What I watched last night: Walking Tall (1973)

Thursday, November 11, 2010 12:11 PM

Last night, Olivia and I watched Walking Tall , the semi biographical film about Tennessee's Sheriff Buford Pusser. Even though I had never seen the film, I have vivid memories of it . It played on television on a Sunday night and was all everyone talked about about at school the next day .
Let me clarify, everyone in 4 ^th grade got to watch it, except me. When I saw it in a newsgroup last night, I thought now is my chance. I could remember the enthusiasm my 9 year old peers brought to the critical discussion at lunch that Monday; they were all impressed by the car chases, fighting, and Joe Don Baker's (as Sheriff Buford Pusser) use of a big stick to mete out justice to the bad guys.

Were I able to travel back in time to the lunchroom of Pleasant Street Elementary School in 1974, I might have pointed out that what was dished out in had more to do with revenge and vigilantism than justice. Wikipedia defines a vigilante as

someone who illegally punishes someone for actual or perceived offenses, or participates in a group which metes out extralegal   punishment   to such a person. Often the victims are criminals in the legal sense, however a vigilante may follow a different definition of criminal than the local law. (italics mine)

And that was how Buford Pusser found solutions to his problems with organized crime and corruption in Mcnairy County, Tennessee. After retiring from his career as a professional wrestler, he returned to his parent's home, and quickly ran afoul of the local crime syndicate. This began an increasingly violent series of confrontations between Pusser and the gang of criminals. When he was arrested and put on trial, he realized that the local law officials were corrupt and he was on his own.

Even after being elected sheriff, Pusser's attempts to end the illegal gambling, moonshining and prostitution failed. He was critically wounded and his wife was killed in a gun battle.  After he funeral, he took the law into his own hands, and crashed his car into the criminal's hangout, killing two men. The towns people arrived and made a bonfire out of the wreckage, pledging their fealty to Sheriff Pusser and his individual code of law.

As Pusser, Joe Don Baker delivers a perfect two-tone performance; either dewy-eyed sentimental or red-faced indignation. There are no gray areas in between the two. This polar opposite, world view can create an ugly frame of mind, where one's personal frustration level dictates right and wrong. If Pusser had continued to seek legal redress, he may have saved his family from harm. At the very least, he would have avoided committing murder himself.

Parents and schools strive to educate children from the harmful effects of acting out while angry, that violence is seldom the solution to problems. But as a nation, when we lapse into bouts of fist pumping jingoism against perceived enemies, we run the risk of doing the same and subverting our established legal system, thereby becoming criminals ourselves.

Friday, November 12, 2010 07:47 PM

Here are some of the things I really want to talk about:

(This is a repost from my other blog.  This was when I decided I should start a new blog.)

I am a lifelong fan of horror movies and this past October I immersed myself in them. I watched old horror films, from the 1932 White Zombie to a slew of recent remakes of classic horror films such as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nightmare on Elm Street, Dawn of the Dead,and Halloween, and some new original films like Jennifer's Body, Trick 'r Treat and House of the Devil.

I have to say that compared to the originals, these remakes were pretty tepid. The new Texas Chainsaw Massacre is nowhere  nearly as frightening or bull-goose loony as the first one. One thing missing was the totally over the top family dinner scene, where a shrieking Marilyn Burns is tied to an armchair made from real human arm’s.

Fangs of the Living Dead

I was also pleased to watch several Euro-horror films from the mid 1970s. Many of these films are pretty obscure and maybe for good reason. They all thrived on bizarre plot twists, poor acting, and incomprehensible dialogue. On the other hand they were all gorgeously filmed, featured great costumes and sets, and made excellent use of the beautiful female stars.

The Blood Drinkers

Lastly, I spent a lot of time watching a group of films by Filipino auteur Eddie Romero. These films were made in the late sixties and early seventies and most featured the word blood in the title. The best of these films is called The Blood Drinkers and can be watched for free at Hulu.com. Beautifully shot in a mixture of color, black and white and monochrome tinted scenes, and populated with some of the most interesting villains I’ve ever seen, it reminded me of the stylish films of Jean Rollin.

My companion for most of these films has been Olivia, our black cat. She curls up in the crook of my arm and watches as my computer screen with me. I’m pretty sure she’s not actually watching the movies, but rather than moving colors on the screen. Otherwise I would give for one of my ear buds so she could listen.

Friday night-Rabid

Sunday, November 7, 2010 02:14 PM

Last Friday was an awesome day. I did a couple of firsts in physical therapy, then went to a party in the neighborhood that was the most fun I have had in a long time. What better way to cap off a great day like that than to watch David Cronenberg's 1977 film, Rabid .

David Cronenberg is one of my favorite movie makers. His last two films, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises are among my favorites. Early in his career, in the mid-1970's, he made a name for himself directing very original, creepy films horror films.

His first two, mainstream films, Shivers (1975) and Rabid (as they were known in the US) explored a subject that would soon became a world-wide obsession; a mass plague, transmitted by sexual contact that would transform its victims into monsters. Both these films were made well before AIDS became the global scourge it would later become in that decade and the one to follow.

People quickly demonized AIDS suffers or even people who might be a high risk. The first time I heard about AIDS was my freshman year at college, when someone voiced their fear of catching the disease from Haitian dining hall workers.

In both films, the plague is released in small, isolated communities, an exclusive apartment block on an island in the earlier film, and in a remote, sparsely populated area in Rabid.  Shivers ends with the infected leaving the island to spread the illness; Rabid goes a step further and shows what happens when the plague gets to a large city, Montreal.

In Shivers , Cronenberg casts a wide net with several competing story lines happening at once. Rabid is more restrained, focusing primarily on one couple, Hart and Rose. Marylin Chambers, primarily known for her career in adult films,   especially Beyond the Green Door, the 2001, a Space Odyssey of adult films, plays Rose.

Rose, a Typhoid Mary type carrier, wakes up from experimental surgery craving human blood. She ingests the blood through a proboscis like thing under her armpit that penetrates the victim and sucks the blood she needs. In a typically Cronenberg-esc image, while draining the blood, Rose calmly strokes her victim's heads in a disturbingly nurturing way.

When they awake, the victims are green foam spewing mopnsters, seeking their own supply. Except for when they are attacking, these monsters appear human enough to pass, able to get close to their intended victims, unleashing the plague in a largely populated area.

Marylin Chambers does an apt job in her role as Rose. The last act of the film allows her to show quite a bit of versatility. These are the scenes where she struggles with her changing identity; no longer being the person she was, young, pretty, surround by a nurturing group of friends and family, and what her illness has made her.

Anyway, both films are totally worth watching and I have moved Cronenberg's third film, The Brood to the top of my Netflix queue.

Monday, November 8, 2010 11:41 AM

P. J. Soles

P.J. Soles in Rock and Roll High School

In my post about watching The Devil's Rejects I forgot another reason to like the movie; getting to see P.J. Soles again.

P. J. had supporting roles in seminal classics Carrie, Halloween, and Stripes.  But she captured my teen age heart as Riff Randlle, superlative Ramones fan in Rock and Roll High School .   I think it was her pigtails.


She is one of  a group of fellow travelers who suffer painful and humiliating deaths at the hands of the Firefly family when their paths intersect at a hotel.

I don't remember my gym classes being quite like this.  

What I watched last night: The Great Rock and Roll Swindle

Friday, November 5, 2010, 10:14 AM

Last night I watched The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, a somewhat fictionalized account of the birth, short life and demise of the band The Sex Pistols. The Sex Pistols are considered to be one of the most influential bands in rock and roll, much more for the for their lifestyle and the controversy they created than for their musicianship. They were the anti-band; whatever it was, they were against it.

This was the closest I ever got to reading
about The Sex Pistols

Growing up in the small Midwestern town of Norwalk, Ohio, I was in my early teen years during the reign of the Sex Pistols. In the days before the Internet, to learn about anything exotic (anything outside the borders of Ohio),like punk rock, one had to go to the local public library and use the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature to find magazine articles about it. It was dismaying to find that the Rolling Stone magazine that featured the Sex Pistols from October, 1977 had been heavily censored by the staff at the library. The article and any pictures had cut out of the magazine.

The librarian was nonplussed when I confronted her about this act of censorship. She clearly thought that it was the library's job to remove offensive material before making it available to patrons. That did it for me, if the Sex Pistols were against everything, then I was for them.

Today, like a deadbeat dads who desert their infant children the Sex Pistols ceased to be before they got the chance to know their absentee fathers.  But in post bicentennial America eir ill-behaved antics made headlines. Reactions to their outlandish behavior ranged from amused to outrage. The post hippy world didn’t know how to respond to this angry punk rock child.

Johnny Rotten,The iconoclast's iconoclast,

For me the Sex Pistols, with their destroy everything attitude, provided definition to the walls of my cell, giving me an object to butt my head against. At last, I could see what was confining me or so I thought.

Of course such a self-destructive, nihilistic force, does not produce cogent statements or a manifesto of belief beyond “I want to destroy everything.” Paradoxically while calling mass destruction, Johnny Rotten also elected himself as the leader of this movement, urging his fans to “Follow me!”

One of the miracles of our modern age is the Internet. Thanks to the Internet, finally, 30 years after its release, I am able I was able to watch The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, a mockumentary about the Sex Pistols, as from the perspective of Malcolm Mclaren, their manager.

But thanks to the Internet I’m finally able to watch this film 30 years after its release. Up till now I only had a copy of the soundtrack (on vinyl). It is disorienting to see the still images from the record jacket and the sounds from the album put to life in a film. Seeing those boys from 30 years ago who wanted to destroy the world's icons (and refused to become icons themselves) didn't make me feel nostalgic and pine for days gone by.

But I did feel it was a vital part of my education.

 Here is the trailer on YouTube: 

Poor Sid, he took destruction to its end.