Say Do You Want To Play Ball With The Law-Michelle Pfeiffer’s “Married To The Mob” (1988)-A Film Review

Say Do You Want To Play Ball With The Law-Michelle Pfeiffer’s “Married To The Mob” (1988)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sarah LeMoyne

Married To The Mob, starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Matthew Modine, directed by Jonathan Demme, 1988

As a junior, junior reviewer I have not gotten many film assignments although I have gotten plenty of other work including a ton of editing for site manager Greg Green. (An editor being, according to an unnamed source a person at this publication who cannot write, write for publication, so edits-or I might add has underlings do the work.) I was surprised when Greg handed me this old-time film, old-time to me since was not even born in 1988, Married To The Mob especially when he gave me the reason for my selection. He seems to be somewhat apprehensive about reviewing films, even spoofs like this one, ever since back in the 1970s his ace reviewer at his previous job American Film Gazette Leo LaGrange got found in a dumpster in downtown Manhattan after some pretty rough and hard-hitting comments about the mob in The Godfather trilogy. Apparently I am something like the sacrificial lamb since Greg wants me to go no holds barred here if I see fit. His idea, maybe quaint and reflecting another age, is that the mob, the Mafia-type mob as portrayed here not the crazies from the drug cartels would not hound a woman, would not let a woman get sent to the nearest dumpster just for calling them hoodlums and a cancer on society. I hope Greg is right so here goes.       

What the mob, remember we are talking strictly about the civilized mob, the Mafia guys who have been running various criminal enterprises without too much fuss since before World War I but have kept a low profile for the last few decades and have let the mal hombres of the drug cartels take the public heat, mob bosses cannot tolerate is guys lower down in the food chain stepping out of line, moving in on the boss’s women a big no-no. Young hit man Cucumber DeMarco, played by a young Alex Baldwin, who looked like a sure thing to go steadily up the food chain, made that fatal mistake when he didn’t have enough sense that God gave geese to find out whose “property” a sexy cocktail waitress who worked where the mob members hung out was, who she was giving her favors too. The boss, the boss of bosses in his locale Tony Russo, played by smooth as silk Dean Stockwell, who wound up doing a million years in jail and may still be there for all I know, yes that Tony Russo, had that kitten as his pet and so good-bye Cucumber.

Cucumber though was small potatoes in this story because the real prize for love-crazy Tony, despite being knee-deep in marriage to a wicked witch of the West, is the Cuke’s now widowed wife Angela, played by foxy Michelle Pfeiffer. Angela, unhappy with the mob life anyway, figured once her sainted husband was in the ground it was time for her to start a new life. Get away from the grifters, hit men and con men whom she loathed under her breathe. But even that escape idea is small potatoes compared to what outside forces are plotting against Tony and his boys. Naturally since that is their mandate, the FBI, is in the person of a couple of sad sack agents trying to get the goods on Tony and move up in their own food chain.

The key for the agents though is to see what moves Tony makes to lure Angela into his bed. As first they, and for our purposes really one agent, Mike, played Matthew Modine, think she is still in knee-deep with the mob so they are trailing her very closely to see what shakes out. Trailing so closely that Mike and Angela start up an attraction for each other while he is working undercover as a plumber living in her new digs. Everything tumbles forward from that premise including the problem, serious problem for Greg when I asked about it, of Angela turning fink against the mob, against Tony. That problem which seems to be an old school guy thing based on the histories of some of the writers here who would almost rather be found in that freaking dumpster than to be known as a snitch. Seth Garth normally a cool calm guy and a fountain of information and help on lots of assignments went crazy when I said in the interest of love, of having a guy who she could depend on once she found out he was FBI and got over the idea of his using her as bait did the right thing by helping catch the bad guys. Of course Angela’s turning was all that was needed to eventually snare Tony into the trap set up by the Feds, aided in no small part that jealous wife of Tony’s who had her own scores to settle. I honestly don’t think that I have been in any way disrespectful of the mob here, of the Mafia, so if you hear that I have been waylaid then point the finger directly at one Seth Garth.

When Marlene Dietrich Strutted Her Stuff And Made All The Drag Queens Weep- Joseph Von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus” (1932)-A Film Review

When Marlene Dietrich Strutted Her Stuff And Made All The Drag Queens Weep- Joseph Von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus” (1932)-A Film Review   

DVD Review

By Will Bradley

Blonde Venus, starring Marlene Dietrich, Herbert Marshall, Cary Grant (yes that Cary Grant), directed by Joseph Von Sternberg, pre-Code 1932  

It is amazing how you get assignments for films sometimes from the site manager Greg Green who is the guy who gives them out these days. Everybody knows, or if not then get it here now, that Phil Larkin and I had been, have been if anybody wants to take up the challenge, in a long term continuing battle royal over who is the “real” James Bond (our respective choices Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan) which has spilled over into other reviews and brought in a couple of other reviewers. A reviewer like Seth Garth who apparently really does believe that our dispute is a tempest in a teapot. Of course, Seth, an old-timer like Phil probably thinks Agatha Christie is the cat’s meow and as well from reading some of his latest reviews he seems to be in a time machine set exclusively around the mid-1960s what with him going on and on about the summer of love, acid rock and the like subjects which got the previous site manager Allan Jackson the boot-and rightly so. I won’t even mention Bart Webber’s remarks since he hasn’t written a worthy review since he found out Humphrey Bogart died.  

Here is the weird part though since the time of my last Bond film review I have not been assigned any film reviews although I have had plenty of other assignments. Some of them like covering a Klimt exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with Mark Rothko thrown and on the political front the brewing controversies around the rise of the Alt-Right which has become increasingly public around the country in the aftermath of the Charlottesville events where they laid bare their fangs. (By the way I was assigned that beat since the massive counter-demonstrations against this movement have been spear-headed by young people and had argued to Greg that giving the assignment to one of the old guard would bring in off-beat and basically negative comparisons to their “glorious” 1960s. It didn’t hurt that I mentioned that these elders would be clueless about the different way, mostly via social media platforms, that the young organize today. Nobody needed to hear about mimeograph machine leaflet production, pay phone telephone calls or plastering the world with posters at midnight.)         

The drought is over now with this film review of one of Marlene Dietrich’s early Hollywood films directed by master director and one- time husband Joseph Von Sternberg Blonde Venus (blonde by virtue of a wig in this case). It was no accident that I received this assignment since in 2017 I was down in Washington on another assignment and decided to peek into the National Portrait Gallery to see what was new something I try to do when down in the “swamp” (the only term from Trump-land which resonates with me). While there I noticed that there was an exhibition featuring Marlene Dietrich and did a short report in this space on her career and her effect on the acting profession centered on her provocative bisexual use of men’s clothing in many of her films (including here) so that she was something of a forerunner and icon for sexual liberation. Moreover Marlene had a certain style Allan Jackson (that former site manager) old me that his growing up friend Timmy Riley, now professionally a “drag queen” under the name Miss Judy Garland out in San Francisco where he runs a famous “drag queen” nightclub told him was a close runner up to Ms. Garland among that entertainment set.      

This film gives an early view of that patterned Dietrich style from the men’ clothing while preforming to that look of utter distain and boredom which she gave off. The “hook” as Sam Lowell who is a pretty cool guy even if kind of ancient and knows a lot about these early films from a lifetime of reviewing likes to tell everybody they should be looking for in a film to hang their hat on is that Marlene after marriage and a child, a young boy, finds out that her scientist husband, Ned, played by wooden stick Herbert Marshall in something of a mismatch, has developed some rare and deadly radiation problem which requires a trip to Europe and a lot of dough to help cure. Marlene to the rescue via her “talent” as a singer and entertainer.  (She can act but the singing bit is hard on the nerves according to an associate who knows a thing or two about music and declared her off-pitch in English and not quite so bad in French.)   

Well not exactly Marlene to the rescue but Nick, Nick Townsend, the fixer man and a guy smitten by Marlene for some reason, played by a very young Cary Grant so this is no slough movie. While Ned is away getting his cure, which unknown to him Nick paid for after services rendered Marlene and Nick are seen cavorting. Except Ned comes back unknown to them and demands the custody of their son. Marlene flees and through a series of further down the social scale maneuvers is the subject of an all- points bulletin initiated by Ned. She finally gives up the kid, her Johnny and she takes a few steps further down the social ladder. As she hits bottom she decides to spring back and restart her career in Europe. That is where forlorn Nick is trying to forget her until he runs into her at a concert and they start up again. No good though since she still pines for her Johnny boy. Eventually she will get him, and Ned, back to the chagrin of Nick. Along the way we get that bunch of songs that are hard on the nerves but which also makes me wonder why those drag queens love to imitate her.     

When The Winds Of War Do Get Stirred Up- Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent” (1940)-A Film Review

When The Winds Of War Do Get Stirred Up- Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent” (1940)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon

Foreign Correspondent, starry Lorraine Day, Joel McCrea, Herbert Marshall, directed by Sir Alfred Hitchcock, 1940

Seth Garth and Alden Riley have already gone over in some detail the Sir Alfred Hitchcock problem, no, the problem of heavyweight male movers and shakers in all walks of upscale life, here cinema, and their sexually predatory and in some cases criminal practices toward the women, the professional women, they work with. The problem of placing in some cinematic perspective the relationship between the cultural importance of their work and their gutter-worthy personal lives as they affect other members of the human race. What I want to address is a different Sir Alfred Hitchcock problem, the problem of using his films in the immediate pre-World War II period and beyond, a problem that also affected the extreme bachelor coupling of Sir Sherlock Holmes and Sir John Watson in the same period, of mixing cinematic values with low-rent propaganda for the Allied, no, the British side in that epic war. The film under review could stand alone as a good piece of cinema but is marred toward the end with some “speeches” that could have been written by Sir Winston Churchill’s speech writers in Britannia’s darkest hours.

That is all I have to say about that aspect of the film, Foreign Correspondent, except that looking backward on the plotline the whole thing reeked more than a little as a rebuff to the American Firsters like Charles Lindberg and Homer Martin in order to get America on board the European fiasco. The start is pretty straight forward in a time when commercial newspapers were a major source of news about the greater world and not fighting the culture wars over “fake news,” social media and Everyman’s opinion disguised as reportage. The editor and owner of the New York World     

wanted to know more about the impeding war clouds in Europe than the hand-outs from the various embassies which his current crew of so-called correspondents were spewing forth between cocktails at five. Enter Johnny Reporter, it could be any name, played by winsome Joel McCrea, hungry, raw and ignorant of any of the play in Europe except he had a nose for grabbing some serious news and riding it out like with a storm.    

Assignment one, which our boy Johnny never got past since this turned out to be his Pulitzer moment, find out what some old- time peacenik diplomat thinks is going to happen and what the terms of a peace alliance were all about. No problem as he runs into the guy he needed to see minute one. Except that meeting started a whole series of turns and twists which will lead him on a merry, merry goose chase. See the dippy diplomat got himself “killed” while attending, or going to a attend a world peace conference sponsored by a British national who is running a peace party operation, or so the general naïve public think since there is plenty going on which looks very suspicious after Johnny and another holy goof reporter working his own angel angles and a naïve if attractive daughter of said peace operative trace things to a windmill in the boondocks of Holland, in the outback of the country where the whole fight for peace is taking place.

That dippy diplomat was not killed but had been taken hostage to get a phrase from the secret peace agreement which might just have averted the war. (Ho hum, we have been down that road before when nations are hell-bent on war.) Taken hostage by forces unknown except they all seen to speak German when given a chance and so the chase in on. The twists and turns going running round like some second generation running kind until it becomes inescapable that the peace operative (with that naive but attractive daughter) is pulling all the strings-is an agent of the unnamed fascists like a good many other well-bred and snobbish English gentry who saw Hitler and Mussolini as the saviors against those troublesome workers who were always asking for something or other. Kept order and trains on time not necessarily in that order.   

Here’s the beauty of the whole charade, and the political baloney part as well. Once exposed as a treacherous agent of the night-takers swarming over Europe like vultures our good English gentleman with the nice manners flees London and with naïve if attractive daughter in tow heads to, where else, neutral America, once war is declared on a great looking airplane which seemed like the lap of luxury. Also on board are the dogged Johnny R, and his buddy intrepid reporter. Out in neutral waters the airplane is fired upon by a German destroyer and goes down in the briny drink, the Atlantic. Among the survivors Johnny, Intrepid, Attractive Daughter and Traitor Blue Dad. As a gesture of his suddenly found “patriotism” Traitor Blue Dad slips himself into that briny deep, the Atlantic when the wing of the plane they were floating on couldn’t handle the weight. So that gesture, fake unlike all the stuff he did for the Nazis and their ilk, gets him a pass on the traitor list. Baloney, double baloney.            

When The Blues Was Dues-Howling At The Moon-When Howlin’ Wolf Held Forth

When The Blues Was Dues-Howling At The Moon-When Howlin’ Wolf Held Forth  

  

 From The Pen Of Bart Webber

One night when Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris were sitting in the now long gone  Johnny D’s over in Somerville, over near the Davis Square monster Redline MBTA stop sipping a couple of Anchor Steam beers, a taste acquired by Sam out in Frisco town in the old days on hot nights like that one waiting for the show to begin Ralph mentioned that some music you acquired naturally, you know like kids’ songs learned in school. (The Farmer in the Dell, which forced you a city kid although you might not have designated yourself as such at that age to learn a little about the dying profession of family farmer and about farm machinery, Old MacDonald, ditto on the family farmer stuff and as a bonus the animals of the farm kingdom, Humpty Dumpty, a silly overweight goof who couldn’t maintain his balance come hell or high water although you might not have thought of that expression or used it in the high Roman Catholic Morris household out in Troy, New York where Ralph grew up and still lives, Jack and Jill and their ill-fated hill adventure looking for water like they couldn’t have gone to the family kitchen sink tap for their needs showing indeed whether you designated yourself as a city kid or not you were one of the brethren, etc. in case you have forgotten.)

Music embedded in the back of your mind, coming forth sometimes out of the blue even fifty years later (and maybe relating to other memory difficulties among the AARP-worthy but we shall skip over that since this is about the blues, the musical blues and not the day to day getting old blues).

Or as in the case of music in junior high school as Sam chimed in with his opinion as he thought about switching over to a high-shelf whiskey, his natural drink of late, despite the hot night and hot room beginning to fill up with blues aficionados who have come to listen to the “second coming,” the blues of James Montgomery and his back-up blues band. That “second coming” referring to guys like Montgomery and Eric Clapton, now greying guys, who picked up the blues, especially the citified electric blues after discovering the likes of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Magic Slim and James Cotton back in their 1960s youth, made a decent living out of it and were still playing small clubs and other venues to keep the tradition alive and to pass it on to the kids who were not even born when the first wave guys came out of the hell-hole Delta south of Mister James Crow sometime around or after World War II and plugged  their guitars into the next gin mill electric outlet in places off of Maxwell Street in Chicago, nursing their acts, honing their skills.  

Yeah, that hormonal bust out junior high weekly music class with Mr. Dasher which made Sam chuckle a bit, maybe that third bottle of beer sipping getting him tipsy a little, as he thought about the old refrain, “Don’t be a masher, Mister Dasher” which all the kids hung on him that time when the rhyming simon craze was going through the nation’s schools. Thinking just then that today if some teacher or school administrator was astute enough to bother to listen to what teenage kids say amongst themselves, an admittedly hard task for an adult, in an excess of caution old Mister Dasher might be in a peck of trouble if anyone wanted to be nasty about the implication of that innocent rhyme.  Yeah, Mr. Dasher, the mad monk music teacher, who wanted his charges to have a well-versed knowledge of the American and world songbooks so you were forced to remember such songs as The Mexican Hat Dance and Home On The Range under penalty of being sent up to the front of the room songbook in hand and sing the damn things. Yes, you will remember such songs unto death. (Sam and his corner boys at Doc’s Drugstore found out later that Dasher  was motivated by a desperate rear-guard action to wean his charges away from rock and roll, away from the devil’s music although he would not have called it that because he was too cool to say stuff like that, a struggle in which he was both woefully overmatched by Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Bo, and the crowd and wasting his breathe as they all lived for rock and roll at Doc’s Drugstore after school where he had a jukebox at his soda fountain.)  

Ralph agreed running through his own junior high school litany with Miss Hunt (although a few years older than Sam he had not run through the rhyming simon craze so had no moniker for the old witch although now he wished he had and it would not be nice either). He added that some of the remembered music  reflected the time period when you were growing up but were too young to call the music your own like the music that ran around in the background of your growing up house on the mother housewife radio or evening record player which in Ralph’s case was the music that got his parents through his father’s soldierly slogging on unpronounceable Pacific islands kicking ass and mother anxiously waiting at home for the other shoe to fall or the dreaded military officer coming up to her door telling her the bad news World War II. You know, Frank (Sinatra, the chairman of the board, that all the bobbysoxer girls, the future mothers of Sam and Ralph’s generation swooned over), The Andrew Sisters and their rums and coca colas, Peggy Lee fronting for Benny Goodman and looking, looking hard for some Johnny to do right, finally do right by her, etc. Other music, the music of their own generation, classic rock and rock came more naturally since that is what they wanted to hear when they had their transistor radios to their ear up in their bedrooms.

That mention of transistor radios got them yakking about that old instrument which got them through many a hard teenage angst and alienation night. That yakking reflecting their both getting mellow on the sweet beer and Ralph thinking that they had best switch to Tennessee sipping whisky when the wait person came by again if they were to make it through both sets that night. This transistor thing by the way for the young was small enough to put in your pocket and put up to your ear like an iPod or MP3 except you couldn’t download or anything like that. Primitive technology okay but life-saving nevertheless. Just flip the dial although the only station that mattered was WJDA, the local rock station (which had previously strictly only played the music that got all of our parents through their war before the rock break-out made somebody at the station realize that you could made more advertising revenue selling ads for stuff like records, drive-in movies, drive-in restaurants, and cool clothes and accessories than refrigerators and stoves to adults).

Oh yeah, and the beauty of the transistor you could take it up to your bedroom and shut out that aforementioned parents’ music without hassles. Nice, right. So yeah, they could hear Elvis sounding all sexy according to one girl Sam knew even over the radio and who drove all the girls crazy once they got a look at him on television, Chuck telling our parents’ world that Mr. Beethoven and his crowd, Frank’s too, that they all had to move over, Bo asking a very candid question about who put the rock in rock and roll and offering himself up as a candidate, Buddy crooning against all hope for his Peggy Sue (or was it Betty Lou), Jerry Lee inflaming all with his raucous High School Confidential  from the back of a flatbed truck, etc. again.

The blues though, the rarified country and electric urban blues of the likes of Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, James Cotton, and Howlin’ Wolf was an acquired taste. Acquired by Sam through listening to folk music programs on that very same transistor radio in the early 1960s after flipping the dial one Sunday night once he got tired of what they claimed was rock music on WJDA and caught a Boston station. The main focus was on other types of roots music but when the show would take a break from down home mountain music, western swing ballads, and urban protest music the DJ would play some cuts of country or electric blues. See all the big folkies, Dylan, Tom Rush, Dave Van Ronk, people like that were wild to cover the blues in the search for serious roots music from the American songbook. So somebody, Sam didn’t know who, figured if everybody who was anybody was covering the blues in that folk minute then it made sense to play the real stuff.  (Sam later carried Ralph along on the genre after they had met down in Washington, D.C. in 1971, had been arrested and held in detention at RFK Stadium for trying to shut down the government if it did not shut the Vietnam War, had become life-long friends and Ralph began to dig the blues when he came to Cambridge to visit).

The real stuff having been around for a while, having been produced by the likes of Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf going back to the 1940s big time black migration to the industrial plants of the Midwest during World War II when there were plenty of jobs just waiting. But also having been pushed to the background, way to the background with the rise of rock and roll (although parts of rock make no sense, don’t work at all without kudos to blues chords, check it out). So it took that combination of folk minute and that well-hidden from view electric blues some time to filter through Sam’s brain.

What did not take a long time to do once Sam got “religion” was going crazy over Howlin’ Wolf when he saw him perform. Once Sam had seen him practically eat that harmonica when he was playing that instrument on How Many More Years. There the Wolf was all sweating, running to high form and serious professionalism (just ask the Stones about that polished professionalism when he showed them how to really play Little Red Rooster which they had covered early on in their career as they had covered many other Chess Records blues numbers, as had in an ironic twist a whole generation English rockers in the 1960s) and moving that big body to and fro to beat the band and playing like god’s own avenging angel, if those angels played the harmonica, and if they could play as well as he did. They both hoped that greying James Montgomery, master harmonica player in his own right, blew the roof off of the house as they spied the wait person coming their way and James moving onto the stage getting ready to burn up the microphone. Yes, that blues calling is an acquired taste and a lasting one.