Fast Cars and Fast Women, Okay A “Fast” Young Woman- With Josh Breslin’s Film Review Of Nicolas Cage’s “Gone in Sixty Seconds” (2002) In Mind

Fast Cars and Fast Women, Okay A “Fast” Young Woman- With Josh Breslin’s Film Review Of Nicolas Cage’s “Gone in Sixty Seconds” (2002) In Mind 

By Laura Perkins

I loved fast cars as a young girl, young woman, still do. I will give details in a moment about why and what happened but let me tell you how that youthful excitement came on the radar of late. You never know what kind of conversation you will get into around the water cooler at this publication except maybe if you are there when my fellow older writers are sipping it will center on some youthful adventure back in the prehistoric 1950s and 1960s. That time frame important since that era was something like the golden age of the automobile and certain rites of passage around cars went with it for young men and women. Today’s generation apparently in the age of the lime bicycle, Uber and Lyft don’t have anything like the same experiences we had when car was king and to be a queen, to be seen in some cowboy’s “boss” care (a lost term of art which every other older writer I mentioned the term to immediately recognized as such) you had to have some respect for the vehicles. Otherwise you would find yourself, especially as a young woman sitting frantically by the midnight phone while others were cavorting in the night. That cavorting can best be left to the reader’s imagination not because of any prudery on my part but because the demographics of the sustaining readership tells you we all know what that meant whether it was out on some back country lovers’ lane road, up on Eagle’s Pass far from prying eyes and the snooping authorities or down by the shore shifting sand watching as Sam Lowell put it ‘watching the submarine races” the local term for the why of those fogged up cars along the boulevard. Of course, Sam my long-time companion and fellow writer have spent many hours regaling each other with our kid’s stories but I still say that down by the seashore for a farm brought up girl sounded very interesting, very interesting.     

(By the way, speaking of today’s generation, the so-called millennials, a couple of my grandchildren don’t even have driver’s licenses and they are in their mid-twenties. Damn, we were out learning how to drive even before we could legally do so and thought nothing of it, especially in my growing up farm country where maybe you learned to drive a tractor or truck at fourteen before you ever got behind the wheel of a car, boss or otherwise.)

But getting back to the water cooler talk after my little intergenerational pithy social analysis one day Josh Breslin was talking about his latest assignment, his latest film assignment Nicolas Cage’s 2000 car boost classic Gone In Sixty Seconds where the legendary car thief Memphis Raines, whose photograph was up on my bedroom wall when I was a kid because a boyfriend had given it to be as a present, as a sign of his affections, such things meant a lot to an isolated girl, me,  had to steal something like fifty cars in a short period or else his brainless brother would be toast on the say so of the villainous enemy gangster character in the film, some nefarious Brit. Josh mentioned he was not sure why site manager Greg Green had assigned him the film since he had not been all that much of a car freak when he was young.

Josh did mention that he knew that his boyhood friend Peter Paul Markin had been, against all form, against his nerdish absent-minded professor appearance the greatest “hot wire” guy he had every known. After viewing the film and in his review Josh declared that Markin, always reverently called Scribe by the clot of older writers who work here and who knew him before he fell down at a too early age back in the 1970s over some busted drug deal that nobody to this day knows why went awry down in Mexico, could show old Memphis a thing or two. He mentioned a time when he first met Scribe out in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967 and he went up to him to ask for some dope, and got it, starting a too short lifelong friendship while Scribe was sitting in a boss Camaro. It was not until much later that Josh found out that car turned out to belong to the mayor’s son and he had boosted it right in front of City Hall Plaza with a half dozen cops looking on. (By the way for the stray Generation X and millennials who might have found this publication the “boost” was a term of art for stealing cars and “hot wire” was the way it was done without keys and without muss or fuss by grandees like Scribe.)

Back at that cooler I startled Josh, and maybe Leslie Dumont (an old flame of his, and maybe they have rekindled from what I have also heard at another water cooler conversation and by my keen powers of observation when they seem to be constantly smiling at one another for no apparent reason a sure sign known since childhood on my part) who has just retired from her big by-line at Women Today and is once again a contributor here now and young Will Bradley, fresh from his “wars” with Seth Garth over who is who in the film noir detective world, who were also privy to the conversation when I mentioned that I loved cars growing up, or rather loved to be seen in cars, or better sitting beside some guy in a “boss” car ready to do battle for me, for my “favors” in a “chicken run” (another “term of art” to be explained below).

They were astonished given what they have long known of my personally quiet adult demeanor and all that they know about me and about my very sedate lifestyle of late. Here’s where looks and style are deceiving. Where an ex-professor’s look hides more than one would think. I was raised in farm country in upstate New York outside of Albany in Mechanicsville, Dutch country, Dutch country as they came up the Hudson from New York City, then New Amsterdam, and populated the area once the wonder of the first load of sailors who saw that Fitzgerald “fresh green breast of land” got themselves land-locked and moved up river. (That Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby final paragraph courtesy of Sam Lowell who is crazy for the guy’s works and who smiles at me for no apparent and me back too.)        

Yes, so I knew how to drive a pick-up truck before I ever knew how to drive a manually- clutched automobile. Knew how nice it was to be mobile like that. Of course, that all had nothing at all to do with the social scene among the young in that country atmosphere in the 1960s when all hell was breaking loose elsewhere. What it had plenty to do with was getting out of the farmhouse, getting out on weekends. See every guy who was anything also knew how to drive, how to “soup-up” a car and how to have some young thing sitting next to him come that Friday or Saturday night. That was how I started to be seen with Indian Jack, the “king” of the chicken run night out our way in the back roads of roads leading out of Albany. (Indian Jack was for real an Indian, or part Indian, now Native American or a member of an indigenous tribe, in his case the Mohawk tribe which had been in the area long before those land-locked Dutch sailors ever saw the place.)

Indian Jack prided himself on two things, always having the fastest car in the county and always having a pretty girl sitting next to him in that fast car. Not that I was the prettiest girl Indian Jack ever had although I was “Queen” of my Senior Prom at Half Moon High but that was as much my sociable personality and intelligence as beauty but I did keep up my appearances since that counted and I wanted to be counted in. Thelma McGraw was the prettiest girl Indian Jack ever had sitting next to him but she was an “ice queen” and kind of stuck up so nobody missed her when I took over her seat. You should also know that the average “chicken run” won girl was not like me, not like me at all. They ran to buxom big breasts, tight cashmere sweaters, short revealing tight skirts, heavy mascara, chewing gum and serious reputation for sexual activism to put the matter politely. I was something of an outlier, was not liked by that part of the tribe, although I was by the regular country girls who just wanted to get off the farm, get out of the house and breathe whether they liked fast cars or not. They as it turned out were happy that I was Indian Jack’s girl (although that did not stop them from trying to beat my time with Jack, trying to get their young asses in that passenger seat).        

I might as well stop and tell how I got to be Indian Jack’s girl since I mentioned how he “won” me which will tell a lot about the social milieu among the fast car set (the fast women aspect can be left to your imagination although I was pretty naïve about sex both before Indian Jack and afterwards too). See I had started out as Moon Mooney’s girl, a guy in my class in high school who was also a farm boy from the next farm over whom I had known since kindergarten, and who had a great 1956 Chevy Impala if I recall correctly, two-toned white and green with those aerodynamic wings and very comfortable cushy seats (not the bucket seats of today but a one piece operation which allowed a girl to sit right next to her guy, maybe head on his shoulder or to have three across but who cared about that on date night when it was one on one).

Moon, real name Jeffrey, was crazy for cars, was crazy to race too although the few times I had seen him do so did not seem like he was built for heavy running the roads. But that is where the “culture” comes in. Guys were always egging each other and themselves on about who had not only the “boss” car which might only be the best-looking car like the vaunted 1957 Chevy when that was king of the schoolboy night but the fastest.        

Moon was no exception to that draw. Thought he could take on anybody after beating “Wreck” Phillips and “Dink’” Monroe on the “chicken run.” Strictly amateur stuff as it turned out but the stuff that dreams are made of as Humphrey Bogart said in some movie which I don’t remember the name of. This chicken run business is just what it sounds like and whether they are still doing it in the back- country roads it is still the same. Pick some Two AM weekend morning back road like New York 146 in my youth or after U.S. 87 took a ton of traffic away U.S. 9 near my house and let two guys start from zero and beat the other guy no matter what was in the road ahead, especially what might be on the road ahead. That was what we spent our late-night times as much as working the lovers’ lane wrestling matches we found ourselves in.

Sometimes this was for money, sometimes for the other guy’s car (a trade-off) and sometimes for a guy’s girl. That latter was the way Indian Jack swept me off my feet. He had heard that Moon was looking to race him and had heard that I was pretty so one Saturday afternoon when Moon and I were at the A&W for hamburgers Indian Jack came up in back of us in his souped up 1949 Hudson. Moon made the mistake of sort of, only sort of, guffawing when he saw Indian’s auto and that was enough for Indian to make the wager the winner takes the girl (in those days the girl was strictly window dressing in the decision department but truth be told I was very interested in big handsome Indian and got some funny feeling when the whole idea of being the prize swept over me-like I say truth to tell). Needless to say that Thelma was not happy about the matter but like I said no girl was asked about the matter and I never heard any girl refusing to be the bet, or not walking away with the winner if it was not her current guy. And needless to say Indian Jack blew Moon’s crate off the road (literally with me in the passenger seat).

When the dust settled and Indian Jack came back to claim his “prize” I got out of Moon’s busted up car, Thelma got out of Indian’s and I slid nice as could be beside him. I am not sure how Thelma got home or how Moon got his jalopy back home but I did see him several days later after school at the Dairy Queen talking to some freshman girl.  As for Indian Jack he was my first guy, my first serious sexual experience, and while he could be rough-handed he also could be gentle. It was only by way of an armed robbery of the Midnight Diner that broke us up since he was going up for two to five and my parents practically kept me locked up in the house until Senior Prom night when Wayne Sellars escorted me to my throne. I can still feel the wind in my hair when those cars were going full out, still turn my head when I see a classic car on the road or at a show.          

Desperate Times Call For Desperate Actions-Gary Cooper’s “Beau Geste” (1939)-A Film Review

Desperate Times Call For Desperate Actions-Gary Cooper’s “Beau Geste” (1939)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Fritz Taylor

Beau Geste, starring Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, Robert Preston, Susan Hayward, 1939

As a kid I never wanted to be a French Foreign Legionnaire. Period. Never liked the idea of being out in the freaking hot desert with a bunch of dead-end guys whose only common trait is that they had to hightail it from some place-usually fast. In my neighborhood there were dead-beat guys hanging on the lamp posts in every street and I knew most of them, had been on a few capers which are better left unspoken about at this time since I have been clean for many years but some silly relative might this and putting two and two together try to blackmail me.

Okay, I wanted to be at times a cowboy defeating Indians (now Native Americans or indigenous peoples), a knight around King Arthur’s Roundtable, a swashbuckling pirate a la cinema’s Errol Flynn or a Three Musketeer but unlike the older boy Beau Geste character in the film under review of the same name never a Legionnaire. And not from any scruples like I developed later when I got political and would have seen this cohort of desperadoes as front-line agents of French imperialism, colonialism against the native peoples of the various colonies they lorded it over. If I had watched the film as a youth I would have been put off by those dry endless desert expanses and that was that. Now I would be put off more by the fact that the Arabs massed armies had no speaking parts, that the whole thinking beyond the plot-line was strictly from the Western and French perspectives.

That said the Foreign Legion exploits and desires just kind of an adventure backdrop to the front-end story which is what happened to an expensive piece of jewelry which went missing from its location in a box in the house, manor house really, of Lord and Lady Brandon in Merry Olde England. Problem: none of the three young charges, the Geste boys will own up to the theft, will claim responsibility. These three are had been orphans in the charge of Lady B. Lord B was some kind of spendthrift who would have sold the jewel to pay for his profligate ways leaving nothing except debt and craziness for Lady B. Next morning Beau, played by High Noon sheriff Gary Cooper, split for parts unknown. So did Digby, played by Music Man Robert Preston and subsequently the third pseudo-musketeer John, played by lost weekend Ray Milland. The former two had left confessions so who the hell knows who stole the freaking jewel.           

This is where the French Foreign Legion part makes a certain among of sense, at least for the guy who committed the heist. Get far away from manor houses, from England, from civilization. Wrong move though one late arriving John joins up and the three are in for a dime, in for a dollar. Enter a Sergeant Markov one hell of a bitch of lifer who has dreams of going up the food chain to officer land and medals by keeping his foot on the heads of all his underlings. Not a nice guy, no way. His idea of discipline, fun, was to send two guys who had deserted, and were captured back out into the desert without water to die. Even my sergeants in Vietnam would have been hard-pressed to top that for guys who were on the same side, tough as those latter guys were. Since all the Legionnaires were desperados and not out in the freaking desert  for the waters one guy started mutiny talk once they find out Sarge is going to be in charge.

Sarge was able to put down that mutiny with the help if you can believe this of Beau and John. Digby is in some other hell-hole fort miles away. Before this some stoolie told Sarge that one of the guys, Beau had a valuable jewel so he was dead meat if Sarge had his way. So no love lost between them and no love lost either when Beau and John refused to be the execution squad to murder the mutineers. Save by the bell any way since the restless “natives” started an attack just as all hell was breaking loose in the fort. The massed attacks came in waves and ultimately most of the soldiers in the fort were killed. This is the kind of guy Markov was though to create a feign for the enemy he had dead soldiers looking out on the attackers making it look like there were more guys than there were. Before the end of the attacks though Beau was killed.

This gave Sarge an opportunity to grab the jewel and use Beau as massed enemy rifle practice. John disagreed and Sarge went down for the count. John blew town, or rather hit the desert -with water in hand. Digby showed up with a troop of reinforcements from the other fort, finds the dead Beau, gives him a warrior’s send off and as he blows town, or rather hits the desert he runs into John and they are ready to head off except those pesky natives launch another attack and Digby falls on his sword. John is the only one left to go back to Brandon Manor and sad news Lady B. and with the jewel. Except there is no jewel, nothing but a fake jewel since Lady B. to keep the household running sold the damn thing years before. Beau had witnessed the transaction and to protect Lady B. from hubby and/or the law staged this schoolboy theft.  Strange film about strange guys turning into strange soldiers. Watch it though as the three amigo brothers go through their paces. 

Tramps Like Us We Were Born To Run-Elizabeth Taylor and Laurence Harvey In The Film Adaptation Of John O’Hara’s “Butterfield 8” (1960)-A Film Review-Of Sorts

Tramps Like Us We Were Born To Run-Elizabeth Taylor and Laurence Harvey In The Film Adaptation Of John O’Hara’s “Butterfield 8” (1960)-A Film Review-Of Sorts

DVD Review

By Leslie Dumont

Butterfield 8, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Laurence Harvey, Eddie Fisher, from the novel by John O’Hara, 1960 

Bang- I might as well get my “hook” in right now. Talking explicitly about sex, as opposed to channeling explicit sex in its various guises is still a hard sell in many precincts. That seems counter-intuitive given the amount of time and energy media, social media, hell, people in cozy individual conversations spent on it. Maybe I should step back and explain what the heck this statement has to do with reviewing a film from the early 1950s before the full swing of the sexual revolution hit, before the blessed “the pill” which needs no further explanation, Butterfield 8, updated from a John O’Hara 1930s novel, he the Pottsville, Pa plot-liner famous at the time for his ground-breaking Appointment at Samarra.  Explain too why this is a film review “of sorts” and why I used a line from a Bruce Springsteen song in the headline to this piece.  

When I essentially retired from the day to day grind of writing a by-line for Women Today I didn’t fully want to give up writing and still wanted to do an occasional piece, what I call a “think piece” as the spirit moved me. So I got in touch with my old flame Josh Breslin who has worked at this publication for many years and whom I met here when I was a young just out of graduate school stringer working for Sam Lowell, the film editor, when Allan Jackson was running the show. (In the interest of transparency which is a big thing with current site manager Greg Green Josh and I are “rekindling” our old flame if you can believe that after his three marriages and my two and Josh was instrumental back in the day in helping me get that by-line when it was apparent that I would never be more than a stringer as long as his old friend Allan was in charge.) He checked with Allan and Allan was now quite pleased to have me contribute whatever I wanted to as that spirit mentioned above moved me.

That is the rub though. Since my arrival there has been a change of leadership from Allan to Greg the reasons for which do not need to be gotten into here since that happened a while back. Originally the assignment on this film was given to Si Lannon who was crazy for, had read I think every John O’Hara novel although his writings in my eyes were uneven enough that I would not have read everything the man wrote. This was a couple of years ago just before the #MeToo movement came to the public gaze and Greg felt that the subject matter was best handled under the current circumstances by a woman given that the lead female character, Gloria, the role Elizabeth Taylor won an Oscar for, was what in the old days, my youth days a tramp, “every man’s darling” we used to cynically call such women in the girls’ locker room. Men would have used the word “whore” or some such vile designation.  I had argued at the time that Si was still the better choice since having read the novel and thinking it was so much pulp I was not that enthusiastic about reviewing the film adaptation. Greg shelved the project for a while and I had other assignments in the meantime and didn’t get to view this film until recently.

That is one part of the back story. The other after viewing the film was a feeling that I wasn’t sure how to approach the subject matter until I remembered Sam Lowell’s “cure”-when you don’t have a “hook” for your piece (and he reminded me of that as well after he read the first draft of this review). On viewing older films, this from 1960s and so even before my time although not my sensibilities, when stuck use the old tried and true “slice of life” approach. And that along with some personal material which is the “sort of” part of the review is where I am heading with this-and with my initial comment about the vagaries of talking candidly about sex.

As I mentioned above the lead female character, Gloria, was a tramp, a slut by her own definition, although being beautiful, being intelligent and fronting her sexual appetites working as  a pay my own way “fashion model” she didn’t want for male companionship-on her terms. No dough involved, at least formally.  More on that later when I do a short summary of the story. Although couched in 1950s implicit language where much was left to indirection to pass the Hollywood censors and arbiters of what could be expressed and how vividly to do so the girls in my Monday morning before school locker room conversations would have known girls just like Gloria, as did I.

Girls who in our suburban New Jersey neighborhood were known to go “all the way” meaning for anybody now who is clueless having full sexual intercourse (then meaning essentially the “missionary position” and not of other types of sexual experience learned about later and not just from the Karma Sutra either although that is a an excellent source-for the young and agile not fragile). Known to be “easy.” Some of them were motorcycle mamas in training, others were just seen as promiscuous, being seen with a variety of guys on a variety of occasions and others whom we never heard about were those who had been “soiled” by some unwilling bad encounter with a man, maybe even a relative, which did something to her soul. Like I said we would have been clueless and horrified at that latter although today a too frequent story from hell. That was the obvious “bad girl” aura of the times. More than a few of whom would wind up what Josh called in his growing up neighborhood in Maine “going to see Aunt Emma.” Meaning the girl was “in the family way,” pregnant and unmarried and rather than bring shame on the family would leave town for some relative’s home to have her baby maybe never to return.

What the reader may not know and here is my “of sorts” contribution not all the so-called virtuous girls, meaning flat-ass virgins who were allegedly clueless about sex were that innocent. Not according to that ubiquitous Monday morning locker room talk, although we all found out much latter after high school usually that girls who said that had “gone all the way” with some Johnny hadn’t and girls, confession, girls like me who had said they were still virginal who had. That last part important and I think that is where I could stand in some solidarity with that Gloria of the film. I was known publicly to be very proper, something of what today would be called a nerd, always nose in a book and in the advanced classes in school. But I was very curious about sex, about “doing it” and one summer night when I was fourteen I let a guy I said I loved have his way with me (funny all the implicit sexual expressions we used rather than some maybe rawer terms).

And I will not lie, will not kid the reader, I liked it maybe not that first night since it hurt a little but after that.  And nobody, nobody at all knew what I was up to including close girl friends who would have freaked. Maybe told their parents or worse mine. See from the very first I never dated any guys from in town, in that death trap Sunnyvale town but would go to say the Village in New York City and get picked up with no real problem. I was so naïve though I never seriously thought about the possible consequences if say “the rubber” failed, about becoming an “Aunt Emma” girl. This I know, this in the heart of the sexual revolution 1960s and later with Josh, we used to laugh about all the secret stuff, all the shameless shameful stuff we did and which today probably seems pretty old-fashioned and it was except you had to know the milieu then, had to know that “slice of life.”

That, finally, is what did Gloria in, that difference between being a party girl, being any man’s girl, being a tramp. I would have been horrified if anybody called me that-ever but it was the way I felt some times, sometimes when I was plotting my next adventure. That struggle to gather in some self-respect, to have her man Liggett, played by coldly sexy Laurence Harvey, love her for what she was -a good woman-and not a tramp no matter how many men she had is what would be her downfall when she decided she had to start a new life, start a life without the burden of what Liggett knew about her and in the back of his mind would always wonder about her. While her death via an automobile accident as the scorned Liggett was pursuing her in another automobile seemed too over-the-top as a story line it kind of says a lot about who was a winner and who was a loser then. She died, while when he went home to wifey, he could just try to go “find himself.” Damn.  

The Devil’s Child-With Bette Davis’ “In This Our Lives”(1942)-A Film Review

The Devil’s Child-With Bette Davis’ “In This Our Lives”(1942)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Senior Film Critic Sandy Salmon

In This Our lives, starring Bette Davis, Olivia deHavilland, George Brent, Dennis Morgan, directed by John Huston, 1942  

Some people are born under the sign of the devil, the sign of 666. They may not want to do the devil’s bidding, may want to be as sweet as sweet can be but are organically incapable of doing anything but leaving storm, stress and chaos behind them, And that is just for starters on their “good” days. In the film under review, In This Our Lives, we run up against the devil’s spawn, the devil’s daughter, although born of woman (who might have aided mightily in that daughter’s recklessness come to think of it).

Maybe I am being too harsh, maybe that fallen daughter could not help herself but let’s see how the whole thing played out. One Stanley Timberlake, she of the old-time Timberlake fortune gone bust through a meek father and a scheming uncle’s shady doings, played by Bette Davis, she of the “Bette Davis eyes” and “put her hands in her back pockets Bette Davis style” is engaged to mild-mannered people’s lawyer Craig, played by mild-mannered butter would not melt in his mouth George Brent. One Roy Timberlake Fleming, Stanley’s sister, played by Olivia de Havilland and in possession of no Bette Davis eyes is married to an up and coming surgeon Peter Fleming, played by emotional volatile and morose Dennis Morgan. The sisters and Fleming live in the old Timberlake house along with neurotic, bed-ridden of woman born Ma and sedate Pa Timberlake brewing up a witch’s cauldron in a hothouse atmosphere which may have fatal to some parties in more than one way. (By the way don’t be thrown off by the masculine names, Stanley and Roy in an Elizabeth, Mary, Katherine age these most unlike sisters for they both are seriously into the menfolk. Some serious psychanalysis could be worked through figuring out why those names and the effects of cruelty, of childhood taunt, but that is that is for the secular types to fathom. I’m sticking with the devil’s bargain theme.)                    

Here’s where the devil’s daughter, where the sign of 666 takes off and leads all parties astray. Mantrap Stanley lures Peter away for Roy leaving Craig somewhere short of the altar. One moonless night (it had to be moonless to do such dastardly work) the pair blew town, lived together for a time and then got hitched got married. All while the fickle Stanley decided she was bored and needed some distraction driving the emotional volatile and morose Peter up a wall. Needless to say the jilted Roy and Craig are crestfallen but still for a while carry the torch for their respective jilters. Needless to say already that Stanley-Peter marriage was not made in heaven.

Get this though, follow me please, Roy and Craig have a chance meeting which eventually leads them to tie the knot, get hitched, you know married. Bingo though in the meantime that marriage not made in heaven leads the remorseful Peter to kill himself. Chalk one up for Stanley’s devilish charms. After Stanley cries for about ten minutes she is off again to taunt/lure Craig into going back with her. No dice but not for a lack of trying. He was supposed to meet her at some gin mill but was a no show. She got drunk to contain her rage and then left the joint, got into her car, and sped away. Sped away in a residential area and wound up killing a child and grievously wounding the mother. Then sped away leaving nothing but a hit and run mystery to be solved.

Here is where the devil’s child idea really gets a workout in a sequence of scenes that could have taken place in 1877, 1919, 1942 the year of the film, and today, 2017, as well. See spoiled rotten Stanley was not built for jail cells and to be some hard-ass prisoner’s honey. So she lays the blame on a young up and coming black kid, the son of the Timberlake’s old-time maid, who was studying to be a lawyer under Craig’s tutelage. She claimed on a stack of seven sealed Bibles (like any devil’s disciple would) that she had left the car with the kid to be washed. Claimed she had not been out of the house all evening. The kid like many, too many, generations on young black men sensed his was doomed-his word against a white woman’s in America in 1877, 1919, 1942. 2017.

All her tales were bullshit of course but she had everybody going for a while including lawyer Craig. But she doth protest too much. In her frenzy to get out from under she was ready to sell the black kid, Craig, Roy, her old man, her scheming uncle, anybody to get in the clear. Also no go. See she had left a telltale address on Craig’s calendar where they were to meet at a certain hour at that bar. Craig checked and the bartender vividly remembered her. Expecting to be taken to her well-deserved jail cell she broke from the house and fled by car to parts unknown. The cops in hot pursuit. During the ensuing car chase she made a fatal turn and that was that. A home inside the gates of hell-also well-deserved. Now tell me that she wasn’t born under the 666 sign-huh.                     

On The 150th Anniversary Of The Publication Of "Das Capital" (1867)-Karl Marx Was Right!-World Economic Crisis—Workers Must Fight for Power

On The 150th Anniversary Of  The Publication Of "Das Capital" (1867)-Karl Marx Was Right!-World Economic Crisis—Workers Must Fight for Power

Markin comment:

This is a very good, very nicely pedagogic introduction to basic Marxist economics for today's younger readers not versed in the old time (ouch!)1960s studies of his economic theories that were de riguer for leftists then.
***************
Workers Vanguard No. 997
2 March 2012

Karl Marx Was Right!

World Economic Crisis—Workers Must Fight for Power

(Young Spartacus pages)
We reprint below a presentation on Marxist economics given by Tynan Maddalena, editor of Spartacist Canada’s Young Spartacus pages. The presentation was originally given to a 24 September 2011 Trotskyist League of Canada/Spartacus Youth Club day school in Toronto and published in Spartacist Canada No. 171 (Winter 2011/2012).

As the economic crisis that began in 2007-2008 continues around the globe, the post-Cold War myth that capitalism is the final stage in human progress and can continue to grow without limit is shattering before our eyes. In the United States, millions of workers have been thrown into the ranks of the unemployed, millions have lost their homes, hundreds of thousands of immigrants are deported every year, and youth are burdened with huge student debt with dwindling prospects of getting a job. For those who see no future under capitalism, Marx’s analysis is an essential tool to understand the world we live in today—and change it.

Since this presentation was given, populist Occupy Wall Street protests against inequality and austerity spread further around the country. The Occupy organizers have argued that they have no clear political agenda, affiliation or even a fixed set of demands, but in fact they do have a program: liberal reform, especially of the financial sector, and “democratization” of capitalism. But capitalism cannot be fundamentally reformed. There is a fundamental class divide in society between the capitalists—the tiny number of families that own industry and the banks—and the working class, whose labor is the source of the capitalists’ profits.

In this election year, Occupy protesters and others will be told to swallow the poison pill of “lesser evilism,” as attempts will be made to corral them into support for Obama and the capitalist Democratic Party. Posturing as the “friends” of labor and the oppressed, the Democrats are in reality no less committed than the Republicans to the maintenance of capitalist exploitation and pursuit of bloody imperialist wars.

To students and young workers seeking a revolutionary program for the destruction of capitalism, as opposed to seeking only liberal reform, Young Spartacus offers Marxism. The Spartacus Youth Clubs train the next generation of revolutionary socialists—the future cadre of a multiracial workers party built in opposition to all capitalist parties and their sycophants. Led by such a party and armed with a revolutionary program, the working class can vanquish this system of exploitation and war, laying the basis for a global communist society of abundance and human freedom.

*   *    *

As stock markets crash and the world economy stands on the precipice of a second “Great Recession,” consider that the collapse of 2008-09, the worst global economic crisis since the 1930s, added 130 million people to the ranks of the chronically malnourished and hungry. That brings the total number to over one billion. In so many words, one-seventh of the human race is starving. One-seventh and counting.

Across the European Union, 23 million workers are out of work. In Spain, which was recently rocked by general strikes and enormous protest movements, youth unemployment is over 44 percent. In Greece, hundreds of thousands of jobs are gone, homelessness is through the roof, and many people, especially pensioners, line up at soup kitchens in order to survive.

Every so-called bailout for every financial crisis across the eurozone—from Greece to Ireland to Portugal—brings with it unrelenting attacks on the living standards of the masses, who seethe with discontent. The IMF, the European Central Bank, the governments of Germany, France and the United States all chauvinistically chastise the peoples of these countries in crisis as living beyond their means or lazy. In reality, the financial powers are only bailing out themselves—their own failed banking systems—on the backs of workers and the poor.

Here in North America, we hear a lot of talk about an economic recovery. It is a jobless recovery, a wageless recovery, a fragile recovery, a “still nascent” recovery. At the end of July, the American government revised its statistics: the 2008 recession was deeper than reported, and the “recovery” was even more dubious than reported. As for the Canadian economy, we recently learned that it shrank by 0.4 percent in the second quarter of this year. Scotiabank released a report two weeks ago forecasting another drop in the third quarter which could be as great as 2.5 percent. “Canada could be among the first of the world’s advanced economies to fall into a technical recession,” warned the CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation]. That’s rich. We’ve had a jobless, wageless, fragile, still nascent recovery, but don’t worry, the coming recession is going to be only a “technical” one!

In human terms, one in six Americans is now unemployed, with the average time out of work close to ten months. Forty-five million people are on food stamps, and that has increased more than 30 percent during the two years of this specious recovery. Since the housing bubble burst in the U.S., there have been over seven million home foreclosures. Enforcing them is a brutal act of state repression: the police come to a home, haul the furniture and other possessions onto the street and lock the family out. The bourgeois media would have you believe that the worst was over by 2008. The truth is that 932,000 of those foreclosures came in the first quarter of 2010, and that was an increase of 16 percent over the previous year. And under racist American capitalism, blacks and Latinos, one-third of whose households have no net worth, always suffer disproportionately. In some largely black and Latino neighbourhoods of South Chicago, as well as across the Detroit metropolitan area, one of every 20 households was in foreclosure.

In Canada, well over a quarter million manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2002. This underscores the decades-long deindustrialization of North America, represented in the rusted wreckage of steel mills and the shells of auto plants. As Karl Marx put it: “Thus the forest of uplifted arms demanding work becomes ever thicker, while the arms themselves become ever thinner.”

At the same time, corporate profits have reached record levels. Ed Clark, chief executive officer of the Toronto-Dominion Bank, whose profits recently rose to a staggering $1.45 billion, recently joined billionaire capitalist parasites Warren Buffett and George Soros in advocating higher taxes for the rich. Their only concern, of course, is to better preserve the capitalist system, including by giving it a facelift—though that did not prevent right-wing demagogues from labeling Buffett and Soros “socialists.” As they say, truth is stranger than fiction.

It should come as no surprise that the Conservatives, now with a majority government, are moving rapidly against the unions. The government ended a lockout by Canada Post [the postal service] this spring by legislating wage levels that were even lower than the employer’s final offer. Recently, two different unions at Air Canada were threatened with strikebreaking legislation.

The bailouts of the banks—in some cases to the tune of trillions of dollars—were enacted uniformly by every government in the imperialist West and Japan at the expense of the working class. These measures point to an elementary truth of Marxism-Leninism: that the executive of the modern state is but a committee for deciding the common affairs of the ruling class as a whole. Or look at Export Development Canada’s agreement to lend $1 billion to the Vale mining conglomerate. This came after a year-long strike at Vale’s Sudbury nickel mines, during which the company claimed that funds simply weren’t available to meet the union’s modest demands.

Various reformists and even self-professed Marxists claim that the way forward is to look for “concrete” solutions “in the here and now,” i.e., liberal palliatives. The problem is that any reform wrested from the capitalists today will only be taken away tomorrow—and today the rulers aren’t even offering the pretense of reform. The reformists especially drag out their cant about “real world” solutions when they want to express disdain for the theory and program of revolutionary Marxism, which they dismiss as “abstract.”

In fact, the reformists’ perspective is counterposed to the only road that can end the hunger, poverty and social degradation that are intrinsic to capitalism. Vladimir Lenin, who along with Leon Trotsky led the October Revolution of 1917, warned: “Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution, however barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes” (“The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,” 1913). Lenin stressed that “there is only one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can—and, owing to their social position, must—constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for the struggle.” As scientific socialists, we fight for workers revolution to establish an international, centrally planned economy based on satisfying human want.

Marxist Theory and the Class Struggle

Lenin called Marxist theory the “granite foundation” of the Bolshevik Party. Without revolutionary theory, he explained, there can be no revolutionary movement. The core of Marxism is the labour theory of value, elaborated by Marx in the first volume of Capital. Not a breeze to read. But when it comes to the theory that all value in a capitalist economy derives solely from, or is indeed synonymous with, labour, whether or not someone wants to learn this hinges to a great extent on their sympathies for the working class. It was Marx’s commitment to the modern industrial proletariat that allowed him to unlock the secret of value that underlies commodity circulation. As we Spartacists say, program generates theory.

Capitalist production developed from commodity circulation. People have always had to come together to produce for their needs. However, as the techniques of production developed and diversified, people no longer produced goods solely for their own groups, but for trade with others through the medium of exchange. Thus Marx called commodities a relationship between people expressed as a relationship between things.

Obviously, there would be no need for someone to trade their product for something they already had. In order to be exchanged, two commodities must have different uses to satisfy different wants. At the same time, they must on some level be equivalent: they must possess equal value, otherwise there would be no basis for each person to voluntarily give up their product for someone else’s. The great discovery of Karl Marx was that the basis for this equivalence is that all commodities are the product of labour, labour in the most abstract and general sense.

Go to an economics lecture at a university and you may learn that people exchange things solely because they have different uses. But why not just get it yourself? The answer is that it has to be produced: it takes work to acquire it. A slightly more sophisticated version of the same bourgeois argument is that you can’t get it yourself because it is scarce. That reflects a certain truth. However, it is a rigid, static view of the truth that is conditioned by the values of the bourgeoisie, which is an idle class. Anyone who works readily understands that all commodities are scarce until they are brought into existence by labour.

It has never been the case that people have produced commodities on a level playing field. Capitalism did not begin with a clean slate, but was built up on the previously existing systems of feudalism and slavery. Large sections of the ruling classes of these societies capitalized their wealth, whereas the slaves remained dispossessed and the peasants were often brutally robbed of what little they had. Through market competition, the larger, more efficient producers drove the smaller, weaker ones out of business, bought out their capital and conquered their share of the market. Those who were amassing the wealth became capitalists—the bourgeoisie. Those who had nothing left to sell but their own sweat and blood were the workers—the proletariat.

It’s often said that workers sell their labour. In fact, they are not permitted to do even that. The prerequisites for labour in an industrial society—machines and factories, the core of which can be scientifically termed the means of production—belong to the capitalist. The worker cannot work without first receiving permission from the capitalist. What the worker actually sells is therefore not his labour, but rather his potential to labour. That is what Marxists call labour power.

Labour power is bought, sold and consumed. It is a commodity, but there is something peculiar about it. The price of any commodity is based roughly on its value, or the amount of labour necessary for its reproduction. What is the value of labour power? The cost of reproducing the ability of the worker to perform his labour. That consists of food, shelter, clothing, some means of relaxation and of acquiring the skills necessary for doing the job. And finally, enough to support a family so that the working class can continue to exist from one generation to the next.

Taken together, the labour required for these measures constitutes the value of labour power. The gist of capitalist exploitation is that the proletariat generates far more value than is required for the production and reproduction of its labour power. In other words, the peculiarity of the commodity of labour power, its unique attribute, is that it is a source of value. The difference between the total value the worker adds to the product and the value of labour power is called surplus value. Exactly how much of the total value goes to the capitalist and how much goes back to the labourer? This is determined by living factors, by a contest of forces—in other words, by the class struggle.

Take Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold. Their operation in Indonesia faced a strike last July. Reuters news agency, which is anything but Marxist, made the following calculation: the workers’ wages were $1.50 an hour, the price of gold, $1,500 an ounce; therefore, the gold output lost during the eight-day strike could have covered three times the workers’ annual wages.

To begin to determine the rate of exploitation of these miners—otherwise known as the rate of surplus value—you would need to know the value of the machinery and fuel used up during production and subtract it from the total product. Otherwise, you could not verify the total amount of value the workers add to the product through their labour. However, the fact stands that these gold mines yield 137 times the workers’ annual wages each year, and Indonesian mines are not famous for being high-tech. Since based on our present knowledge we are confined to being somewhat less than scientific, let’s just say that someone is being taken advantage of here, and it’s not the capitalist.

There can be no fair division of the social product between the worker and the capitalist. As Trotsky explained: “The class struggle is nothing else than the struggle for surplus-product. He who owns surplus-product is master of the situation—owns wealth, owns the state, has the key to the church, to the courts, to the sciences and to the arts” (“Marxism in Our Time,” 1939). There can be no such thing as equality, fairness, freedom or democracy between the slaves and the slave masters.

Exploitation and Capitalist Crisis

So what are social classes? Lenin defined them as “large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently”—only consequently—“by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it” (“A Great Beginning,” 1919).

Social class does not derive from a state of mind, nor is it even fundamentally a question of the rich and the poor. For example, a skilled unionized worker in a modern factory in an imperialist country may under exceptional cases make over $100,000 per year. Yet because labour productivity is so high, his or her rate of exploitation is likely much higher than that of far more oppressed and impoverished labourers in a semicolonial country. Moreover, a unionized worker in the trades may make as much as or more than a yuppie supervisor in an office. Nevertheless, the worker still has an economic interest in overthrowing his capitalist exploiter, while the supervisor is an accessory to capitalist production and thus bound to it materially and, you could say, spiritually.

Just about anyone can criticize capitalism from the standpoint of reason or morality. Yet Marx criticized capitalism from the standpoint of maximizing labour productivity, which is generally promoted by capitalism’s ideological defenders as its strong point. Marx proved that capitalist production increasingly puts the brakes on historical development, at the same time as it creates its own gravedigger, the proletariat.

Day in and day out, the proletariat continues to produce. It cannot use its own labour to get ahead as a class, because it is only paid what is necessary to allow it to continue producing. Everything necessary to get ahead goes to the capitalists. As Marx put it: “If the silk worm were to spin in order to continue its existence as a caterpillar, it would be a complete wage-worker.”

As capitalism develops, the bourgeoisie amasses more and more capital. Technology advances. Machinery becomes more and more sophisticated and extensive and labour productivity rises. The capitalist devotes an increasingly large ratio of his wealth toward acquiring machinery, and a correspondingly declining ratio toward employing workers. In Marx’s words, the organic composition of capital increases. The effect of this is contradictory. On one hand, the rate of exploitation increases. On the other hand, the rate of profit decreases. That’s the dilemma the capitalist faces. Even if he ratchets up the rate of exploitation, the rate of profit still tends to go down. That is why the capitalist has no future. Let’s take a closer look.

Say you’ve got your engineering degree and you’re looking for a job in your field. Off you go to the Celestica factory at Don Mills and Eglinton to pave the information superhighway, one transistor at a time, for $11.75 an hour on six-month contracts with no benefits. (And your boss can call you a few hours before your shift starts to tell you to stay home without pay.)

So there you are with your co-workers paving the information superhighway with these transistors; array enough together in the right way and you get a flip-flop, an edifice of the binary logic used on a grand scale in computers. It’s nowhere near as glamorous as it sounds in Wired magazine or those trendy post-Marxist academic seminars. Away you work. Eventually, the company replaces the soldering irons that each of you uses with a wave solder machine. A chunk of your co-workers gets laid off. You’re producing way more circuit boards than before, only your wage is the same. Since most of your friends were laid off, the company’s spending on wages has gone way down. The rate of exploitation overall has increased astronomically. Good times for the capitalist, right? Not so fast.

At first, the company will have an advantage over its competitors. Soon, however, that new machinery will become the standard across the industry. Even though the rate of exploitation has gone up, the rate of profit will go down. It all comes back to labour being the sole source of value. One capitalist can sell another capitalist a machine, but that exchange does not increase the total amount of value in the economy. The value just changes hands. It’s only once the capitalist purchases labour power, and consumes it by having the worker do his job, that any new value is added to the economy. The lower the ratio of the capitalist’s wealth that is spent on wage labour, the lower is the ratio of surplus value to his total expenses. More and more of his wealth gets tied up in replacing and maintaining machinery—what Marx evocatively termed “dead labour.”

As I said, the rate of exploitation is going up, but the rate of profit is going down. The capitalist does not resign himself to that fate peacefully, however. He panics and slashes wages like a madman, doing whatever he can to transfer the burden of his decaying system onto the backs of the people he exploits. When that capitalist can no longer produce at a competitive rate of profit, he simply ceases to produce. He throws his workers onto the street. Like Malcolm X said of the slave master, he worked them like dogs and dropped them in the mud. Production is in chaos. The empty factories rust.

Once the slave escapes his master, he is no longer a slave; once the serf gets his plot of land, he is no longer a serf. But even after the proletarian punches his time card for the final time and quits (or loses) his job, he remains a proletarian. The modern slave, the wage slave, is slave to the entire capitalist class. The proletariat cannot escape this exploiting class but must overthrow it in its entirety, worldwide, and in so doing liberate everyone who is oppressed by capitalism.

For a Revolutionary Workers Party!

What has been placed on the agenda is proletarian revolution, even if this seems far off today. We look above all to the legacy of the Russian Revolution. As Trotsky noted about the early years of the Soviet Union:

“Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the earth’s surface—not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity. Even if the Soviet Union, as a result of internal difficulties, external blows and the mistakes of its leadership, were to collapse—which we firmly hope will not happen—there would remain as an earnest of the future this indestructible fact, that thanks solely to a proletarian revolution a backward country has achieved in less than ten years successes unexampled in history.”

—The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

We Trotskyists fought against the Stalinist degeneration of the USSR, and against its final counterrevolutionary collapse in 1991-92. Nevertheless, that collapse did occur, and the ideologues of the bourgeoisie have done everything they can to bury the lessons of the October Revolution, which remains our model.

The key political instrument for victory is the revolutionary vanguard party as developed by Lenin. Trotsky explained: “The class, taken by itself, is only material for exploitation. The proletariat assumes an independent role only at that moment when from a social class in itself it becomes a political class for itself. This cannot take place otherwise than through the medium of a party. The party is that historical organ by means of which the class becomes class conscious” (“What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat,” 1932). We seek to win the working class, starting with its most advanced layers, to understand the necessity of sweeping away capitalist rule and establishing what Marx called the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is the only road to communism, a global high-tech society of material abundance where classes, the state and family no longer exist, and where thereby social inequality based on sex is eradicated and the social significance of race, nation and ethnicity abolished.

Where to get started? We come full circle to the question of what to do concretely in the here and now. We can now approach that question scientifically, from the standpoint of the historic interest of the proletariat as a class. We can avoid the pitfall of do-gooder moralism, of becoming, as Lenin warned, “the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics,” whether in the form of right-wing religious demagogy or social-democratic opportunism.

The class consciousness of the proletariat and its will to struggle have been greatly undermined by the social-democratic misleadership of the labour movement, exemplified by the New Democratic Party. Three years ago, the now-deceased NDP leader Jack Layton—who, unlike the reformist left, we do not eulogize—called on workers to have the “courage” to “take a pay cut so your friends at the plant can keep their job.” This is one of many reasons why we said “No vote to the NDP” in the May federal election, and we say so again for the upcoming Ontario election.

The NDP is based not merely on a bad set of ideas. It is rooted materially in the trade-union bureaucracy of English Canada. That bureaucracy expresses the interests of a stratum of the working class that Marxists term the labour aristocracy. Where does the labour aristocracy come from? It lives off scraps from the superprofits the capitalists in imperialist countries tear out of the semicolonial countries. Thus, to Marxists, it was no surprise that the NDP voted with both hands for NATO’s war on Libya. The NDP is what Marx’s close collaborator Friedrich Engels called a bourgeois workers party: it may be linked to the organizations of the working class, but it is thoroughly pro-capitalist in its leadership and outlook.

What is needed is something completely different: a class-struggle workers party that understands that the interests of the capitalists and the workers have nothing in common. Such a party would be, in Lenin’s words, a tribune of the people, which understands that the working class can only emancipate itself by ultimately abolishing all forms of oppression.

A revolutionary workers party would intervene into the class struggle as the most historically conscious and advanced element of the proletariat. It would advocate Quebec independence to oppose the dominant Anglo chauvinism and get the stifling national question off the agenda, making way for a higher level of class struggle. It would champion free abortion on demand and fight for the perspective of women’s liberation through socialist revolution, including among the more backward layers of the proletariat. To combat mass unemployment, it would demand the sharing of available work, with no loss of pay, and a massive program of public works.

To unmask the exploitation, robbery and fraud of the capitalist owners and the swindles of the banks, a class-struggle workers party would demand that the capitalists open their books. Raising the call for the expropriation of branches of industry vital for national existence, it would explain that this must be linked to the fight for the seizure of power by the working class, as against the reformist misleaders for whom the call for nationalization is merely a prescription for bailing out bankrupt capitalist enterprises. As Trotsky argued in opposition to the capitalists and their reformist agents in the Transitional Program (1938):

“If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. ‘Realizability’ or ‘unrealizability’ is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what its immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.”

That is the task to which we of the Trotskyist League and the Spartacus Youth Clubs are dedicated. In the trough of the reactionary political period following the destruction of the Soviet Union, it’s a task with few immediate rewards. But let’s be sober and scientific about this—there is an overhead to historical progress. And on the grounds of that necessity, we urge you to join us in that struggle.

Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain-Watch Your Back, Sister, Watch Your Back-Humphrey Bogart’s “The Enforcer” (1951)-A Film Review

Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain-Watch Your Back, Sister, Watch Your Back-Humphrey Bogart’s “The Enforcer” (1951)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Jack Callahan

The Enforcer, starring Humphrey Bogart, Everett Sloane, 1951  

[Although Jack Callahan very infrequently writes for this publication I feel it is necessary in the now seemingly obligatory interest of transparency to note that Jack has been a major financial supporter of this publication both in the days when it was in hard copy and now on-line. That said it is no accident that Jack is writing this film review since he along with a cohort, a word by-line writer Seth Garth has been falling in love with of late and which some of us have picked up on until some other fall in love expression moves in, of guys like Allan Jackson, Si Lannon, Sam Lowell, and Phil Larkin who all grew up together in the “Acre” section of North Adamsville south of Boston and who spent many an ill-spent Saturday afternoon feasting on such films at the Strand Theater. (This well before Jack took up with his ever-loving high school sweetheart Chrissie McNamara, now his wife, at which time they were balcony-bound and I bet hard-pressed to give detail number one about any film allegedly seen. How they met and became a high school item is a story in itself which I believe Allan Jackson has written about in these pages.)

Since Jack is not a regular writer like those listed above from the Acre a few details are in order-this beyond the need for transparency but maybe gives the reader an idea of why he has been a fervent supporter of this publication. Jack, unlike all the others mentioned and lets’ include the late Peter Paul Markin who has something like legendary status among this crowd reflected in the inordinate amount of stories about him in this space and in others, did not serve in the military during the 1960s, during the time of the hellish Vietnam War. Didn’t serve for the simple reason that he was 4-F which meant physically unable to serve. That disability the result of a severe football injury sustained when he went to State U on a football scholarship and got injured in his sophomore year when his team played Boston College.

Jack, in any case, was not a natural fit for the crowd he hung around with since he was the high school football hero as once could imagine. Except he was very shy despite all the attention every male in the school, and most females, gave him. (He only had eyes for Chrissie and she for him I really ought to have Allan or Seth revive that romance story about this pair). These guys provided cover for him since he was an Acre guy, one of them, one of the poor as sin Catholic boys. Still after high school and college with one short exception when he went West for a while with this crew of ex-G.I.s who turned against the war of their generation after having all the fill they wanted of killing and death Jack was the shoulder to the wheel guy among the cohort. With Chrissie and later four fine daughters Jack became Mr. Toyota of Eastern Massachusetts and therefore of all the guys was the one who made a ton of money. Money which he used partially to help finance a million Acre boy schemes and this publication. That said lets’ let Jack go through his paces doing this film review which he begged me, no, asked me to let him do. Greg Green]

Seth Garth said it best, or the character in the film Key Largo ex-World War II officer Frank McCloud played by Humphrey Bogart the lead actor in the film under review The Enforcer did, “one more Johnny Rocco, more or less, is not worth dying for.” Meaning in that case that one Chi town gangster was not worth death when some other Johnny Rocco was waiting in the wings to move up the food chain. That did stop McCloud from bang-bang shooting old Rocco  when he messed with his woman and it will not stop ADA Ferguson, Bogie’s role here, from putting a gangster underground, sending him to the big step off- letting a few volts do him in. For a while Ferguson was on hard times, looked defeated against the scumbag was trying to send to the chair but whether there was one more Mendoza, the arch-criminal here played by Everett Sloane, or not this one is going down, going down hard.   

The reason that Ferguson was on the ropes for a while in this police procedural, a kind of film noir that we didn’t necessarily like all that much because in the end the story-line was always “crime doesn’t pay” and we didn’t like cops very much in the Acre and had our own reasons for looking kindly on “crime paying” without penalty which I will leave to the reader’s imagination just in case, was that his key witness, his only witness against the kingpin was Mendoza’s “dispatcher.” This stoolie, a guy named Joe, Joe Rico started folding like a hand of cards once the deal was ready to go down, when he was supposed to go to the witness stand and finger his boss for a murder when they first started out together. Fearing the long arm of Mendoza the sappy bleeding all over the place Rico tried to escape and fell down, fell down hard when he slipped off the ledge of the building from which he was attempting to flee. Sorry, Fergie, but those are the breaks when you depend on a rat, a stoolie, a fink, whatever you want to call such a guy. 

But here is where Ferguson got wise, figured he had nothing to lose by reviewing the case from day one via a bunch of flashbacks (and then some back flashbacks on those which sounds menacing to follow but was not, not at all). Wait a minute, maybe I better lay out Mendoza’s racket first, and why Ferguson was desperate to get him to the chair. (This “lay out” veteran reviewer Seth’s suggestion). Why Rico would rather have fallen down than get the big kiss-off from one of Mendoza’s killer boys. This wily Mendoza must had had some time on his hands and furthermore have been tired of living on cheap street because he figured out a racket a that a few guys in the Acre would have loved to have thought of, the perfect crime. Murder for hire, murder without any apparent motive for the coppers to pin something on somebody who knew the deceased on. Beautiful in its way.  Mendoza puts the word out that he has an operation to take care of some unwanted person for somebody didn’t matter the reason or non-reason. Rico, away from Mendoza for plausible deniability purposes, “dispatches” the “hit” man, pays him off and that is that. Clean hands, clean as a whistle, perfect crime. Except there was one little misstep right at the beginning of Mendoza and Rico’s beautiful friendship. The first murder for hire killing of a restaurant owner ordered up by parties unknown was witnessed by a guy and his daughter who walked in while Mendoza did his dirty deed.            

That of course meant that there were two witnesses to what happened and while they were left alone for whatever reason Mendoza left them alone for that would be Fergie’s edge if he could find either one. Assuming that he knew there were witnesses which he did once he dug the dirt up which started him on his long road investigation. The rest of the story line depends on those flashbacks mentioned above. After going for years working the murder for hire racket Mendoza stepped into a cab which was being driven by the guy who saw him murder the restaurant owner.  One cabbie gone to cabbie heaven if there is such a place for the over-charging bastards. Of course if you kill Papa then you need to waste the daughter since you needed to tidy things up. And that was done too, or it sure looked like it was done.

The “hit” man on the daughter job nothing but a stone- cold killer though screwed up, made the cardinal error of hits. Got to know the young woman and so was ready to back her out, flee with her. But you don’t do that to a guy like Mendoza and so he ordered the weak-kneed hit man to kill her under penalty of being killed himself. That is when things really unraveled. See Mister bad-ass hitman had moral qualms about killing his girl and went to the coppers who though he was screwy. Then Ferguson got into the act, especially when that stone-cold killer committed suicide. Fergusson conducted a thorough investigation (which is how he got Rico and how he had Mendoza in the slammer ready for the big step-off) including talking to the slain girl’s roommate after her mutilated body was found. No help. But Ferguson was intrepid working on every angle and not quitting, not falling down himself. The pieces start coming together though once the racket’s aims were exposed when Ferguson was able to ride the train up to Rico’s part in the whole caper.

You know though that no way was Mendoza was going to get sprung, although not for lack of trying. Not by his lawyers but by his gallery of hit men two of who he dispatched to kill that loose end roommate once he got wise to something. That wise to something is the beauty of the whole film although we knew what had happened long before Ferguson and his coppers knew what hit them. See that hit man who killed his girl, murdered her under duress, killed the wrong girl-she had brown eyes but eye witness to that restaurant murder Rico who almost spilled his guts out distinctly remembered the girl’s eyes were blue. Bingo roommate and double bingo Ferguson who wasted one of the two hit man sent to kill her under jail cell Mendoza’s orders. Nice, still though thinking back on it I wish every police procedural didn’t “prove” crime doesn’t pay. Okay that is the Acre in me speaking.