The Golden Age Of….The American Family-Suburban Branch-Jimmy Stewart’s “Mr. Hobbs Takes A Vacation” (1962)- A Film Review

The Golden Age Of….The American Family-Suburban Branch-Jimmy Stewart’s “Mr. Hobbs Takes A Vacation” (1962)- A Film Review

DVD Review

By Laura Perkins

Mr. Hobbs Takes A Holiday, starring Jimmy Stewart, Maureen O’Hara, Fabian, 1962

My old friend and fellow writer here Sandy Salmon (and film critic formerly with the American Film Gazette but we aren’t supposed to say anything but the designated term writer since we cover all beats so just writer) always told me that the best kind of movie to review for him anyway was one which put the spotlight on some aspect of American life at a certain nodal point in our history. Basically a “slice of life” story told as much, or more about society, or as here in the film under review Mr. Hobbs Takes A Vacation a certain segment of that society at the time as any academic book or paper.

Within the plotline of this quasi-comic look at suburban America circa the late 1950 and early 1960s Sandy’s comment is spot on even if it’s a very glossy take on the mores of white middle class families in the “golden age” of American prosperity. It is almost a clinically pure example of the inward facing look of that segment during the heart of the Cold War red scare although you would hardly know it from the total lack of outside world reality intervention. I came up on the farm, a hard scrabble working truck farm outside of Albany in Dutch country upstate New York around the time of setting of this film and would have been the youngest daughter in this household, Katey, near contemporary. My world never came close to looking like that including all the alleged teen anagst and alienation traumas she faced.  Didn’t have time for that kind of thing.        

The plot is almost irrelevant here since it is pretty slim but the sociology is something to behold. An older white suburban couple, married, father Roger Hobbs, Jimmy Stewarts’ role, a successful banker, wife, Peggy, of Peg of my heart fame, played by Maureen O’Hara, successful housewife, one troubled boy teen, one very troubled girl teen, and no known dogs at home, along with two older married with children daughters also housewives with husbands who appear to be good providers for the next cookie cutter generation of one provider families already heading toward extinction to be replaced by two working parents also with no known dogs. Perfect sociological cohort of upwardly mobile America in a day when that dream had some realistic possibilities of achievement.

That was the sociology part the other part is the jack of all trades Mr. Fix it dad part. That much put upon Roger Hobbs who followed a long line of such dads from his own role in It’s a Wonderful Life to television’s Ward Cleaver, Fred McMurray, and Ozzie Nelson you get the picture. No child welfare department, no school counselors, no police intervention, no priest, nada. Just Pops, aka here Bumpah to grandchild. Old Hobbs takes the vacation from hell (in the future Chevy Chase would take up those same cudgels) and turns it into a one man’s family triumph. Young son alienated take him sailing. Young daughter ditto alienated and boy hungry no problem. Send a guy around (the guy turns out to be singer  Fabian heartthrob to young white suburban boy hungry white girls in the interest of transparency me too but here whose beard seems to make him cradle robbing). Daughter’s husband out of work get him work. Cook getting uppity no problem woo her back. Machinery out of whack-give the guy a wrench. An A number one Dad. Yeah, count this one if you really must see it as strictly a slice of life from a time which seems like a million years ago. Before rampart divorce, single parenthood, two worker households, and the like. Even the family station wagon has bitten the dust.                       

The Rise And Fall Of A Top-Rated Private Investigator- The Almost Legendary 1950s California Shamus Lew Archer-With The Doomed Hallman Case In Mind

The Rise And Fall Of A Top-Rated Private Investigator- The Almost Legendary 1950s California Shamus Lew Archer-With The Doomed Hallman Case In Mind

By Sam Lowell

[There have been plenty of crime novels based on the exploits of very real private investigators like poor Lew Archer (some of public coppers too but they are usually s strictly by-the-book procedurals making it seem like there was no need for private investigation although the stacks of “cold cases” sitting in the police file freezer belie that fake news). Phil Larkin out of Albany maybe the best of the lot, of course Sam Spade and his partner Miles out of Frisco town and Phil Marlowe working the southern slumming streets of the same state come to mind. Guys who when their careers were over, when they hung up their guns and closed down the third desk drawer liquor cabinet, or who fell down and make a slight misjudgment about some bad ass’s intentions made the coveted entry into the Hall of Fame.     

It only takes a few pages of those lightly altered stories to figure these guys were built for the heavy lifting that goes with chasing after windmills, chasing after some rough justice in what the writer Seth Garth at American Left History has called “this wicked old world.” It has bothered me for a long time that Lew Archer, an ex-cop who got out of line one too many times for some lifer superior to give him the boot, and a guy who started out like a house on fire wrapping up the Galton case, the big Bay City kidnapping and extortion case in about a week after the public coppers had put the thing is deep cold storage after about two days fell down too early in his gumshoe career (by the way most P.I.s hate that “gumshoe” designation but I am trying to vary up the names for those in the profession). That concern got me on the trail of what happened, why Lew wound up, if I recall, peeping through keyholes, no, that is not right, doing leg work for Sally Langley who is now set to be inducted into the Hall in her own right. A lot of the decline is, no, was shrouded in mystery especially when a guy named Kenny Miller, I believe that is his name although some crime novel writers use aliases so as not to be bothered by holy goofs who want to know “the scoop” on some silly case, started to write about Lew when he had the goods. Wrote a very good one about Lew’s breakthrough case, that Galton one which really was great work even if he solved it faster than most P.I.s working on a per diem would have liked.                

Miller then wrote a few books where you could see he was pulling his punches, was letting Lew take a bow for stuff the public coppers finally had a handle on, could see Lew had some kind of trouble getting the last lap finished. Then Miller wrote about the doomed Hallman case, a case where everybody, or almost everybody, saw as the start of Lew’s downfall. The start of making way too many mistakes, of letting the bad guys get way ahead of him.

When I started my research, started to delve into what brought Lew low I did not know about the Hallman case, the Bay City coppers and whatever was left of the Hallman family when the killings were over had hushed the thing up so tight that it was like it did not happen. Apparently Miller went after the facts, after the record not to chart Lew’s decline but just to see where the decline had begun. The only way that I found out about the case was when Miller saw a piece I wrote in Nightshade, the P.I.-friendly magazine wondering about Lew and what happened to him at the end and he sent me an e-mail referring me to his lightly altered story about the Hallman case. We corresponded a bit to compare notes until we had a parting of the ways over my sound and well thought out analysis of Lew’s big problem-that sexual impotence in an age when that was fatal to big story P.I.s. Automatically froze you out of any consideration for the Hall. Miller’s take, his what he called sound and well-thought out analysis of Lew’s problem was that he never got over his wife divorcing him, and it gnawed at him worse when he was around women. Sure, Kenny every guy who has been chain-whipped by some woman falls down for the rest of his life because he screwed up a good thing. Get real. Get some facts and then come back with that lame idea. Compare that with what I have to say below. Sam Lowell]               

**************

I have a bombshell to report in the festering case of the late California private detective Lew Archer who I have been doing research on to try to figure out why he never made the P.I. Hall of Fame after starting out with such promise on the Galton case which made him a star-for a minute. Sadly, he wound up as a gofer for Sally Langley, yes, that Sally Langley who is about to be inducted into the Hall, after the divorce laws changed to “no fault” and keyhole peepers like taxi drivers today became passé. And after some punk beat him up and stole his car when he was doing “repo” work. Yeah, sad no way around it. But before I lay out my new information let me ask the gentle reader a question. I don’t need an answer but think about it.

Who was the greatest home run hitter of all times? The “Babe,” Henry Aaron, Bobby Bond (setting aside whatever enhancements he may have used)? What about the greatest quarterback? Sammy Baugh, Bart Starr, Joe Montana, Tom Brady? To pose the question is to give the answer. It is very hard to compare athletes from different generations working under very different condition and come up with a sensible comparison. The reason for this \normally silly sports stuff is that I have been pelted, no, inundated with all kinds of lame gibberish about my “unmanly” carping on Lew Archer’s sexual impotence as the reason he slipped down the shamus food chain, why he never made the Hall.

Somehow these deadbeats with apparently plenty of time on their hands and plenty of “cyber ink” can hardly wait to pounce on me for being unkind, or worse to Lew’s memory. What they don’t get at all, don’t understand especially those who see Sally Langley or maybe the “outed” gay private eye Lance Devine as the beeswax of the profession is that in Lew’s time being able to get under the silky sheets with some femme, some frail was part of the job, was part of the resume, was what got you clients and publicity in those circles who could afford to pay to get stuff investigated that the public coppers were either clueless about or would not touch with a ten-foot pole.

I hate to keep having to make a “teachable” moment for this clot of “trolls” who don’t think sex should have entered into the equation but in Lew’s time, as Lew was coming up he had models, good models, just like Sally had Meg Diamond and her post-feminist pushing women forward in the profession giving it a different twist, making taking slugs of either kind sort of old-fashioned and certainly ending that third drawer whisky bottle obsolete against the power of so-called women’s intuition (better stick-to-it-ness) and Lance had Carl Dover pushing gays forward for the same reason when having to bed women as part of the assignment sort of violated the new Code established by the American Association of Private Investigators (AAPI) after great pressure was put on after the heyday of the 1960s. Thus, we are clueless about who either of them slept with, if anybody, because that is not the question today in the private detection field but one’s ability to manipulate the explosive new technologies to put the bad guys to rest, to do what the public coppers can’t do or don’t want to do when all they want to do is have their coffee and crullers. (Some things never change having observed a fleet of them chowing down recently at a Dunkin’ Donut or is it just Dunkin’ not even leaving coin tips in the sacred tip jar) But back in Lew’s day the late 1940s and early 1950s you might as well have become a librarian, maybe a lab technician if you couldn’t rustle and tussle up some sheets while you were solving that heinous crime you were hired to find the perp who did the nasty deed.

Okay, for the millionth time here was the scorecard a guy like Lew had to follow. An old-timer named Sam, Sam Spade set the early standard in a couple of high-end cases also out in California which made that much more glaring about Lew’s downfall. Back East or maybe in Toledo he could have gotten away with the problem, could have faked it and made the Hall if he ever ran across a case that was worthy of his steel. Sam was beautiful in one case to give you an example. While solving about six murders by this femme, Mary, Mary something, Mary Astor, that’s it but don’t get too sentimental about names since everybody had about twelve, one for any occasion,     who was crazy for dough and used guys like washcloths to get this rare jewel he not only bedded her a few times including about five minutes before he tossed her over to the coppers (to save his own skin which is okay in this case because she had him set up as a patsy if things went awry as they did) he was bedding a few others just to keep things interesting. Knocked over his partner’s wife, Ivy something, his secretary, a female cab driver who was willing to take a warm bed in exchange for forgoing cab fare plus tip, maybe more.           

              

   So there was a standard, a California standard which is what a guy named Phil, Phil Marlowe, had to outdo. And did. Phil was a beautiful guy, nature’s nobleman. He worked the Sternwood case, yes, the Sternwood case an old man paid him good money for to find some old Irish revolutionary who befriended him, like a violin. I swear I don’t know how he did it. Bedded this old general who hired him to find some guy two daughters, one at a time or together was never mentioned, some frill in a bookstore, the female clerk working for some scumbag pornographer, a couple of hat check gals at a swank nightclub, another footloose female cab driver bartering the cab fare plus tip away, and the mobster behind lots of dirty stuff who ran that protected night club’s wife. All for a case that took maybe a week to solve. Gold standard.

And Lew? Poor suck-face Lew. The last anybody ever heard of him tussling with a woman, a woman involved in a case he was working was some frustrated wife of a doctor who ran a high-end clinic for the weak and unsure for big dough. Problem in Lew’s case was she was at that point any man’s woman if it is okay in the #MeToo age to say such a thing even if that was the call she made on herself once hubby saw dollar signs in them there hills and studiously avoided her in bed. Bigger problem when Miller interviewed her for background on what ailed Lew (remember that bogus pining over divorcing wife theory he had, sound and well thought out, Jesus) she mentioned that whatever he told anybody else he “couldn’t get it up” to be polite. So Lew was firing blanks, okay. Don’t shoot the messenger just because the message is not to your liking.               

What makes that social worker more important is that the case was the one immediately before the Hallman case, the doomed Hallman family who got picked off like rabbits before the whole thing was done, before the public coppers finished up what Lew had left like scrambled eggs. Here’s a rough outline of the play, really a scorecard of opportunities Lew blew. (I am willing to cut the guy some slack in those pre-Viagra times for his medical condition but remember I am only trying to figure out why he never made the Hall not what he couldn’t help himself with in those dark nights.)

I don’t know, Miller never gave a clue, about Lew’s mental condition upon taking the Hallman case, or really having it thrush upon him after some junkie he had helped when he was a kid referred young heir Hallman, Carl, to Lew to solve a few pressing problems. Like who killed his mother and father. A good- looking brunette was taking care of her aunt and batted her eyes as Lew as he was looking for leads to where this young Hallman might have gone after stealing Lew’s car for a getaway. No go, not even when she practically knocked him over in the foyer retrieving his hat. (That’s, by the way, two stolen joy ride cars in less than a year which should tell even the most devoted Lew adherent that something was wrong, something more than some inherent unmanliness). Next up a psychiatric social worker who was working with young Hallman and was ready to do anything, and from the reports, that meant anything to keep her man, her young Hallman from being killed by the so-called posse, really lynch mob, that was looking all over from Southern California to Nevada for him. Lew said  he would “take a rain check” like the offer would last forever.           

Things get juicier once Lew hits the huge ranch young Hallman is heir to and he runs into young Hallman’s older brother’s wife who can see that if Carl takes a tumble, falls in a rain of bullets as a fugitive and crazy murderer her man will grab everything. She showed up at Lew’s motel room with a proposition and you don’t have to be a genius to know what the terms included to have Lew lay off. Again, zero. Interlude: a couple of crazy townie girls looking for kicks and that was that approached Lew as he walked down the street. They had nothing to do with the case although they had gone to school with Carl and were just feeling their womanly oats but no go even if anybody would bother to argue that Lew was maintaining some kind of professional ethics by laying off women connected with the case. Bullshit. This is the closer, case closer against the defendant one Lew Archer, Carl’s wife who turned out to be an enraged serial killer piling up the bodies-father, mother, older brother, that slatternly wife of his all so she could be on easy street after a life on the wrong side of the tracks practically tore open her shirt showing a firm bosom to try to throw Lew off the scent. Strike four.       

I already have mentioned that this case marked the steady downhill trajectory in Lew’s once promising career. Worse, the coppers had to come in and rescue Lew when that deranged wife was holding him, rightly by her lights since Lew held her future in his hands, hostage and had him pinned down facing a big old-time Colt 45 which even a brave man had to respect, respect a lot. After this bad karma trip Lew just couldn’t get work, nobody wanted to hire a guy who couldn’t face down some looney dame without peeing all over himself. Eventually he went to work for Larry Larsen the big Hollywood divorce lawyer which started Lew’s peeping in keyholes career which as mentioned died out when the divorce laws got more liberal most places. Then down the scale to Manny’s, the main repo operation in town and that infamous stolen car by a guy he was supposed to repossess on. Then Gypsy Sally’s and taking deli sandwich orders from real private eyes in her employ.         

I have saved the bombshell for last although looking over the evidence against poor Lew I am not sure I need to bring in the heavy guns. Since I have it and since the “trolls” will not believe anything any way that has to do with real facts here goes. Seth Garth recently did an article in American Left History about the passing in 2017 of Dotty Malone at 97. Many readers may not know who she is, was, but she was a very famous screenwriter in Hollywood when such things counted with credits Dark Passage, A Lonely Place, Fit To Be Tied and a fistful of others, some which carried awards with them. Before Dotty made it in Hollywood she worked a high-end bookstore on Sunset in Hollywood. That is where she met Phil Marlowe, yes, that Phil Marlowe I have been touting forever as the king of the hill with femmes. This was during the early part of the Sternwood case, before he got seriously tangled up with the two wild child daughters. The afternoon he came in looking for information and looking him over she wound up shutting up shop for the afternoon to entertain Phil and his bottle of whiskey. They would thereafter meet off and on even when Phil married the older Sternwood daughter, Vivian, to take a trip on easy street. Once Phil got tired of playing house and  Vivian divorced him he and Dotty took up again seriously, got married. After Phil passed away in the 1970s Dotty ran into Lew, hadn’t seen him for a while (this P.I. fraternity was pretty inbred in those days when it was all guys and hell-raisers too). Despite their age differences, Dotty some years older but still a looker, a mature looker, they started an affair. Or what should have been an affair. That is when Lew told Dotty that he was having trouble, sexual trouble and while she was sympathetic she thought he had maybe gone queer, or something like that. That is what she told Seth in any case. While the trolls will deny reality, call her story a hoax or the blathering of an old woman the rational world can judge why Lew Archer never made the Hall. End of story.      

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-When Mister Warren Smith Fretted To Perdition Over His Rock ‘n Roll Ruby

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-When Mister Warren Smith Fretted To Perdition Over His Rock ‘n Roll Ruby

Sketches From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

*********** He and She-With Warren Smith’s Rock and Roll Ruby In Mind  …he knew, knew deep in his bones, knew on the face of it too that he could not keep her, keep her to himself, keep her settled down and so he accepted that she would blow away like the wind on him sometime,   that same wind would take her away as the one on which they had proclaimed, or maybe better he had proclaimed and she went along with, that their love was written on, and it was just a matter of how long he could keep her. It was not that he was perceptive about women and their needs, wants, desires, nothing like that, not women in any case, girls really since he did not know anything at all about women who were older than say twenty, twenty-one except relative women, mothers, aunts, grandmothers and what was there to know about them to help him, help him with a wild side woman they all placid and proper, or about anything like that. And even on the girl thing he was filled with as much mystery and awe as with any real knowledge, his knowledge like everybody else, every guy, in town acquired on the street, in the boys’ sports locker rooms, and on the corner when he hung out with guys, or did before she took up his time but a lot of that was just flat-out wrong, half church-truth, half-just getting it wrong, about what made them tick, and about how to hang onto them. And it was not like he could lay claim to as a wet-behind-the ears high school kid trying to survive in the doldrums 1950s some inside knowledge about what was going to happen when his generation, the generation which would post-war born be called baby boomers and who would not fall into the false security, or at least he did not think that then, that their from hunger parents craved, broke out of the straitjacket but he just knew that she was like the wind and would get caught up in everything that was breezing across the land. He knew in his knotted stomach that what was happening in the cold war red scare night could not be the end of things, the end of the world and that when the time came for the break-out all hell would break loose. She would imbibe, joyfully imbibe the “newer world” was the way she put it to him one night when she wanted to go to a dance and he wanted to just hold hands or something at the movies (they went to the dance and she danced like Fred Astaire going up the walls in some movie they had seen), everything that was coming whether about ways of getting high not just the illicit liquor but some drugs that were beginning to make their way into the neighborhoods among the hipped; ways of dressing, especially ways of dressing sexy without old prudes scolding or guys leering; ways of dancing, dancing free from the old forms; and ways of hearing the music that always seemed to exist in her head just below the surface of what drove her personality.    Him, well, he was what she called when she was angry at him when he would not dance, wanted to square parent hold hands, or got mad when she did dance with other guys or he was smothering her with his forever plans (her take, not his) a “square.” Jesus, a square and with his strict Jehovah upbringing and his “get out of from hunger and get ahead dreams” maybe he was. He knew that he would not be able to go with her when she broke out, knew that for sure. Knew from that one time some guy at a dance at the Surf Ballroom down by the beach gave them a couple of shots of rotgut Southern Comfort which she dug and on which he just threw up, knew that other time in downtown Boston when some college guy was giving her the once over and passed them a “joint” (marijuana for the squares like him) and she got all high and flirty (and he did too except he could not go with the flow of the thing); knew when she started wearing her dresses shorter showing her well-turned legs and challenging guys to look; knew when she got all esoteric in her dancing like she was of the she with the seven veils; knew that when she began to dig electric blues and some helter-skelter hipster jazz, that he would not be able to go with her. No question.       It hadn’t started out that way, at least he did not see it like that at the beginning, see that she was a wayward wind, see that she had the desire to  deeply imbibe the new wave coming across the continent. That wind born of the wild reckless feckless boys sunk knee-deep in alienation and angst, of outlaw motorcycle bikers who played for real and played rough, of surf city guys searching for perfect waves with golden-haired girls waiting patiently on shore for that event, of hot rod Lincoln “chicken run” guys with boffo girls sitting high-breasted wearing cashmere sweaters in that coveted passenger seat turning the radio dial reaction against the staid Great Depression and World War II parents’ generation search for the security blanket in a hostile red scare Cold War world where they, the parents, just wanted their Johnny coming home from the war music, big Cadillac, two car garage with two cars and stardust memories. You know what he meant, don’t you, the undefined but vital mood change that started when Elvis and a bunch of other hungry guys [and a few women like Wanda Jackson and Laverne Baker] ripped it up with a new sound, a new not your parents’ tinny sound, but blessed, no, twice blessed rock and roll. And then other guys, other be-bop guys who had been around but were just then getting noticed called the beat, called the beat down to rise up and play themselves true, no hassles man, no hassles. All under the umbrella of dropping that dragged out, square, red scare cold war night thing the ancients had everybody stirred up about. Yeah and all their old has-been crowd. A little later, in Billy and Jenny time, the he and she here to introduce them but they could have been any of ten thousand kids hooked on the visual bible of the new religion American Bandstand, standing on corners looking be-bop beat, or throwing nickels and dimes at some Doc’s Drugstore jukebox complete with soda fountain to abate hungers in order to hear the latest about twenty times the music changed up again, and square was nowhere to be. Billy sensed it, sensed before Jenny even but he with ten thousand worries in his head blew it off, called it at first a passing fad then got real scared when his Jenny got testy with him more often.       They had met conventionally enough in senior year at old North Adamsville High, although they had seen each other around for ages as most of the kids in town had been at endless school assemblies, rallies, dances together but what of that in teen life had, for as such things go, they had not paid particular attention to kids they knew for ages, or kids that were not in their clique.. Had moreover grown up together on the wrong side of the tracks and wore a few scars to prove it although mostly they just acknowledged the slights from the Brahmins, noticed the no nods, the no look of approval, their slightly under-cool cheap Bargain Center dressing against the latest hip thing from Filene’s or Macy’s and didn’t talk about it thinking it was uncool to talk about roots, about yesterday, about anything but the moment, and Billy all bunched up about the future. Something clicked though in that senior year as they both had responded to each other’s furtive glances in Miss Williams’ study hall,   had furtively danced around each other at Doc’s Drugstore where all the kids hung out after school to listen the latest music, their music juke box, and had finally gone out on a double-date (he without a car at the time and so they had doubled up with her girlfriend Terry in her beau’s car, a “boss” Chevy since that beau was out of school and working as a welder down at the shipyard) at the local drive-in theater where she, sitting in the back seat with him, surprised him with her sexual advances. Stuff that Billy wasn’t all that familiar with but which he liked and which she knew that he liked. He, at least, was embarrassed when Terry and Eddie kept telling them to quiet down a little while Jenny was doing her thing on him. She on the other hand just to show how wild she could be if provoked took that as a signal to make him go   crazier. Terry later told Jenny there would be no more double-dates after she told her that Eddie had asked her to do what he called “doing the Jenny” on him before he left her off at her house. Terry said she did not know how to do that mouth thing and refused him flat when he said he would show her how. Jenny told Billy later after she had taught Terry the technique and Eddie coaxed her into doing it one afternoon after school she would chide Terry with a little “so did you do the Terry” again Saturday night down at the beach when they compared notes on their respective weekends before school on Monday morning. Somehow that “do the Terry” got around school and when Terry dumped Eddie guys would try to coax her into it. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. That is when Billy and Jenny would go back to double-dating with whatever new beau with a car that Terry had. Yeah, Billy liked it, liked it like any guy would, especially since Jenny was one of the prettiest girls in class and had a reputation for being kind of “unapproachable.”  (Billy later found out it was not so much the stuck-up thing as that she had been dating a college guy and at that time was strictly under his sway after they had a few sexual experiences which had kind of loosened her up. Joe College eventually took off with some girl from some college in Michigan once he was done with Jenny.) Yeah, he liked it but also thought to himself that night and the several other nights Jenny and he found themselves in some secluded spot on the beach (the Squaw Rock end not the Seal Rock end where parents and young kids hung out) when she did her thing to him, those times when she got all loud and screamy when he touched her where had she picked up that knowledge of what made a guy moan (and a girl all screamy). When he asked her about it later, not any of the nights when they were alone down the beach but a couple of weeks later, she just said girls knew stuff like that and she had learned it from her first boyfriend (that Joe College) who was older. Said that older guys, older guys who had been out in the world, guys who knew how to turn a woman on, and who expected to be turned on showed girls like her what was what. He let it pass.  So they were an “item” that last year of school and many a Monday morning before school when the other guys were speaking of so-called weekend conquests by the billion he just smiled a knowing silent smile.    Then, a couple, a few years out of high school, Billy working taking a few classes at the local junior college at night, Jenny working a couple or three nights a week as a high end restaurant waitress, the music at Doc’s jukebox changed, got more charged, frankly, got more sassy and sexual far different from their parents’ sappy sentimental stuff that didn’t get anybody’s heart rate up. And Jenny changed, well maybe not so much changed as got caught up in the new dispensation, the new moves. When they went on dates then it wasn’t to the movies or to some restaurant but to Smiley’s Bar & Grille on the outskirts of town where old Smiley had a hot new cover band, the Rocking Rockets, playing all the latest big beat stuff from guys like Warren Smith with his Rock ‘n’ Roll Ruby that she flipped out on. Not that she, like Warren said, would dance on the tables and stuff like that but that she would dance with lots of guys, would be flirty, tease flirty right before his eyes. When he questioned her on it she just said “don’t be a square, daddy” and refused to discuss it further. And then it began. Some nights when he called her mother answered to say she was not home, had gone out with the girls, or something like that. Yeah, he knew deep in his bones …        ******** …he had changed, Billy had changed too much for her tastes, changed into a “square” just like all the parents in town and all the kids who didn’t want to have fun and just be like them, be like their parents and worry like Billy’s parents’ Jehovah worried about the new devil’s music coming on the scene to replace, square, square Pat Boone and those clowns. Billy, Jesus, Billy worrying and just barely out of high school about some house, kids, dogs and two cars. Funny though he never complained, not one word, when she did her thing, her “doing the Jenny” thing they laughingly called it when they were in that mood, with him down at the beach. Oh, he asked, Jehovah hypocrite asked where she learned how to satisfy a man but he never asked her to stop but just moaned like every other man. She had learned all about sex from a college guy she had been dating before Billy when she was a sophomore in high school but who had ditched her for some college girl from Michigan. Had done a couple of sexy turn on one-night stands with some other college guys before latching onto Billy who she suddenly became attracted to senior year when they shared a study class together and she kept taking furtive glances his way until they began talking to each other after school at Doc’s Drugstore, the one place in town which had an up-to-date jukebox and a soda fountain, and that was that. He was fun at first, fun when she did her thing with him, went down on him, and he got all soft and stuff and she could have gotten anything she wanted from him. Then he started on his ten million plans for them. So she knew, knew sooner or later she was not sure which, she would have to drop him, drop him for somebody who was fun, who liked what she did and didn’t act the hypocrite about it. Hell, in one of her fantasy moments maybe drop him for the first guy who wanted to dance with her close and fast, maybe had some reefer or Scotch and didn’t ask forever how she knew what she knew about sex and just enjoy it (and enjoy her). The problem was that in square old North Adamsville that someone who was fun and the rest had not passed her door, but she had hopes. In the meantime she thought she would have to stick with old gloomy Gus as he fretted his life away.  As long as he kept his mouth shut  when she started swaying when the juke-box played some hot, latest rock and roll tune or the cover band at Smiley’s started her dancing to the beat on something like Warren Smith’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Ruby. Started guys looking through Billy her way too, and licking their chops. Funny, as she thought back to that time a little over a year before when they had eyed each other in Miss Williams’ study hall that she was then attracted to his easy manner, his sly boyish-ness which she thought she could talk him out of with a little coaxing (he had made her laugh when after they became an “item” he said that the eyeing had really been furtive glances-he said funny things like that then). They had not spoken a word until they had spent what seemed like a lifetime dancing around each other at Doc’s Drugstore where he put in endless nickels and dimes in the juke-box and then just sat there dreamy-eyed looking at her until she had said enough and went over to him and stood right in front of him and dared him to ignore her with her look. He had surrendered easily enough and they became an “item” after a subsequent drive-in movie date where she had shown him a few things in the back seat of her friend Terry’s boyfriend’s car. He liked her doing that stuff and she knew he liked her doing that stuff although he was a very shy boy for the first few times. So this was how they had spent their last year of school together in some kind of bliss. Things changed though, changed a couple of years later when a new breeze came through the town, when Doc’s juke-box started to almost jump off the walls what with the latest rock tunes coming one right after another. But Billy did not catch on, wanted to stay mired in his parents’ music and so the frets began-his about marriage and settling down, hers about having fun rocking the night away. The worse times had been when  they went to Smiley’s, the hot-spot bar on the outside of town where there was plenty of booze and bop and guys who eyed her, maybe not  furtively shy like Billy had  but eyed her like they wanted to have a good time, wanted to have fun rather mope around and be square. He would just sit there and be mopey while she danced with a few guys, a couple of whom she had given her telephone number to although they in the end had not worked out. She began telling her mother sometimes that when Billy called to tell him she was out and to tell him that she didn’t know when she would be back.  Even when, like this night, she was just sitting up in her room waiting for a new guy who had danced her off her feet the night before who said he would definitely call and maybe, just maybe, want to have fun …      ***********  "Rock And Roll Ruby" Well I took my Ruby jukin' On the out-skirts of town She took her high heels off And rolled her stockings down She put a quarter in the jukebox To get a little beat Everybody started watchin' All the rhythm in her feet She's my rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll Rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll When Ruby starts a-rockin' Boy it satisfies my soul Now Ruby started rockin' 'bout one o'clock And when she started rockin' She just couldn't stop She rocked on the tables And rolled on the floor And Everybody yelled: "Ruby rock some more!" She's my rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll Rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll When Ruby starts a-rockin' Boy it satisfies my soul It was 'round about four I thought she would stop She looked at me and then She looked at the clock She said: "Wait a minute Daddy Now don't get sour All I want to do Is rock a little bit more" She's my rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll Rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll When Ruby starts a-rockin' Boy it satisfies my soul One night my Ruby left me all alone I tried to contact her on the telephone I finally found her about twelve o'clock She said: "Leave me alone Daddy 'cause your Ruby wants to rock" She's my rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll Rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll When Ruby starts a-rockin' Boy it satisfies my soul Rock, rock, rock'n'roll Rock, rock, rock'n'roll Rock, rock, rock'n'roll Rock, rock, rock'n'roll When Ruby starts a-rockin' Boy it satisfies my soul

From The Marxist Archives- Under the Banner of the “Three L’s”(Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht)

From The Marxist Archives- Under the Banner of the “Three L’s”(Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht) 

Workers Vanguard No. 1125 12 January 2018 TROTSKY LENIN Under the Banner of the “Three L’s” (Quote of the Week) This month, we continue the communist tradition of honoring the “Three L’s”: V.I. Lenin, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. On 15 January 1919, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, founders of the German Spartakusbund and Communist Party, were murdered by counterrevolutionary troops unleashed by the Social Democratic Party-led capitalist government as it crushed a workers uprising. Five years later, on January 21, Lenin, head of the Bolshevik Party and Soviet workers state, died after suffering a series of strokes following an assassination attempt. Liebknecht and Luxemburg’s assassination exemplified “democratic” bourgeois rule, as Lenin noted in a resolution presented to the First Congress of the Communist International. In Germany, the most developed capitalist country of continental Europe, the very first months of full republican freedom, established as a result of imperialist Germany’s defeat [in World War I], have shown the German workers and the whole world the true class substance of the bourgeois-democratic republic. The murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg is an event of epoch-making significance not only because of the tragic death of these finest people and leaders of the truly proletarian, Communist International, but also because the class nature of an advanced European state—it can be said without exaggeration, of an advanced state on a world-wide scale—has been conclusively exposed. If those arrested, i.e., those placed under state protection, could be assassinated by officers and capitalists with impunity, and this under a government headed by social-patriots, then the democratic republic where such a thing was possible is a bourgeois dictatorship. Those who voice their indignation at the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg but fail to understand this fact are only demonstrating their stupidity, or hypocrisy. “Freedom” in the German republic, one of the freest and advanced republics of the world, is freedom to murder arrested leaders of the proletariat with impunity. Nor can it be otherwise as long as capitalism remains, for the development of democracy sharpens rather than dampens the class struggle which, by virtue of all the results and influences of the war and of its consequences, has been brought to boiling point.... In these circumstances, proletarian dictatorship is not only an absolutely legitimate means of overthrowing the exploiters and suppressing their resistance, but also absolutely necessary to the entire mass of working people, being their only defence against the bourgeois dictatorship which led to the war and is preparing new wars. —V.I. Lenin, “Theses and Report on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (4 March 1919)

The Ghost Of Tom Joad…Dust-Bowl Broken-With The Boston Museum Of Fine Arts Exhibition On Families Conventional And Unconventional In Mind

The Ghost Of Tom Joad…Dust-Bowl Broken-With The Boston Museum Of Fine Arts Exhibition On Families Conventional And Unconventional In Mind

By Bart Webber

…the ghost of old Tom Joad followed their every footstep, followed their every mile in that broken old excuse for an automobile that sucked the life out of one of his progeny, Prescott Ayers by name, a wheat farmer by trade, huh, by professional except that goddam dust has eaten up that wheat turned it to dust too, turned it so bad Prescott like the Joads before him (and his) from up the road had taken that poor excuse for a car and hightailed it out of the barren Okie hills to head for the promise land wherever that might be and if wasn’t to be then he’d  just not have been buried in that fucking flatland anyhow. Yeah, Tom Joad who would have thought that the winds, the wicked heaven-sent winds, oh lord what did I do to deserve this, would have sent him on the road.

Got a West Coast guy, a guy named Johns Steinbeck, a writer out in the docks of sardine-smacked Monterey thinking about that dust, thinking about fleeing and how to get him the hell out before the whole world turns ash-can grey. Got another guy, an Okie brethren out of the reservation territories, out of the veil of tears, Woody Guthrie, a wild boy no question, to signing and humming about that brother Joad like he knew in his heart that going west was the best. Got another guy, a movie director, an oater by trade, John Ford,   out in mountebank Hollywood, Hollywood before Ed Ruscha, another Okie tramp, immortalized another setoff hill, thinking it might very well do to let the Saturday afternoon at the Bijou movie crowd see what stuff Mister Joad was made of, what Okie dust turned into out west. Unto the seventh generation, if you don’t believe me, making a Jersey guy, a fucking Jersey guy, used to singing about ’57 Chevy’s and the running kind walk the Highway 101 late at night looking across the arroyo skies for a sign of that father he never knew like something out of a Jack Kerouac novel. Jesus.        

…and Prescott Ayers, wheat farmer by professional and owner of a no excuse for a car except he (and his) had to get the hell out before he exploded and wound up in McAlister Prison himself all he got for his sullen efforts was a silly photograph poorly cropped from some Eastern city dame with a high-tail camera by the name of Dorothea Lange who gave his wife Matty a copy (one of the “and his” the others being the boy Lonny, girl Ella, and the girl Martha Jane-Prescott, Junior laid to rest before his second birthday eaten up by wind dust making Prescott damn the day he let Matty conceive him and damning the day he had decided that he wanted a large family to farm that wheat farm and pass on that land, that land that make him cry alone his own veil of tears cry). Matty and that goddam copy which she cherished all the way to Fresno and raisin pining away times as they headed west, headed clunker west in that no excuse for a car. Cherished, unknown to taciturn, no sentiment Prescott, and secretly passed on to Ella upon her death bed long after Prescott laid  his head down in raisin valley soil,  as long as she drew breathe and had a roof over her head.        

The photograph showing Prescott’s Matty all angular and care-worn, slightly slouching, hair not seeing washing or a beautician’s touch for many a mile (couldn’t that photo time since the money all got eaten up buying a new tire when that fixed to perdition tire he was eternally fixing finally gave its last breathe. Wondering, not some 16^th century Dutchman’s wondering (her people’s stock coming into New York Harbor, in the days when all you needed to do was show up on the docks to get into the freaking country and start looking for the streets paved with gold, not able to breath, city breath they from out in edam cheese land and farmers by trade, no, by profession, and heading west first to foreboding Kentucky coalmines and hard-scrabble leavings then across the Mississippi and no turning back into God’s country, Okie life), seeing what did that guy from Minneapolis, that F. Scott Fitzgerald who knew the distinction between rich and poor, call it, yes, the fresh green breast of land heading inland but where Lonny, Ella, Martha food was to be found for that night’s hell-broth stew.             

And that Lonny, Ella, Martha showing that mother angularity, and that haggard look like even a hell-broth stew would be a feast out in those broken down rutted roads not dreaming child dreams, not dreaming about those left behind (even they, even kids, know enough not to dream dust-bowl dreams) and just wishing that tire would hold up some miles and they with fatty meat could get acquainted. No fresh green breast of land to wound their dreams all to hell. Funny, Lonny destined to be an alienated youth in the post-World War II world firing up big hot rod engines out in the deserted desert roads, chicken run roads, east of Fresno and crashing his dreams in a 1949 Hudson all shiny and bright. Funny, star-struck, endlessly star-struck Ella, driving mother Matty crazy would be serving them off the arm in Phil’s Diner, turning part-time tricks for truckers to pull her own brood over the from hunger hump. Funny, Martha a dreary housewife living with husband and two kids in a ranch house (fake-Spanish design all the rage) on converted farm land wondering why the hell the whole tribe had headed west.

….yeah, the ghost of Tom Joad.       

If You Want The Stuff Senator Bernie Sanders Has Been Talking About For A Million Years Including Out In The Wilderness When It Was Not Fashionable About Medicare For All, Eliminating Student Debt, The Fight For $15 (Hell Now More Than That) To Happen Accept No Substitutes-Fight For Bernie 2020 Not Come Lately Elizabeth Warren

If You Want The Stuff Senator Bernie Sanders Has Been Talking About For A Million Years Including Out In The Wilderness When It Was Not Fashionable About Medicare For All, Eliminating Student Debt, The Fight For $15 (Hell Now More Than That) To Happen Accept No Substitutes-Fight For Bernie 2020 Not Come Lately Elizabeth Warren  

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-When (the late) Mister Chuck Berry Told Mister Beethoven To Move Over A New Sheriff Was In Town

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-When (the late) Mister Chuck Berry Told Mister Beethoven To Move Over A New Sheriff Was In Town     

Sketches From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Introduction

I recently completed the first leg of this series which is intended to go through different stages of the American songbook as it has evolved since the 19^th century, especially music that could be listened to by the general population through radio, later television, and more recently the fantastic number of ways to listen to it all from computers to iPods. That first leg dealt with the music of my parents’ generation, that being the parents of the generation of ’68, those who struggled through the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II in the 1940s. This leg, centered on the music of my generation growing up in the Cold War 1950s, is a natural progression from that first leg since a lot of what we were striving for was to make a big musical break-out from the music that was wafting through many of our houses in the early 1950s.

The pitter-patter sound of stuff from Tin Pan Alley and sometimes from Broadway if they were not one in the same once they hit our muffled ears. You know Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree, Rum and Coca Cola, Tangerine, I’ll Get By, If I Didn’t Care, tear the goalposts down, grab a Tennessee waltz, and swing and sway with Big Buddha and some guy chomping on the chop sticks. The music of our “square” parents which was driving us to desperation for a new sound just in case those threatened bombs that we kept being warned about actually were detonated. At least that musical jail-break is the way we will tell the story now, although I, for one, have a little more tolerance for some of their music, those square parents still square but maybe there was hope if they listened to the Ink Spots crooning away at about seven million different songs with that great harmony, or the Duke taking that A train or better, much better sweet junkie Billie swaying a dark fruit, day and night, all of me, and whatever else Cole Porter could button up the night with. Some, I said, since I am unabashedly a child of rock and roll, now denominated classic rock. Jesus.   

Whether we liked it or not, whether we even knew what it meant, or frankly, during that hellish growing up absurd teenager time in the 1950s trying to figure out our places, if any, in the cold war red scare world, if there was to be a world, and that was a close thing at times, or whether we cared, our tribal music was as dear a thing to us, we who were in the throes of finding our own very different musical identities. Whether we knew it or not in the big world- historic picture scheme of things, knew what sacred place the music of the 1950s, rhythm and blues, scat be-bop, rockabilly, doo wop, flat out pure rock and roll those tunes held a primordial place in our youthful hearts. That was our music, our getting through the tough times music of post-World War II teen alienation and angst, that went wafting through the house on the living room radio (when the parents were out), on the family record player (ditto on the parents), or, for some, the television (double ditto the parents out, especially when American Bandstand hit us like a hurricane and we breathlessly rushed home every afternoon after school to make sure we were hip to the latest songs, the latest dances, the latest hair styles, boys and girls, and whether that brunette with the boffo hair-do and showing an edge of cleavage was “going steady” or whether we has a dream chance at her, or her “sister,” same boffo hair-do sitting across from you in seventh grade English class), and best of all on that blessed transistor radio, compact enough to hide in shirt pockets but loud enough when placed next to your ear to block out that mother-father-brothers buzz that only disturbed you more, that allowed us to while away the time up in our rooms away from snooping parental ears. Yes, that was the pastime of many of those of us who constitute the now graying fading generation of ‘68.

Some of us will pass to the beyond clueless as to why we were attuned to this music when we came of age in a world, a very darkly-etched world, which we too like most of our parents had not created, and had no say in creating. That includes a guy, me, a coalminer’s son who got as caught up in the music of his time as any New York City Jack or Jill or Chi town frat or frail whose father busted out of the tumbled down tarpaper shacks down in some Appalachia hills and hollows, headed north, followed the northern star, his own version, and never looked back and neither did his son.

Yes we were crazy for the swing and sway of Big Joe Turner snapping those big fingers like some angel- herald letting the world know, if it did not know already, that it did not mean a thing, could not possibly matter in the universe, if you did not whether your young febrile brain caught any or all of the not so subtle to experienced ears sexual innuendoes that drove Shake, Rattle, and Roll, if you did not rock with or without Miss La Vern Baker, better with, better with, her hips swaying slightly, lips moistened, swirling every guy in the place on Jim Dandy vowing be her man just for that smile and a chance at those slightly swaying hips. Mr. Elvis Presley, with or without the back-up boys, better with because they held the key to the backbeat that drove Elvis just a little bit harder, rockier, and for the girls from about ten to one hundred sexier, belting out songs, knocking down walls, maybe Jericho, maybe just some teen-struck Starlight Ballroom in Kansas City blasting the joint with his Jailhouse Rock to the top of the charts. Elegant Bill Haley, with or without that guy blowing that sexy sax out into the ocean air night in some Frisco club, blowing out to the Japan seas on Rock Around The Clock. Bo Diddley, all banded up if there is such a word, making eyes wild with that Afro-Carib beat on Who Do You Love. A young Ike Tina-less Turner too with his own aggregation wailing Rocket 88 that had every high school girl throwing dreamy nickels and dimes into the jukebox, with or without fanfare. Buddy Holly, with or without those damn glasses, talking up Peggy Sue before his too soon last journey. Miss Wanda Jackson, the female Elvis, with or without the blues, personal blues, strung out blues too, singing everybody else’s blues away with that throaty thing she had (and that long black hair and ruby red lips to make a schoolboy dream funny dreams), that meaningful pause, on yeah, Let’s Have A Party. Miss (Ms.) Patsy Cline, with or without the bad moments, making grown men cry (women too) when she reached that high note fretting about her long gone man on She’s Got You, Jesus. (And you not caring for all the strung-out emotion, or hubris, still wanting Patsy for a last chance last dance close up song to take a whirl at that she you had been eying until your eyes got sore all night.)  

Miss (Ms.) Brenda Lee too chiming in with I’m Sorry. Mr. Jerry Lee Lewis doing a million songs fronting that wild piano off the back of a flat-bed truck in High School Confidential calling out, no preaching out the new dispensation to anybody who wanted to rise in that rocking world, with or without a horde of cashmere sweater girls breaking down his doors, putting everybody else to shame. The Everly Brothers, always with that soft -spoken refrain catch that nobody seemed to tire of, getting everybody nervous, everybody who had gone past curfew looking for a little, well, looking okay, and not reflecting enough on damn reputations except in the school pecking order determined first week of ninth grade in the girls’ lounge and boys’ “lav,” doing teary Wake Up Little Susie. The Drifters with or without those boardwalks. The Sherilles with or without the leader of the pack, the Dixie Cups with or without whatever they were doing at that chapel. Miss Carole King, with or without the boys, writing the bejesus out of last gasp Tin Pan Alley. Yeah, our survival music. 

We, the generation of ’68, baby-boomers, decidedly not what Tom Brokaw dubbed rightly or wrongly “the greatest generation,” decidedly not our parents’ generation, finally could not bear to hear their music, could not bear to think anybody in the whole universe would think that stuff was cool. Those of us who came of age, biological, political, and social age kicking, screaming and full of the post-war new age teenage angst and alienation in the time of Jack Kennedy’s Camelot were ready for a jail-break, a jail-break on all fronts and that included from “their song” stuff. Their staid Eisenhower red scare cold war stuff (he their organizer of victory, their gentile father Ike), hell, we knew that the world was scary, knew it every time we were forced to go down into some dank school basement and squat down, heads down too, hoping to high heaven that the Russkies had not decided to go crazy and set off “the bomb,” many bombs. And every righteous teenager had a nightmare that, he or she, was trapped in some fashionable family bunker and those loving parents had thoughtfully brought their records down into the abyss to soothe their savage beasts for the duration. Yelling in that troubled sleep please, please, please if we must die then at least let’s go out to Jerry Lee’s High School Confidential.  

We were moreover, some of us anyway, and I like to think the best of us, driven by some makeshift dreams, ready to cross our own swords with the night-takers of our time, and who, in the words of Camelot brother Bobby, sweet ruthless Bobby of more than one shed tear in this quarter, quoting from Alfred Lord Tennyson, were “seeking a new world.” Those who took up the call to action heralded by the new dispensation and slogged through the 60s decade whether it was in the civil rights/black liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle to find one’s own identity in the counter-culture swirl before the hammer came down were kindred. To the disapproval, anger, and fury of more than one parent who had gladly slept through the Eisenhower times. And that hammer came down quickly as the decade ended and the high white note that we searched for, desperately searched for, drifted out into the ebbing tide. Gone.

These following sketches and that is all they are, and all they pretend to be, link up the music of the generation of ‘68s coming of age time (and a few post-coming of age sketches as well) gleaned from old time personal remembrances, the remembrances of old time corner boys whom I hung around with on lonesome, girl-less Friday nights at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys just off Thornton Street in the Dorchester section of Boston, and from remembrances of events and personalities that I, we, heard about through the school grapevine (especially those obligatory Monday morning before school talkfests where everybody, boy or girl, lied, or half-lied about what they did, or did not do, over the steamy weekend), the media (newspapers or radio and television in those days) or through what is now called the urban legend network but then just called “walking daddy” talk.

The truth, the truth of each sketch is in the vague mood that they invoke rather than any fidelity to hard and fast fact. They are all based on actual stories, more or less prettified and sanitized to avoid any problems with lose of reputation of any of the characters portrayed and any problems with some lingering statute of limitations. That truth, however, especially in the hands of corner boys like Jimmy Jenkins, our leader Frankie Riley, Sam Lowell, Pete Markin, Billy Bradley, Dime Store Benny Kidd, myself and the other guys who passed through the corner at Jack Slack’s must always be treated like a pet rattlesnake. Very carefully. Still the overall mood should more than make up for the lies thrown at you, especially on the issue of sex, or rather the question of the ages on that issue, who did or did not do what to whom on any given occasion. The lies filled the steamy nights and frozen days, and that was about par for the course wasn’t it.    

But enough of that for this series is about our uphill struggles to make our vision of the our newer world, our struggles to  satisfy our hunger a little, to stop that gnawing want, and the music that in our youth  we dreamed by on cold winter nights and hot summer days.  

Didn’t Your Mother Ever Tell You Not To Talk To Strangers And Not To Cops Either, Not “Projects’ Boys” And That Is No Lie-With Cop Buddies Michael J. Fox And James Woods’ “The Hard Way” (1991) In Mind

Didn’t Your Mother Ever Tell You Not To Talk To Strangers And Not To Cops Either, Not “Projects’ Boys” And That Is No Lie-With Cop Buddies Michael J. Fox And James Woods’ “The Hard Way” (1991) In Mind

DVD Review

By Bradley Fox, Jr. (no relation to the actor listed here but a relation to former and now retired American Film Gazette writer and editor Bradley Fox, Sr.)

The Hard Way, starring Michael Keaton, James Woods, 1991

[The reader may have not seen the name Bradley Fox, Jr. on a by-line at this publication for some time now. For a very good reason. A couple of years back when I was starting out at this publication as a stringer, I locked horns with the previous site manager Allan Jackson, who has recently returned as a contributing editor which is okay as long as he is not my boss. The reason, reasons really but the main one was his insistence that every writer delve deeply into the 1960s counterculture, general 1960s culture for that matter since a number of 50^th anniversary commemorations were coming up and Allan wanted blanket coverage. Even from younger writers who didn’t have a clue about the 1960s, could have cared less about that ancient history or had to reach out to parents or in my case grandparents to get a feel for the times. Not good, not good at all.

Greg Green, who Allan had brought over from American Film Gazette to run the day to day operations while he did the big strategic planning and gave out the assignments, knowing how unhappy I was, knowing I would be forever a stringer as long as Allan ran the show, ran it his way “or the highway” as some wag put the matter, got me a job over at Film Today. In late 2017 when all hell broke loose, and Allan was canned I thought about coming back. Problem was I had a two-year non-competition clause in my contract to not write for some other publication which meant that I had to wait it out. And I did. Once the contract restriction expired Greg called me up and asked me back. This is my first assignment back although not my first run at this film since I reviewed it at Film Today as well. Greg wanted me to revise that effort to fit in better with his idea that this kind of film did not need the three-thousand-word gloss that I had put on it. The revised and shortened piece is below minus the extended analysis of the place of “buddy movies,” male buddy movies until recently and now gal buddies as well in Hollywood film history. Brad Fox, Jr.]

      

**********

Sam Lowell, the now sort of retired film editor at this publication who still contributes a few pieces and who right now is working on a continuing project about why certain once well-known private investigators, specifically Lew Archer from out in California who wound up peeping through keyholes, never made it to the P.I. Hall of Fame despite some real promise starting out, once told my father when they both were working at American Film Review I think a few good tips about film reviewing. About film reviewing when you are totally without a clue about how to proceed with a review which is in many ways a piece of fluff like The Hard Way but which you must say something about if for no other reason than to keep the wolves from your door (and avoid taking hand-outs, cash outlays, from fathers and mothers as the case may be). Without a “hook” you might as well stay home and have a drink to drown your sorrows. Here are the three life-savers  in ascending order-“slice of life” for the time period especially if the theme has been totally superseded by newer social conventions; feature the “buddy” aspect; and, play up the “boy meets girl (or visa versa)” theme which has saved more Hollywood and now world-wide films than it would seem possible to do given some of the lame plotlines.

Today we do the middle life-line (which I used in a feverish pitch when I first reviewed this film at my previous job at Film Today loading up the piece with the history of “buddy movies” in Hollywood since on re-viewing the film for this piece I came up with the same problem as there. A piece of fluff. The difference was that the editor there was looking for “high culture” aspects hence the three-thousand-word minimum requirement. As well as a stringer I was being paid by the word at one of the last publications to use that relic of indentured servitude method of payment for stringers). As usual with buddy films there has to be some conflict of interest that gets resolved and lets them go off hand and hand into the sunset having bonded for eternity, or until the sequel if any. John Moss, James Woods’ character is a hard-nosed, no non-sense and basically politically incorrect public detective, a New York detective who has a major problem on his hands. A major crime problem which is that some new version of American psycho is running around dance halls, barrooms, frat houses, maybe even public restrooms off-handedly shooting people for kicks or some mysterious reason known only to him, as usual. Our Man Moss is bound and determined to bring this cretin to justice-by any means necessary.                 

           

Naturally the case in widely publicized as are Moss’ relentlessly baiting remarks about that psycho. Meanwhile Nick Lang played by Michael J. Fox as a movie star out in Hollywood is in a funk. You might remember Nick from back a couple of decades ago when everybody was touting him as the next Errol Flynn, on film not in personal life, an action movie guy bringing in big studio grosses for little dough but apparently only spending about six dollars on script-writers. Nick was having a mid-career crisis like a lot of people when he came up with either a brilliant idea, or one of pure genius. He would hook up with this John Moss and learn what it was like to be a real action guy, a real cop. Pulling a few thousand strings, or maybe the studio doing so he is in.

Of course our serious cop John is outraged that some punk movie star who has the liberty to endlessly shoot fantasy bang-bang scenes is going to play copper, play out in the mean streets of New York while this psycho is running amok. Nick, as expected made every mistake in the book, maybe more in real cop line of duty. Which only infuriated Moss more. Meanwhile the psycho is pulling their chains, has them looking in all the wrong places. Along the way, as expected as well, John lightens up a little on Nick although he is still desperate to get him out of town. (Probably the best scene in the whole film was when trigger-happy Nick “shoots” an innocent by-stander while they are on the trail of Mister Psycho. It turns out this was a scam way that Moss tried to get Nick out of town by setting up the scene with fellow coppers-sorry for the egg all over your face Nick.) In the end Nick will redeem himself by taking a few stray bullets as they go in for the kill after psycho kidnaps Moss’ estranged girlfriend out in Time Square and there is final action on a 3-D billboard touting some film Nick had made. The psycho goes down and is chalked up as no great lose. Yeah, thinking about it again I am glad Greg gave the okay to make this dopey film a subject for short review. I don’t believe even with padding I squeezed well over three-thousand words out of this mildly funny film.