was the result of a conspiracy. Determined to find out who was truly behind the conspiracy, Nick goes to see his father, the flamboyant tycoon Pa Kegan (John Huston) who, we discover, is only alive because he frequently gets blood transfusions from young women. With Pa’s encouragement, Nick is sent on an increasingly bizarre odyssey into the darkest shadows of America, a world that is populated by militaristic businessmen, sinister gangsters, and an unemotional man named John Cerutti (Anthony Perkins) who very well may be the most powerful man in the world.
The martyred President might be named Tim Kegan, his accused assassin might be named Willie Abbott, and the man who shot Abbott might be named Joe Diamond (and might be played by Eli Wallach) but make no mistake about it — Winter Kills is a thinly disguised look at both the Kennedy assassination and the Kennedy family. Based on a novel by Richard Condon (who also wrote the conspiracy classic, The Manchurian Candidate), Winter Kills takes all of the various Kennedy conspiracy theories and intentionally pushes them to their most ludicrous extremes. The end result is a film that tries (and occasionally manages) to be both absurd and sincere, a portrait of a world where paranoia is the only logical reaction.
As I discovered from listening to director William Richert’s commentary on the Anchor Bay DVD, Winter Kills had a long and complicated production history. The film was produced by two marijuana dealers, one of whom was murdered by the Mafia shortly after the film premiered while the other would later be sentenced to 40 years in prison on federal drug charges. The production actually went bankrupt more than a few times, which led to Richert, Bridges, and Bauer making and releasing another film specifically so they could raise the money to finish Winter Kills.
When Winter Kills was finally released, it got a good deal of attention because of its spectacular cast. Along with Bridges, Huston, Perkins, and Wallach, the film also features cameo appearances by Tomas Milian, Elizabeth Taylor, Ralph Meeker, Richard Boone, Sterling Hayden, Dorothy Malone, Toshiro Mifune, and a host of other actors who will be familiar to those of us who enjoy watching old movies on TCM. And yet, according to Richert, the film itself was barely released in to theaters, the implication being that Winter Kills was a film about conspiracies that fell victim to a conspiracy itself.
Given the film’s history and the subject matter, I was really hoping that Winter Kills would turn out to be a great movie. Unfortunately, it really doesn’t work. The film struggles to maintain a balance between suspense and satire and, as a result, the suspense is never convincing and the satire is ultimately so obvious that it ends up being more annoying than thought-provoking. The cast may be impressive but they’re used in such a way that film ultimately feels like it’s just a collection of showy celebrity cameos as opposed to being an actual story.
That said, Winter Kills remains an interesting misfire. Jeff Bridges is a likable and compelling lead (and he gives the film much-needed focus) and, playing a role that has a lot in common with his better known work in Chinatown, John Huston is a always watchable if not necessaily likable. Best of all is Anthony Perkins, who plays a role that, in light of what we now know about the NSA, seems oddly prophetic.
Finally, best of all, Winter Kills remains an interesting time capsule. If nothing else, it reminds us that mistrust and paranoia are not unique to this century.
Released in 1967 and directed by Giulio Questi, Django Kill is one of the essential spaghetti westerns.
The film opens with a man literally clawing his way out of a shallow grave. Played by Tomas Milian and known as the Stranger, the man is a Mexican outlaw who has been buried out in the middle of the desert. Two sympathetic Indians discover the Stranger and, while they nurse him back to health, he has several flashbacks that explain how he came to be buried alive.
The Stranger was a member of a gang of thieves who stole a cargo of gold. However, the Americans in the gang betrayed the Mexicans, gunning them down and fleeing with the gold. The Indians agree to help the Stranger find the rest of his gang on the condition that the Stranger tell them what it was like to be dead.
The Stranger’s former gang, meanwhile, has arrived at a desolate town known as Unhappy Place. From the minute that the gang first rides into town, we know that there’s something sinister about Unhappy Place. A naked child stands in the middle of the street while another is used as a footrest by one of the adults. A distraught woman watches them from behind a barred window. A lame hedgehog drags itself across the dusty street. As soon as the gang stops at the local saloon, the locals see the gold that they’re carrying and, in a shockingly brutal scene, the townspeople lynch the outlaws.
While this is going on, the Stranger rides into town. Spotting the last living outlaw, the Stranger proceeds to gun him down. In one of the film’s more infamous scenes, when the townspeople learn that the Stranger is using gold bullets, they proceed to literally rip the outlaw to pieces in an effort to retrieve the golden bullets.
With the outlaws dead, the townspeople claim the gold for themselves. The Stranger, who was apparently more interested in revenge than getting the gold, stays in town and watches as things get increasingly weird.
How weird?
Well, how about the fact that the Stranger ends up having a romance with a crazy woman who spends her days trapped behind a locked door?
Or how about the fact that the Stranger finds himself in the middle of a power struggle between the townspeople and the flamboyantly homosexual Zorro (played, in grandly villainous fashion, by Roberto Camardiel) who rides into town with a gang of cowboys who are all dressed in black outfits with white embroidery? In another one of the film’s infamous scenes, Zorro and his cowboys kidnap and gang rape the son of the town’s saloonkeeper.
(A young Ray Lovelock, who would go on to be one of the best actors to regularly work in Italian exploitation plays the son.)
Or how about the scene where Zorro plays with a bunch of Civil War figures while arguing with his pet parrot? When Zorro offers the parrot a drink, the parrot replies, “I want more!”
Or, how about the fact that the Stranger, at one point, has to deal with several vampire bats while literally hanging from a cross?
Graphically violent and full of bizarre and disturbing imagery, Django Kill is one of the strangest westerns ever made and that strangeness keeps the film interesting even when the story doesn’t make much sense. While Django Kill may not be the masterpiece that several claim it to (the film runs on a bit long and the dubbing of the English language version was absolutely terrible), it’s still one of the most compulsively watchable films that I’ve ever seen. Just when you think the film can’t get any stranger, it does.
Django Kill was filmed under the title of If You Live, Shoot! However, in a move typical of Italian cinema, the film was retitled to take advantage of the popularity of Sergio Corbucci’s Django. The implication, of course, is that Tomas Milian is playing the same character here that Franco Nero played in Corbucci’s film. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Even in the crudely dubbed English version of the film, Milian is never referred to by name. Instead, he’s simply known as the Stranger and, appropriately enough, the film feels more like a surreal take on Sergio Leone’s Dollar trilogy as opposed to being a part of the Django series.
That said, regardless of whether it’s a legitimate Django film or not, Django Kill …. If You Live, Shoot! is more than worth watching. In fact, it’s essential for anyone who loves Italian exploitation films.
Through the Shattered Lens 