*Not Ready For Prime Time Class Struggle - John Water's "Cry Baby"- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip from the movie,"Cry Baby", of the sultry, sexy, saucy song "Please, Mr. Jailer". Whee!



Cry Baby, Baby, Baby, Baby

DVD Review

Cry Baby, starring Johnny Depp, directed by John Waters, 1990



I would argue that the work of director John Waters and his Baltimore teen mania, circa 1955, type works are an acquired taste. And I have acquired the taste, having first gotten interested in his work through “Hairspray” that was revived on screen a couple of years ago. Of course, part of the draw is that the demographic territory that Waters surveys, circa 1955 teens, is very familiar turf to me. So when dear John spoofs a certain fashion, or a certain crowd, or a certain way of looking at things that were alienating to the average teen back then he is giving off signals that I am attuned to. And that is the key; to know what is being spoofed, because the music is easy, very easy to figure out, the fight to get rock and roll to "youth nation".

Of course, as is inevitable in a teen-based film, spoof or not, there is the central theme of sex. Here that theme centers on the orphan bad boy, Cry Baby played by Johnny Depp, who deep down inside really has a heart of gold matched up with an upscale orphan good girl, Amy Locane, who deep down inside want to be bad. No, that last phrase won’t work here, deep down wants to redeem Johnny-bad boy. Along the way to this inevitable happy-ending everything not nailed down gets spooked from 1950s suburban cookie cutter lifestyles to seemingly odd-ball teen fetishes like- French kissing and, oh no, the love of rock and roll. For my money the best spoof though, and it must have been hard to do with a straight face, are the musical performances of the quartet of pre-roll and rock teen singers(one of them, good/bad girl’s beau, for a while) doing the cutesy songs made famous by male groups like The Letterman that were squeaky clean but upon hearing sounded like scratching on a chalk board. And, incidentally, drove me to blues, rock, and folk music in nothing flat.

Note: I haven’t mentioned much about the performances here but for a long time now anything Johnny Depp appears in will get a look see, although it does not always turn out to be worthwhile. He has had a string of great roles, like in "Ed Wood", and some that it is better left unspoken like, "Sweeney Todd", but in this early film role (1990)as Cry Baby he gives a glimpse of why I will take a chance on any of his efforts. He does a beautiful parody of the James Dean/Elvis/Marlon Brando "rebel without a cause" style that the Cry Baby role calls for. Well done, Johnny.

*Today's Burning Question Of The Day- The Search For The Great Working Class Love Song (In English)- "1952 Vincent Black Lightning "

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Richard Thompson performing his "1952 Vincent Black Lightning". I was not able to find Greg Brown's, the first performer I heard do the song, a high-powered guitar playing cover of this classic motorcycle love song.

Markin comment:

No, old Markin has not gone off the deep end. But every once in a while I like to get a little whimsical, especially if I have music on my mind. Let’s face it , communist political realists that we are we cannot (or should not go) 24/7 on the heavy questions of health care, the struggle against the banks and other capitalist institutions, the fight for a working wage and the big fight looming ahead on Afghanistan without a little relief. So, for this moment, I ask this question –what is the great working class love song (in English)?

Now there are plenty of them I am sure but I control the stick today. You have to choose between my two (now three, see today's addition of "James Alley Blues") selections. Richard Thompson’s classic motorcycle love song (which, of course, if you read the lyrics, borders very closely to the lumpen proletarian-but so does working class existence, especially down among the working poor, for that matter). Or, Tom Waits’ version of the classic weekend freedom seeking “Jersey Girl”. And, after that……… Obama, Troops Out Of Afghanistan- Free Quality Health care For All- Down With The Wall Street Bankers. See, I told you I had not gone off the deep end.




ARTIST: Richard Thompson
TITLE: 1952 Vincent Black Lightning
Lyrics and Chords

Said Red Molly to James that's a fine motorbike
A girl could feel special on any such like
Said James to Red Molly, well my hat's off to you
It's a Vincent Black Lightning, 1952
And I've seen you at the corners and cafes it seems
Red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme
And he pulled her on behind
And down to Box Hill they did ride

/ A - - - D - / - - - - A - / : / E - D A /
/ E - D A - / Bm - D - / - - - - A - - - /

Said James to Red Molly, here's a ring for your right hand
But I'll tell you in earnest I'm a dangerous man
I've fought with the law since I was seventeen
I robbed many a man to get my Vincent machine
Now I'm 21 years, I might make 22
And I don't mind dying, but for the love of you
And if fate should break my stride
Then I'll give you my Vincent to ride

Come down, come down, Red Molly, called Sergeant McRae
For they've taken young James Adie for armed robbery
Shotgun blast hit his chest, left nothing inside
Oh, come down, Red Molly to his dying bedside
When she came to the hospital, there wasn't much left
He was running out of road, he was running out of breath
But he smiled to see her cry
And said I'll give you my Vincent to ride

Says James, in my opinion, there's nothing in this world
Beats a 52 Vincent and a red headed girl
Now Nortons and Indians and Greeveses won't do
They don't have a soul like a Vincent 52
He reached for her hand and he slipped her the keys
He said I've got no further use for these
I see angels on Ariels in leather and chrome
Swooping down from heaven to carry me home
And he gave her one last kiss and died
And he gave her his Vincent to ride

***In The Time Of The Hard Motorcycle Boys- With Marlon Brando’s “The Wild One” In Mind

From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin:

Okay here is the book of genesis, the motorcycle book of genesis, or at least my motorcycle book of genesis. Let’s connect the dots first though. A couple of years ago, and maybe more, as part of a trip down memory lane, old working- class town high school memory lane the details of which do not need detain us here, I did a series of articles on various world-shaking, earth-shattering subjects like high school romances (those that lasted five minutes, those that still last, and those that were wistful dreams never consummated I did not discriminate, except maybe put a little more emphasis on those virginal dream ones), high school odd- ball hi-jinx (all the way from down low spray painting or gluing something or someone this or that up to ritual Monday morning boys and girls “lav” talk about who did or did not do what to whom on that Friday or Saturday night date), high school dances (and endless twaddle about wall-flowers and desperate last dance chances), high school Saturday nights, and most importantly of all, high school how to impress the girls( or boys, for girls, or whatever sexual combinations fit these days, but you can speak for yourselves, I am standing on this ground). In short, high school sub-culture, American-style, early 1960s branch, although the emphasis there, as it will be here, was on that social phenomena as filtered through the lenses of a working-class town, a seen better days town at that, my growing up wild-like-the-weeds town.

One of the subjects worked over in that series was the search, the eternal search I might add, for the great working class love song. Not the Teen Angel, Earth Angel, Johnny Angel generic mush that could play in Levittown, Shaker Heights or La Jolla as well as North Adamsville, Youngstown or Moline. No, a song that, without blushing, one could call one’s own, our working- class own, one that the middle and upper classes might like but would not put on their dance cards. As my offering to this high-brow debate I offered a song written by Englishman Richard Thompson (who folkies, and folk rockers, might know from his Fairport Convention days, very good days, by the way), Vincent Black Lightning, 1952. Without belaboring the point the gist of this song was the biker romance, British version, between outlaw biker James and black-leathered, red-headed Molly looking for bike kicks, or just kicks, and rightly so out in the dark British hinterlands. That jail break-out we were all thirsting for then, and maybe still are. Needless to say such a tenuous lumpen existence as James led, with an off-hand robbery or two into keep himself in coffee and cakes, and the old beauty bike sharp, in order to keep himself “biked" cuts short any long term “little white house with picket fence” ending for the pair. And we do not need such a boring finish. For James, after losing the inevitable running battle with the police, on his death bed bequeathed his bike, his precious “Vincent Black Lightning”, to said Molly. His BIKE, man. His BIKE. Is there any greater love story, working class love story, around? No, this makes West Side Story lyrics and a whole bunch of other such songs seem like so much cornball nonsense. His BIKE, man. Wow! Kudos, Brother Thompson.

Needless to say that exploration was not the end, but rather the beginning of thinking through the great American night bike experience. And, of course, for this writer that means going to the books, the films and the memory bank to find every seemingly relevant “biker” experience. Thus, readers were treated to reviews of such classic motorcycle sagas as “gonzo” journalist, Doctor Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels and his other, later Rolling Stonemagazine printed “biker” stories and Tom Wolfe’ Hell Angel’s-sketched Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and other articles about California subset youth culture that drove Wolfe’s work in the old days). And to the hellish Rolling Stones (band) Hell’s Angels “policed” Altamont concert in 1969. And, as fate would have it, with the passing of actor/director Dennis Hooper at that time, the 1960s classic biker/freedom/ seeking the great American night film, Easy Rider. And from Easy Rider to the “max daddy” of them all, tight-jeaned, thick leather-belted, tee-shirted, engineer-booted, leather-jacketed, taxi-driver-capped (hey, that’s what it reminds me of), side-burned, chain-link wielding, hard-living, alienated, but in the end really just merely misunderstood, Johnny, aka, Marlon Brando, in The Wild One.

Okay, we will cut to the chase on the plot here. Old Johnny and his fellow“outlaw” motorcycle club members were out for some weekend “kicks” after a hard week’s non-work (as far as we can figure out, work, nine to five work, was marginal for many reasons, as Hunter Thompson in Hell’s Angels noted, to biker existence, the pursue of jack-rolling, armed robbery or grand theft auto careers probably running a little ahead) out in the sunny California small town hinterlands.(The bikers are still heading out there today, the last time I noticed, at least in the Southern California high desert, places like Twenty-Nine Palms and Joshua Tree.)

And naturally, when the boys (and they were all boys here, except for couple of “mamas”, one spurned by Johnny, in a break-away club led by jack-in-the-box jokester, Lee Marvin as Chino) hit one small town they, after sizing up the local law, headed for the local café (and bar). And once one mentions cafes in small towns in California (or Larry McMurtry’s West Texas, for that matter), then hard-working (yes, and hard-working, it’s tough dealing them off the arm in these kind of joints, or elsewhere), trying to make it through the shift, got to get out of this small town and see the world, dreamy-eyed, naïve (yes, naive) sheriff-daughtered young waitress, Kathy, nothing but a Johnny trap though when the deal when down came into play. Okay, now you know, even alienated, misunderstood, misanthropic, cop-hating (an additional obstacle given said waitress’s kinships) boy Johnny needs, needs cinematically at least, to meet a girl who understands him.

The development of that young hope, although hopeless, boy meets girl romance relationship, hither and yon, drives the plot. Oh, and along the way the boys, after a few thousand beers, as boys, especially girl-starved biker boys, will, at the drop of a hat start to systematically tear down the town, for fun. Needless to say, staid local burghers (aka “squares”) seeing what amounts to them is their worst 1950s “communist” invasion nightmare, complete with murder, mayhem and rapine, (although that “C” word was not used in the film, nor should it have been) are determined to “take back” their little town. A few fights, forages, casualties, fatalities, and forgivenesses later though, still smitten but unquenched and chaste Johnny (and his rowdy crowd) and said waitress part, wistfully. The lesson here, for the kids in the theater audience, is that biker love outside biker-dom is doomed. For the adults, the real audience, the lesson: nip the “terrorists” in the bud (call in the state cops, the national guard, the militia, the 82nd Airborne, The Strategic Air Command, NATO, hell, even the hey, weren't we buddies in the war Red Army) , but nip it, fast when they come roaming through Amityville, Archer City, or your small town).

After that summary you can see what we are up against. This is pure fantasy Hollywood cautionary tale on a very real 1950s phenomena, “outlaw” biker clubs, mainly in California, but elsewhere as well. Hunter Thompson did yeoman’s work in his Hell’s Angels to “discover” who these guys were and what drove them, beyond drugs, sex, rock and roll (and, yah, murder and mayhem, the California prison system was a “home away from home”). In a sense the “bikers”were the obverse of the boys (again, mainly) whom Tom Wolfe, in many of his 1960s essays, was writing about and who were (a) forming the core of the surfers on the beaches from Malibu to La Jolla and, (b) driving the custom car/hot rod/drive-in centered (later mall-centered) cool, teenage girl–impressing, car craze night in the immediate post-World War II great American Western sunny skies and pleasant dream drift (physically and culturally). Except those Wolfe guys were the “winners”. The “bikers” were Nelson Algren’s “losers,” the dead-enders who didn’t hit the gold rush, the Dove Linkhorns (aka the Arkies and Okies who in the 1930s populated John Steinbeck’s Joad saga, The Grapes Of Wrath). Not cool, iconic Marlin-Johnny but hell-bend then-Hell Angels leader, Sonny Barger.

And that is why in the end, as beautifully sullen and misunderstood the alienated Johnny was, and as wholesomely rowdy as his gang was before demon rum took over, this was not the real “biker: scene, West or East. Now I lived, as a teenager in a working class, really marginally working poor, neighborhood in North Adamsville that I have previously mentioned was the leavings of those who were moving up in post-war society. That neighborhood was no more than a mile from the central headquarters of Boston's local Hell’s Angels (although they were not called that, I think it was Death-heads, or something like that). I got to see these guys up close as they rallied at various spots on our local beach or “ran” in tandem through our neighborhood on their way to some crazed action. The leader of the pack had all of the charisma of Marlon Brando’s thick leather belt. His face, as did most of the faces, spoke of small-minded cruelties (and old prison pallors) not of misunderstood youth. And their collective prison records (as Hunter Thompson also noted about the Angels) spoke of “high” lumpenism. And that takes us back to the beginning about who, and what, forms one of the core cohorts for a fascist movement in this country, the sons of Sonny Barger. Then we will need to rely on our instinct for survival against the raging hordes, and other such weapons.

*Rumblings From The 1960's Heartland- S.E. Hinton's "The Outsider"- A Film Review

Click on the title to link to YouTube's film clip of Francis Ford Coppola's screen adaption of S.E. Hinton's classic tale of teenage alienation, "The Outsiders".

DVD Review

The Outsiders, Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise and every other rising young male star of the 1980s worth his salt, Dian Lane, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Paramount Pictures, 1983

Recently I reviewed another film adaptation by the director Francis Ford of one of S.E. Hinton’s classic tales of American teenage working class alienation during the 1950s-1960s, “Rumblefish”. There the plot centered on the seemingly inescapable nihilism following the footsteps of a leader, and his ex-leader brother, of a by then passé white teenage gang. That film presented the anguish of youthful working class alienation in a very different and much less glamorous light than the teenage angst films of my youth, like Marlon Brando’s “The Wild Ones” and James Dean’s “Rebel Without A Cause”. I also mentioned in that review that I had been momentarily attracted, very attracted, to that ‘lifestyle’, coming as I did from that stratum of the working class that lived with few hopes and fewer dreams. It was a very near thing that shifted me away from that life, mainly the allure of books and less dangerous exploits.

I did not feel that same kind of identification here in this otherwise outstanding tale of youthful working class alienation out in the heartland in the hill of Oklahoma, “The Outsiders”. That, notwithstanding the fact that the main character and narrator, “Pony Boy”, is also very attracted to books (although “Gone With The Wind” and the poetry of Robert Frost seem odd choices to go ga-ga over). The difference. In “Rumblefish”, seemingly a much more experimental film on Coppola’s part and a more searing look at working class youth on Hinton’s part, the plot is is filled with examples of that unspoken danger, that unspoken destructive pathology and dead end nihilism that meant doom for at least some of the characters, and not just the easy to foresee one of early and untimely death that stalks those down at the edges of society.

Superficially, the plot of “The Outsiders” would have assumed that same fate for its characters. A small town out in the hill of Oklahoma where the class divisions are obvious has the working class “Greasers” lined up in combat against the middle class “Socs” with every cliché of the class struggle, except the political, thrown in for good measure. (Obviously portrayed, as well, note the sideburns long hair on the Greaser side and the chino pants on the frat guys side. You don’t need a scorecard on this one.) In summary: the two sides clash over nothing in particular except “turf”: hold grudges; seek revenge taking causalities, one fatally; and ending with a rumble where the Greasers have their momentary Pyrrhic victory.

Along the way there is plenty of time for youthful reflection by the narrator and his fellows about the ways of the class-ridden world, a few bouts heroism and a little off-hand (very off-hand) romance. As much as we know about the nature of modern class society this thing rings false. The moral here-even the most alienated Greaser, played to a tee by Matt Dillon, is really only searching for meaning to his life and a little society, only to get waylaid by that life in the end. Thus, this thing turns into something more like a cautionary tale than a slice of live down at the bottom edges of society. The more circumspect and existential “Rumblefish” gets my vote any day.

Note: Part of the problem with this film cinematically is that the leading male actors here, the likes of Rob Lowe, the late Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise and Matt Dillon are all too ‘pretty’ to be Greasers. Although one can appreciate the talent pool that came out of this film I know from real life that, while the "greasers" of this world may have some raw sexually attractions they would hardly grace the pages of “Gentleman’s Quarterly”, or some such magazine. These guys could. That is what rings false here, as well as the assurances, hammered home to us throughout the story, that in democratic America even the down-trodden can lift themselves up and succeed. If they wash up a little.