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[November 10, 1969] A Great Miracle Happened There

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by Jason Sacks

A miracle happened in New York City this October.

That fact might have escaped the rest of you, especially our international readers. But it began in Queens, New York this summer, and that miracle culminated in the fall.

The New York Mets won the 1969 World Series.

On the surface, it seems normal for a New York team to win the World Series. In fact, New Yorkers might feel jaded by one of the local teams winning the Series. After all, the Yankees won as recently as 1962 and played in the series only five years ago.

The winners of twenty World Series once boasted some of the most famous names in baseball history: you might have heard of legends like Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle. But it wasn’t the Yankees who won the Fall Classic in ’69. No, the ’69 Yankees finished in 5th place with an 80-81 record—merely mediocre—and a shocking 28.5 games behind the first place Baltimore Orioles (more about the Orioles shortly).

No, the champions of the 1969 World Series boasted players you’ve probably never heard of before the Series began. Who but the most avid baseball fan knew of Cleon Jones, Ron Swoboda, Timmie Agee, Gary Gentry, or Nolan Ryan?

The worlds’ champs are the New York Mets, who once entered the league as the most misbegotten of all teams. In their first year, the ’62 Mets lost more games than any other team in this century and were the laughingstock of the league (and much beloved by sophisticated New Yorkers for their ineptitude after decades of dull but excellent Yankees play). Their manager, the great Casey Stengel, once said about those original Mets, “The Mets have shown me more ways to lose than I even knew existed.”

Those original Mets were so much fun to watch because they played so badly. Their ineptitude knew no bounds. Just as one example, the ’62 Mets played “Marvelous” Marv Throneberry, at first base. He committed an astronomical 17 errors and earned one of the great baseball stories of all time. One day he hit a triple but was called out for failing to touch second base. Manager Casey Stengel went out to argue but the umpire told him, “Don’t bother arguing, Casey…he missed first base too.”

You needed some bromo watching Marv field the ball

The team had a 17-game losing streak in May, lost 11 in a row in July and 13 in August. Their longest winning streak all season was 3 games. But the fans loved them. The Mets were the anti-Yankees. They were anti-corporate. They were the team of Greenwich Village rather than Madison Avenue. They were fun to watch and fun to root for: winning and losing became secondary to pure, sheer fun. This fact appealed especially to younger people looking to separate themselves from their parents’ interests.

The 1962 New York Yankees, with stars like stars like Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and Whitey Ford, won yet another World Series. But the Yanks were serious and stolid, your father’s favorite team. As comedian Joe E. Lewis said in 1958, “Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel.” The Mets were terrible that year, but they led the League in having fun.

Things started turning around for the young team in 1967, as the Mets started building a good nucleus of great players. Long gone were the likes of Throneberry, banjo-hitting (unable to hit the long ball) Rod Kanehl, and twenty-game losers Roger Craig and Al Jackson. Instead, Tom Seaver, the Miracle Mets’ ace pitcher, arrived in 1967, won 16 games with a low-low 2.67 Earned Run Average (ERA), and promptly won Rookie of the Year. Seaver’s ERA has decreased (improved) in subsequent years, and he has just won the Cy Young Award, for best National League pitcher of ’69.

Young "Tom Terrific"

Seaver, the cornerstone of an excellent starting pitching staff which boasted the young lefty Jerry Koosman and fine righty Gary Gentry, led the Mets to an amazing 100 wins and first place in the new National League East division. The team started strong and just kept rolling all season long.

Oddly, their main rival for first place in the division was the long-suffering Chicago Cubs, led by their charismatic shortstop Ernie Banks. The Cubbies faded down the stretch, however, and the Mets emerged on top. (It’s often commented how the Cubs started really losing when a black cat ran in front of their dugout during a crucial game – a sign of how the fates hate the Cubbies, I suppose).

A black cat brings the Cubbies bad luck

Meanwhile, in the American League, the mighty Baltimore Orioles emerged on top once again. The O’s are one of the most formidable teams of our time, with a roster which boasts many of baseball’s greatest superstars, household names like Brooks Robinson, Jim Palmer and the incomparable Frank Robinson. The Robinsons, Palmer and most of their compatriots were on the  team which dominated the Dodgers in the ’66 World Series.

Thus the ’69 series could be compared with David’s epic battle with Goliath. The up-and-coming Mets had momentum, but they seemed overmatched in a battle with the best team of our era. Needless to say, the Orioles were prohibitive favorites.

Game One seemed to prove the prognosticators right. Orioles left fielder Don Buford belted Seaver’s second pitch over the fence for a home run, barely eluding Ron Swoboda’s leap. In the fourth inning, Orioles pitcher Mike Cuellar drove in an RBI (his turn at the plate resulted in a score), and the Orioles took the game 4-1. Cuellar was dominant on the mound, and the die seemed to be cast for the end of the Mets’ Cinderella story.

Buford belts his homer

Jerry Koosman took the ball for game two for the Mets against the Orioles’ brilliant Dave McNally. The young Koosman outdueled his counterpart, as Koosman took a no-hitter into the seventh before Brooks Robinson hit a single which drove in Paul Blair (the Mets’ very first draft pick, long a starter on the Orioles). But the Mets rallied back with clutch hitting of their own and took the game 2-1. Clearly these youngsters deserved their place in the Series.

The brilliant Mr Koosman

Mets outfielder Tommie Agee basically won game three on his own. Agee led off the game with a home run off Orioles ace Jim Palmer, then made two amazing outfield catches to save at least five runs on Orioles rallies. Agee’s catches are still the talk of the town, just astounding feats of athleticism.

The first of two amazing Tommie Agee catches.

Two other notable players contributed to the victory. Ed Kranepool, the final member of the original Mets still on the team, hit a crucial homer. Nolan Ryan, the widely praised young flamethrower out of Texas, hurled the final 21⁄3 innings. He’s been touted as an ace of the future, so I hope to see more of him in the ‘70s.

Game four had controversy before it started and more controversy as it ended. October 15, 1969, was Vietnam Moratorium Day, of course, and many New Yorkers called on Major John Lindsay to order flags flown at half-mast at Shea Stadium in Queens to honor those who died in Vietnam. Lindsay agreed, but baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn overrode Lindsay’s decision and ordered flags to fly at full staff. This caused anger on both sides.

Martin starts his dash up the line

The ending controversy happened on the field. Seaver delivered another excellent game, aided by an outstanding game-saving catch by Ron Swoboda in the ninth. The score was tied 1-1 in the 10th as the Mets hit in the bottom half of the inning. The Mets got men on first and second as pinch-hitter J.C. Martin came up to bat for Seaver. Martin laid down a sacrifice bunt, dashing down the first base line inside of the baseline. Orioles reliever Pete Richert grabbed the ball and hit Martin on the wrist with his throw. The ball went wild, the crowd went wild, and the Mets suddenly found themselves up 3-1 in the Series. After the game, many questioned whether Martin should have been called out for interference, and in fact pre-game co-host Mantle agreed.

Game five had its own controversies with two questionable calls by the umpires. In the sixth inning, Frank Robinson seemed to be hit by a Koosman pitch but the umpire ruled the pitch had hit Robinson’s hand. Therefore the pitch was a foul ball rather than a free trip to first base. Robinson subsequently struck out and a potential rally was quenched.

Hit by pitch or not?

The opposite happened in the bottom half of the sixth when Mets left fielder Cleon Jones claimed he was hit on his foot by a Dave McNally pitch. The umpire initally said the ball bounced in the dirt, but Mets manager Gil Hodges carried the ball out to home plate and showed shoe polish on the ball. The ump awarded Jones first. Conspiracy theories abound about the ball, most claiming the polish was applied after the fact, and there is a lot of evidence which backs up that assertion.

Perhaps that weird moment presaged fate intervening for a Mets win, as in the seventh inning, light-hitting Al Weis delivered his only home run at Shea Stadium. In the eighth inning, the ubiquitous Swoboda drove in the game’s go-ahead run. By the ninth inning, the impossible looked to be happening: the Mets were three outs away from taking the Series.

As Jerry Koosman mowed down the final three outs in the ninth, Shea Stadium seemed ready to explode with pandemonium. The sounds were deafening, even on my console TV, as the third out was recorded, the New York fans flooded the field, and the most improbable event in baseball history was official.

Cinderella kept her shoe, with a bit of shoe polish scuff on it. The New York Mets, once baseball’s laughingstock, are World Series champions for 1969.




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Movies

[October 10, 1969] Everybody's Talkin' At Me: Midnight Cowboy and Urban Tragedy

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Science Fiction Theater Episode #7

Tonight (Oct. 10), tune in at 7pm (Pacific) to see what terrific, sciencefictional goodie the Traveler has got in store for you. A hint: it was made by a real Pal…

 


by Jason Sacks

My friends know I'm a big fan of the emerging "New Hollywood" films which has been mushrooming over the last few years. The new film Midnight Cowboy is an outstanding exemplar of that movement, and I'd like to tell you why this film is so great — and why this film movement is so exciting.

"New Hollywood" has emerged as a term over the last few years for a specific type of film. Coming out of the dual filmic earthquakes of the end of the hated Hays Code and the crumbling of the studio system, New Hollywood films are differentated from their more traditional studio counterparts for a few reasons: New Hollywood films tend to prpesent a narrative focus on the lives of ordinary people, tend to use location shooting to heighten their reality, and tend to present an anti-establishment view of the world.

You might remeber the article from late 1967 by influential Time critic Steven Kanfer which praised that year's Bonnie and Clyde as "a watershed picture, the kind that signals a new style, a new trend."  Kanfer continued, "The most important fact about the screen in 1967 is that Hollywood has at long last become part of what the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema calls 'the furious springtime of world cinema."" That "new trend" has evolved into the New Hollywood movement.

Bonnie and Clyde was the cover story in Time in late 1967, with an accompanying article which described a new cinema which was evolving quickly.

In fact, Bonnie and Clyde was a kind of  siren song of this movement — though other bold new films preceded it (notably the work of John Cassavettes and Robert Downey), this was the first sophisticated feature film which really broke through and really embraced youth culture (to be sure, the films of Roger Corman, among others, embraced youthful rebellion but never with the panache or breakthrough success of Bonnie and Clyde). It also helps that Clyde is also a damn good – and very funny – film.

Since '67, we've seen a plethora of remarkable new films which fall into this new trend, including The Graduate, Targets, Head, the outrageous Putney Swope and the terrifying Night of the Living Dead. Last year's Rosemary's Baby can be called a New Hollywood film. And of course, the most ubiquitous film of 1969 is Easy Rider, a film which seems to be on the lips of everybody under the age of 25. Each of those movies seems to represent a new approach to filmmaking and even to narrative. Head is shockingly surreal. Easy Rider uses innovative editing techniques. Rosemary's Baby explicity satirizes the patriarchy. And Targets literalizes the generation gap between traditional and modern entertainment – and finds terror on both sides.

This new filmic philosophy is an explicit rejection of the dictates of the Hays Code and of the overtly conformist morality of the 1950s. The newer generation of filmmakers feel the freedom to delve into subjects which previously would have been explicitly off-limits. And that makes the film-goers’ life thrilling as we move into a new decade.

Now we get Midnight Cowboy, a film which elevates the New American school, throwing down a new gauntlet for realism, for tragedy and comedy, and for character. I went into this film with high expectations due to strong reviews from critics I appreciate. But it's funny—  Midnight Cowboy both was a lot like what I was expecting and a profoundly different experience.

I was expecting a sad, smart, outsiderly story of two desperate and pathetic souls living on the edge of gay hustler culture in a version of New York that seems teetering on the edge of malaise but hasn't quite tipped over the edge. I was expecting great performances from leads Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, a deep portrayal of what it means to be an outsider in a world that just doesn't care about you, and to see an interesting portrait of a New York suspended between outsider culture and Nixon's silent majority, desperate to flee an urban wasteland.

I got all that, and Midnight Cowboy was poweful as expected; moving and thoughtful and crazily weird at times and often plotless seeming and a particularly intense movie experience.

But I also got a lot of stuff I didn't expect. The first maybe half hour of the film lingers on Voight playing Joe Buck as Buck slowly ambles out of his small Texas town to begin the journey to New York City. That segment of the film takes its time, with long, languid but suffocating shots which make the town feel claustrophobic. His old home town is poised on the edge of an all-encompassing landscape but the human space in that landscape is proscribed.

And yet, and yet: people are friendly; they smile and greet each other and seem to welcome the company of others. The Southwest might be desolate, but the human capacity there seems strong.

So Buck leaves town, but we see elliptical, dreamlike flashbacks which reveal Joe's past life, his obsessions, and his deep sadness. Some of those dreams are representational, some are allusional, but they all take the film to a different level, an unexpected level which sets Midnight Cowboy clearly in that same milieu of modern angst as Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch and Easy Rider.

Buck isn't just leaving Texas because the big city is beckoning him. He has a traumatic secret connected to his old home town, something which truly tortures him emotionally and pushes him to jump on a Greyhound for the long, lonely journey to the big city.

All the while, the film's now-ubiquitous (in the film and on our radios) theme song keeps playing, illustrating Buck's inner life. True freedom, Nilsson is singing is inside our own heads:

Everybody's talking at me
I don't hear a word they're saying
Only the echoes of my mind

Buck lands in New York, and as you can see from that evocative still posted above, he literally towers above all the people around him. Joe Buck is a big man, with big dreams.

In a more traditional movie, Buck would aspire to be an actor, or strike it rich on Wall Street, or hobnob with the rich and famous. But those dreams would be unrealistic for a man of Joe Buck's means.

Instead. those big dreams lead him to a life where he tries to make some cash by hustling, offering sexual favors to older women who find his cowboy personality a massive turn-on. Joe seems to like the life for a while, as he tries it on, but he has no idea how to actually live such a life, and he ends up living on or near the streets. Desperate for cash, Buck falls in with a loose amalgamation of hookers, hustlers and runaways who inhabit the alleyways and avenues of a fading New York City.

it is in this world that Midnight Cowboy confronts its most surprising element and the aspect of the film which moves it away most from the era of 1950s morality. The Hays Code explicitly forbade even a glancing mention of homosexuality (which didn’t prevent clever filmmakers from depicting homosexual characters onscreen, albeit using winks and nods to the audience). But here gay culture is explicitly shown onscreen, with even a touch of respect and affection for the kinds of struggles Buck has to go through. In the wake of July’s riots around New York’s Stonewall Tavern, this depiction of homosexuality couldn’t feel more contemporary.

Director John Schlesinger tells Buck’s story with angst and grace, but also with a remarkable amount of humor which keeps the proceedings from getting too heavy.

While hustling men and women, Joe Buck meets Hoffman, who plays the unforgettable Ratso Rizzo, a man of pure id and ansgt, a TB-ridden conman who takes Buck under his broken wing and shares an apartment in an abandoned, desolate tenement which seems like it's been waiting for a Robert Moses wrecking ball for decades.

Dustin Hoffman is absolutely astonishing as the motormouthed, self-delusional Rizzo, a man who both seems unique in film history and utterly familiar. Rizzo is every New Yorker who talks nonstop, with an accent and an attitude which embodies his city. But Rizzo has a beguiling tenderness and prickliness, a sort of personal pride and complex inner life that causes the character to pop off the screen.

Rizzo couldn't be further away from Hoffman's character in The Graduate, Ben Braddock. But just as Hoffman seemed to embody our generation of aimless, privileged young men in the earlier film, here he embodies an aimless man utterly without privilege or power, a man swallowed up by the desolate New York streets and his own disease. And where Ben Braddock is driven by a sex drive stuck on his odd relationship with Mrs Robinson, here Hoffman’s Rizzo seems completely uninterested in sex, even bemused by Buck’s bizarre life which centers around sex.

That odd state of bemusement gives a lot of energy to this film. The fast-talking Ratso can’t help but babble in and on about how strange Buck’s life is. It’s as if Rizzo  simply doesn’t understand why people need to have sex and why they make decisions based in that sex drive. And yet, he grows a deep fraternal love for Buck.

it’s often hilarious, often heartbreaking how tight the bond is between these two men who are so very different from each other.

At the heart of the film is the deep friendship between Buck and Rizzo, a frankly shocking level of intimacy these men develop for each other. This relationship inspires empathy in viewers, too, so that when this movie reaches its inevitable ending, we are left adrift like the movie's characters are.

So yeah, Midnight Cowboy is kind of a tragedy, and the ending left people in my theatre sobbing, and it earns its X rating with its story of hustlers and unsensationalized view of sex and its general feeling of grime.

But still: this movie is not a bummer. It's not a bad acid trip. There are many moments which illuminated life with empathy and intelligence and humor. Heck, in fact, the acid trip in this film (at a place similar to Andy Warhol's famous Factory) is a lot of fun as well as a brilliant conceptual counterweight to the rest of the story: some hustlers were able to find kinship and a sense of family with freaks like themselves. And for others a glimpse into that life helps deliver a small sense of grace.

Brit John Schlesinger came over to America to direct this film, and it's easy to sense his comfort in every scene. Best known for his 1965 film Darling, which introduced Julie Christie to worldwide audiences as a headstrong girl in swinging London, Schlesinger seems to be attracted to stories about people who can't quite find their footing in society but remain resolutely themselves: Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd and Billy in Billy Liar are rebels without a clue.

But Schlesinger has never helmed a film like Midnight Cowboy, which seems to reject the very concept of a middle-class life, which seems devoted to its New York-in-decline setting and that city’s bottomless underclass of weirdos, drug addicts and hustlers. Adam Holender's cinematography adds to the beautiful despair, a lovely widescreen tragedy of urban decay.

Ultimately, Midnight Cowboy is suffused with the dream of freedom, which comes into conflict with the deep ennui of our late '60s reality.  We're living in the shadows of the tragedies of '68 and the dimming of the post-War consensus. Yeah, director Schlesinger seems to say, you can be free, you can live outside the law, but the gravity of middle-class normative Americana will always pull you either into death or into conformance no matter how hard you try to resist.  The deeply moving ending of this film reinforces that sense that it’s unbelievably hard to stay an outsider in our modern world, that the lessons of ‘68 show the optimism of ‘67 has given way to a massive societal bummer.

Midnight Cowboy is a remarkable film which represents the great promise of the New Hollywood movement: John Schlesinger’s film is explicitly in dialog with our current era. Yeah, everybody’s talkin’ at us, but we don’t hear a word they’re saying’.

5 stars.

 




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[September 10, 1969] Once Upon a Time in the West: Best Film of the 1960s?

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by Jason Sacks

1967’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was an unforgettable experience for anyone who saw the film in the theatres. Sergio Leone’s towering Western adventure was one of the most thrilling experiences imaginable, with an astonishing level of craft in cinematography, score, acting, and, of course, the brilliant use of the wide screen.

Under Leone’s towering craftsmanship, Good Bad Ugly was an operatic exploration of betrayal, greed, and anger while also playing with the classic motifs of the tradition of the Western film, with its explorations of frontier justice, the impacts of the Civil War, and – perhaps most famously – with the idea of the lonely man without a name as a key protagonist.

Yes, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly has been one of my all-time favorite films since I first saw it.

Sergio Leoone’s new film, Once Upon a Time in the West, is even better. This might just be my favorite film of the entire 1960s.

I was able to catch West on a quick second run at a local Seattle theatre after a limited release in 1968. And I’m happy to report that everything I loved about Good Bad Ugly is even better in West. The watch was an overwhelming experience for me, one which exists perfectly as both its own work of art and a smart postmodern take on the Western genre itself.

Let’s start with the acting here, because Ugly was the movie which really catapulted the old TV star Clint Eastwood into real stardom. West doesn’t feature Eastwood. But just as Ugly included luminary Western actors Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach in roles which emphasized their strongest qualities, West does so with some even more iconic actors.

Perhaps you know the work of some of the leads in this film. It stars leading men like Henry Fonda and Jason Robards in key roles. Charles Bronson, star of so many action films these days, is a brilliant antihero in this film. Three actors appear in the opening sequence who you probably know from classic Westerns: Jack Elam, Woody Strode and Al Mulock.

10 Behind-The-Scenes Facts About Once Upon A Time In The West

These actors all add a real heft and energy to the film and help to add to the themes Leone develops here.

But the most important character in the film isn’t one of the male characters. The most important character is a woman: Claudia Cardinale, playing Jill, is the character who truly evolves the most in the film and who drives the societal changes which are so much of what Leone and team are delivering.

Jill is a former New Orleans sex worker, now a wife and mother who moves to the small Arizona town of Sweetwater in the late 1800s. We first meet Jill as she steps off a crowded train (full of farm animals, Native Americans, and sundry other men and women in a characteristic Leone crowd shot). She looks around for her new family to meet her. But nobody is there for her. Jill steps into the station, and as she arranges her transportation, Leone’s camera majestically swoops over the top of the station house as Ennio Morricone’s score majestically swells and we get a widescreen view of a town in the middle of intensive construction, a frontier village in the middle of its boomtown days.

101 Movies: Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

It’s an incredible moment, the equal of anything Leone has ever committed to screen – and yet, he almost tops that scene a moment later as Jill rides in a carriage through Monument Valley and right through a massive crowd scene of the railroad built through the sandy wilderness. Again the music swells, again Leone shows his intensive attention to detail, and again we get a moment which feels like a perfect realization of something we’ve only seen in old photographs.

As it turns out, Jill’s entire family has been massacred by a group of bad men (I won’t ruin any of the shock by telling you who led the massacre), so this single woman has to make her way alone in the west. And as she gathers allies and enemies, and intersects with all the petty, self-centered men who cross her paths, Jill almost single-handedly gives the sense of leading the civilizing of the West.

Once Upon A Time In The West | Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site

And it is in those themes that Once Upon a Time in the West becomes truly transcendent. As you can extrapolate from the title, this film is about more than mere fact and mere adventure. Oh sure, it has all that and more.

But what makes this film so special is that it is continuously in dialogue with the myth of the West. Sergio Leone is a huge fan of classic Westerns, and an attentive viewer will see visual and thematic references to classics such as Duel in the Sun, High Noon and Shane. All of that is intentional, but perhaps the most heartfelt references are to the films of John Ford.

Ford, of course, is the dean of Westerns, the director of classics such as The Searchers, My Darling Clementine and 1964’s fascinating revisionist Cheyenne Autumn. The French journals like Cahiers de Cinema venerate Ford as one of the great auteurs. Leone clearly agrees with that assessment; in fact, reports say that Leone demanded to film several segments of Once Upon a Time in Ford’s beloved Monument Valley.

Non-Bond: American spaghetti

Leone wants his film to resonate with both a physical and mythic vision of the West. Revenge is a great motivation for westerns so he gives us Bronson’s character, “Harmonica,” who has an especially vivid revenge story. He wants to give us true villains, as he does with the actor I won’t reveal. He wants to show shifting alliances, and small frontier towns, and brave heroes, and all the set pieces we want to see in a classic Western.

But Leone also wants to mourn the loss of that old West, the world of fights and revenge and pointless machismo. It’s no accident that one of the key characters of the film is Morton (played very well by Gabriele Ferzetti), a monumentally rich man whose body is crippled, who travels in a gilded rail car he can't really leave.  Morton is ambitious but limited. He can barely see past the horizons of his own vision.

As it turns out, Jill’s late husband bought Sweetwater to build a train station on their property, and as the complex characters of this film ally with and fight against Morton in turn, the film becomes a fascinating exploration of myth, of the ability to grow and transcend, of how one person can stand up to authority and yet then become an authority herself.

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Once Upon a Time in the West is ultimately about embracing the past and looking excitedly at the future, at how the myths of the past end and the hard realities of the future can begin. It’s about the hard work and the emotional and physical pain that go into civilizing a frontier, but Leone’s masterpiece is also about individual people who take on the feeling of myths. The final scene is so gorgeous and powerful, such a strikingly optimistic view of American progress, that I was brought to tears.

There is so much more to explore here, and I think one day someone can write a whole book about the themes and complexity of Leone’s tremendous film. I haven’t touched on the story arc of Cheyenne, the Robards character, nor on the majestic cinematography, or on the astonishing opening sequence.

But I think I’ve busted out the thesaurus enough to convince you to catch this film if you possibly can.

5 stars.

 




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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[June 24, 1969] Checking in from Seattle: The Existential Stress of Progress (Galactic Pot Healer by Philip K. Dick)

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by Jason Sacks

Welcome to Seattle, and let me tell you, June 1969 is a busy month here in the often quiet Pacific Northwest. We have a baseball team! And we may be losing a relic of our past while fighting about the present and rocking our own giant music festival… well, at least, we will be rocking a field out in the suburbs!

And I also wandered into the ineffable mind of my favorite author, Philip K. Dick, and found I had journeyed to places I scarcely could have imagined.

The End of the Market?

We live in revolutionary times, times which are painfully uncertain and terrifying. In our era of political assassinations, cities on fire, images of Vietnam on TV every night, and endless sports expansion, many of us find ourselves craving the pleasures and traditions of the past in order to help us have some small ground under our feet, some small element of history to cling onto.

But that need for tradition runs solidly into the endless American drive for progress. And we are seeing that collision of progress with tradition even here in our often quiet city.

If you’ve ever visited Seattle, you’ve probably stopped to visit our Pike Place Market, a farmers market on the hilly edge of the Seattle waterfront. The Market has been around since the dawn of the 20th century, but it may not live to see the 21st century – or even most of the 1970s. See, commercial interests have come for the quaint old market and its prime real estate, aiming to convert that area into fancy hotels and expensive housing. This has triggered a pitched battle and a bit of existential turmoil.

Seattle export Jimi Hendrix jammin' at the Market

Like New York with that neighborhood-destroying Robert Moses, many Seattle residents find ourselves fighting to preserve our landmarks against the machinations of moneyed corporate interests. And like New York with city advocate Jane Jacobs, we have our own leader of the cause. Victor Steinbrueck is a 57-year-old Seattle architect and University of Washington faculty member who has led the charge against the change

As Steinbrueck discusses in a recent issue of Seattle weekly Helix:

600 residents will be relocated in places mostly incompatible to their way of life, producing problems for themselves and others. Approximately 1400 workers will have their jobs placed in jeopardy trough relocation and termination of businesses. 233 businesses will be relocated or forced to close because of the disruption of the low cost market… the massive disruption to benefit a few is neither wise nor morally right.

Steinbrueck proposes several ideas for changes to the Market, all of which are devoted to keeping its unique character for generations to come. More than 53,000 people have already signed a petition to support his organization, Friends of the Market.

This struggle is existential for many of us who have felt buffeted around by the winds of change these days. We are hoping some of our favorite places survive the relentless, unforgiving march of progress, and Pike Place is one of those favorite places.

We can only hope and pray that Steinbrueck’s efforts will bear the same fruits Ms. Jacobs achieved in New York. I love the Market for many reasons, and hope I can continue to stop there for fruit, fish and fresh meals whenever I possibly can.

Rocking the Suburbs

On a cheerier note, there’s been a lot of buzz around town discussing the upcoming Seattle Pop Festival, which will be held in the sleepy Eastside suburb of Woodinville. Many Seattle music fans will be driving over the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge to see such amazing bands as The Doors, Chuck Berry, Albert Collins, the Guess Who, Ike & Tina Turner and the much hyped “New Yardbirds”, Led Zeppelin. (there’s a nice mix of traditional and new acts!)

It’s going to be an expensive event at $6 per day or $15 for the whole three days, and there have been rumors that drug peddlers in the University District have been more aggressive than ever before selling their merchandise in order to afford tickets. It would be groovy if our event was like that upcoming Woodstock event in New York, but I predict that event will be a bit of a bomb. I just don't think there are enough people here who will be excited to see a boring band like The Doors.

Piloting into Disaster

Sadly, we’ve all been looking forward to a major civic event which has definitely become a bomb. After many years of dreaming and a mere few months of planning, the Seattle Pilots debuted this April as the latest team in the American League. They’re now our second Seattle pro sports team, after the SuperSonics of the NBA, and while Washington Huskies football will always be the big sport in Sea-town, and the hydros as number two, my friends and family and I all had high hopes for the expansion Pilots.

Unfortunately, everything about the Pilots has shown that the Emerald City isn’t like Oz. Our team’s ballpark is strictly minor league, the players are strictly second-stringers, and even their uniforms are an absurd joke.

First of all the ballpark: the Pilots home field is called Sicks’ Stadium, and seldom has a name been more appropriate. The field has been in use since before WWII hosting games of the Seattle Rainiers and Seattle Angels of the minor league Pacific Coast League, and the place feels like a minor league relic. The walls often feel like they’re falling down, the bleachers are rickety, and you probably heard the (completely true) story that the stadium was still under construction on Opening Day. Worse than that, the bathrooms often overflow during games, which is just nauseating. And on top of all that, we have higher ticket prices than the other expansion teams this year. No wonder we rarely have crowds which even approach 20,000 fans.

The boys in pastel blue are resolutely in last place in the new American League West, without much hope of avoiding the curse of 100 losses this year. Aside from a couple of decent players, like Yankee castoff Jim Bouton, this year’s team might be long-forgotten in a few years…

If not, that is, for the dreadful uniforms the players are forced to wear. Embracing the idea of a “pilot” way too far, the team’s owners created a cap like no other in baseball, with a captain’s stripe and “scrabmbled eggs” on the bill, which just looks hideous. But hey they are just as bad as the weird powdered-blue uniforms with four stripes on the sleeves, which just look odd.

Just three months into the season, there are already rumors the Pilots may be a one-year wonder, leaving my beloved city for parts unknown. That would be a shame on one hand, but a relief on another. If we’re going to sail into the big leagues, I would hope it would be when steered by a fine mariner instead of a minor-league pilot. Perhaps we will keep the team, and perhaps the Pilots will be able to move into a rumored domed stadium sometime by the middle of the next decade. And hey, they could start winning, right? Just wait’ll next year, as they say.

Now Wait for the Pot-Healer’s Year

If you’ve ready any of the writing I’ve done for this zine, you’re probably aware I’m perhaps the biggest fan of Philip K. Dick on this staff. I’ve raved about his Dr. Bloodmoney, enthused about his transcendent Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and – just last month – waxed poetic about his sublime Ubik.

Mr. Dick has been remarkably prolific over the last few years and has been on a magical roll, success following success. This month sees his latest paperback original hit in a B. Daltons or Woolworths near you. And while brilliant as ever, Galactic Pot Healer is a decidedly different book than the ones I just mentioned.

The lead character of Pot Healer is a miserable middle aged man with few job prospects living a blandly dystopian near-future – hmm, well, maybe this book not too different from other PKD novels. But stay with me for a minute because this book goes in unexpected directions.

Joe Fernwright is a brilliant artisan, a man with the unique skills to repair antiquities from the pre-WWIII era in such a way that they look as good as they did before the War. The term for such a man is pot-healer. Joe’s been a pot-healer all his life. In fact Joe follows in the footsteps of his father, who was a great pot-healer in his time.

The problem, in a future North American megalopolis, is that there’s no more pot-healing work for Joe. All the pots have been fixed and, in this post-apocalyptic world, there are no more porcelain pots being manufactured. In fact, there’s scarcely any work for anybody in this massive, overpopulated world. Instead, Joe shows up to work each day, sits at his desk, and calls up colleagues in Russia and England on his office phone not to work – there is no actual work for anyone in this future world  to do – but instead to play pointless but clever word games just to make the long day feel slightly less meaningless.

It's a crushing, desperately lonely experience, bereft of any redeeming elements which would make life worth living. Joe has no family and really no friends, despite – or maybe because of – the fact that the megalopolis is so overcrowded. Even Joe’s small savings of a handful of actual metal coins, which he hides in his toilet back, are not able to gain him more than a few moments satisfaction in his life.

Until, that is, Joe starts receiving strange messages, which he soon realizes come from a strange being from another planet. The Glimmung summons Joe and a slew of other artifact hunters from across the galaxy – all suicidal dead-enders, all desperate for a chance to find fulfillment in their lives – to a remote obscure place called Plowman’s Planet where they can possibly achieve something which justifies their continued existence.

And though Joe finds some kind of love with an alien girl named Mali, ultimately Joe is unable to find peace with himself, leading to one of the bleakest, most powerful and satirical endings in all of Dick.

A fan named Karla shared a photo of her ceramic creation which dwells on an important plot point of the novel.

Galactic Pot Healer is one of PKD’s most downbeat and philosophical works. While Ubik thrills due to its endless tumble of ideas, Pot Healer is mostly about one idea, an idea central to Dick’s fiction: the feeling of deep, existential doubt and lack of fulfillment. Joe Fernwright is on a quest to truly find the true center of his being. In an amazing sequence I’ll let you discover yourself, Joe actually does find himself but finds himself desiccated, like the raw husk of an insect. He’s a man stripped raw, a man whose encounter with himself and with God leaves him frozen in his own mind, like a spider who spun his web in a tin can and starves to death waiting for a fly to hit his web.

Joe is a loser, but really what choice does he have? How can he actually change his life when every possible opportunity to do so is stripped away from him? What happens when great skills are lost, self-delusion is stripped away, and the stark reality is that everything is as dust?

This is all very emotionally exhausting stuff, for Joe and for the reader.

Mr. Dick

And that’s the difference between Galactic Pot Healer and Dick’s other recent novels. Characters like Robert Childan in The Man in the High Castle or Rick Deckard in Do Androids Dream or Palmer Eldritch in the book that bears his name are men of action, men who at least try to change their lives. Even boys like Manfred Steiner in Martian Time-Slip  or the homonucleus in Dr Bloodmoney take actions to remake the world in their images.

But Joe Fernwright is the ultimate PKD character pushed to the edge, the ultimate man who is powerless before his own pathetic weakness.

Thus I found it hard to read about him, even while sympathizing with his pain and angst.

This is minor Dick, to be sure, but still an essential part of his catalog.

3.5 stars.

 




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Comics

[February 6, 1969] Are Comics Embracing a 1970s Mindset?

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by Jason Sacks

After the hullabaloo we saw in the world of comics in 1968, our new year of 1969 looks to be equally as interesting. Last year saw both Marvel and DC expand their lines—in Marvel’s case, doubling the number of comics they released—and we fans are lucky to see that diversity.

One of the breakthrough stars of ’68 was Jim Steranko, whose astonishing work on Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD provided some massive pop-culture thrills and energy. Steranko’s style feels like nobody else’s in comics, combining a pop-art, hyper-stylized approach with excellent storytelling and a massive dose of energy in his work.

Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD #9 cover
Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD #9 cover

Steranko’s successors on SHIELD don’t have the same flash, but journeyman cartoonists like Frank Springer and Herb Trimpe still bring the goods. The Christmas-themed issue 10 brings some special spy drama and a bit more energy than I’m used to from those artists.

Steranko left SHIELD, but 1969 dawns with an equally epochal run by him on Captain America, with writing as always by Stan Lee. One barely needs to look past the covers to see the energy Steranko brings to the page—see this week’s Cap cover for an example. Inside, the team has contrived to bring back Cap’s pal Bucky Barnes, dead since the end of WWII, and the twists and turns promise to be thrilling.

Amazing spread from Steranko's Captain America
Amazing spread from Steranko's Captain America

Stan, of course, continues to write much of Marvel’s line, most notably on modern classics Amazing Spider-Man (now teamed with artist Jim Mooney), Fantastic Four and Thor (it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Jack Kirby drawing  either). Spidey, in particular, has featured some great tales recently. Last year’s Kingpin tale was a show-stopper, while “Crisis on Campus,” cover-dated January 1969 and released in October, places Spider-Man firmly in the world of today, dealing with the fury and chaos of our complicated world.

Other Marvel books have taken on the modern world, too. Most surprising was probably Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, a book which would be as out-of-step with today as that Green Berets movie if not for the way writer Gary Friedrich tries to bridge the gap, as in January’s story of “The Peacemonger, ” in which a character voices empathy for the enemy and tries to find gray areas between the Allies and Japanese. It’s a bit ham-handed, but the attempt is interesting.

Moral ambiguity in the pages of Sgt. Fury
Moral ambiguity in the pages of Sgt. Fury

Maybe the nicest surprises from Marvel have been two-fold over the last year or so.

Stan and co. took a chance spinning the Silver Surfer off into his own series. I had my doubts whether the “Sky-Rider of the Spaceways” could support a title all his own—the character often seemed too self-pitying and dull in previous appearances. But my concerns were confounded. Stan installed artist John Buscema on the new title, and Big John brought the same majestic heroic splendor to the book which he has been demonstrating on Avengers. Silver Surfer #4, released in November, was an early Christmas gift for anyone looking to see gorgeous super-hero art.

Glorious John Buscema Silver Surfer art
Glorious John Buscema Silver Surfer art

The other nice surprise has been the move away from the dull, dutiful Wener Roth art in The X-Men. The aforementioned Mr. Steranko drew two mind-blowing issues before giving way to a young but promising tyro named Barry Smith. Smith copies Jack Kirby’s linework dutifully, but his art also shows the promise of an artist who might break out like Neal Adams recently did. Speaking of Adams, the fan press tells us that brilliant artist will be taking over X-Men starting next month, so I am on the edge of my seat waiting for that day to arrive.

Marvel still rounds their line out with a plethora of other super-hero mags (including Captain Marvel, Daredevil  and Doctor Strange) as well as war comics, westerns and Archie-style books.

Over at National/DC, the company feels like it’s on the verge of embracing a 1970s mindset in their comics. I’ve written before about the evolution Batman comics took over the last year, from goofy camp to dramatic tales which fit the character’s long history. Frequently written by comic-strip vet Frank Robbins and neo-comics writer Denny O’Neil, there’s a vitality in Batman, Detective and Brave & Bold which fits our times. This month’s Brave & Bold, which teams Batman with the Teen Titans, and includes brilliant Adams art and a story which beautifully captures the generation gap causing chasms in so many American households today.

Lovely Adams art from Brave & Bold
Lovely Adams art from Brave & Bold

O’Neil has also added vitality to another of National’s more stodgy titles, as his take on the Justice League of America has moved the book away from formula and towards a book with one foot in reality. JLA #69, for instance, is a fairly sober look at the rule against heroes killing, an interesting exploration of violence in an era when violence causes hell on Earth.

O’Neil also provides the writing chores for one of National’s most radical changes, in Wonder Woman. Recently editor/writer Mike Sekowsky took over chores on WW, one of DC’s most childish characters, and provided a radical shift in stories. Gone was the patriotic costume, transparent plane and magic lasso. Instead, we have “Diana Prince, The New Wonder Woman”, an adventure heroine in the style of Emma Peel or Tara King. The stories have their flaws—I could happily live without seeing Diana’s stereotypical Asian mentor I Ching again—but Sekowsky’s changes have a thrilling feeling similar to the Road Runner running off a cliff—it feels like these stories will crash, but it’s thrilling to stand on air.

Stunning Sekowsky Metal Men cover
Stunning Sekowsky Metal Men cover

Just this month, Sekowsky is leading perennial also-rans the Metal Men into their own revolution. In Metal Men #39, he has the robot heroes melted down and transformed into human form. This change is wild, unlike anything I’ve seen in comics other than the Wonder Woman transformation, and I can’t wait to see how it plays out.

And while the Superman comics seem as stuck in their rhythm as ever (though the Adams covers on those books are fantastic!), DC also has revitalized some of their other classic heroes. Aquaman, now by the Skeates, Aparo and Giordano, has lovely art and a thrilling exploration of underwater life. Jerry Grandanetti delivers surreal art for DC’s mystical hero The Spectre. And they have transformed House of Mystery from a comic with DC’s worst heroes to a standout horror anthology which is often better than that previous gold standard for horror comics. Warren Magazines’ Creepy and Eerie are having a down year, but thankfully DC has filled that void.

But National’s best comics in 1969 are new series. Beware the Creeper and Hawk and Dove come from the fruitful imagination of Steve Ditko and are offbeat heroic fun, strange action delivered in that delectable, indisputable Ditko style.

Splash page from Howie Post's Anthro
Splash page from Howie Post's Anthro

Anthro, by Howie Post—a rare example of one man providing writing and art skills for a DC comic—tells the story of a boy and his family during caveman times and is a thorough delight—full of fun characters, interesting action and a low-key comedy mood which makes it a treat each time a new issue is released.

The standout new DC title is called Bat Lash and has nothing to do with the caped crusader and everything to do with the new wave of western characters appearing on TV these days. Batton Lash is kind of an antihero, a rare western hero who would rather pick flowers than engage in a gunfight, a wizard with women and at the gambling table who nevertheless always seems to find himself in the middle of one crazy criminal scheme or another. With gorgeous art by Nick Cardy and great writing by Sergio Aragones of MAD fame (no, really!), this is as good as comics get.

Splash page from Bat Lash
Splash page from Bat Lash

A few other titles not to sleep on at National: despite the toy tie-in, Captain Action is a lot of fun and features art by Gil Kane and Wally Wood; Enemy Ace continues in Star Spangled War Stories, with some gritty, smart stories of WWI from the German standpoint; and even DC’s romance comics have caught up with the times and feature more contemporary-feeling tales.

Archie continues to be Archie, the comics your kid sister loves, while Harvey continues the kiddie comics and Gold Key their unexceptional comics line with the likes of Lost in Space, Three Stooges and The Flintstones. I always think of Gold Key comics as “emergency comics”: to pick up when nothing better is on the stands.

Alright, this Pat Boyette page is nice...
Alright, this Pat Boyette page is nice…

Sadly, Charlton comics are worse than that, usually unreadable despite their comics featuring The Phantom, Popeye and Flash Gordon—though Pat Boyette's art on Flash is dynamic. Their comics have a bottom-of-the-barrel feel to them. Worse, their comics actually smell weird, as if their publisher prints cereal boxes as well as comics.

So, overall, comics in 1969 seem in good shape. From top to bottom, there’s something for most everyone. If I can recommend one comic above all the others, it’s Bat Lash. I don’t think the series will be long for the world—it’s too good to sell well—so grab an issue when you can and you will thank me.




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Movies, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 28, 1968] Intelligence Ain't All It's Cracked Up to Be: Charly

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by Jason Sacks

So far, 1968 has been an exemplary year for science fiction films. Filmgoers have had a chance to watch psychedelic, universe-spanning science fiction with 2001: A Space Odyssey and adventure science fiction with Planet of the Apes and buxom science fiction with Barbarella. And now we have down-to-earth, humanistic – and surreal – science fiction with the new film Charly.

Cliff Robertson stars in the new film version of the already-classic Daniel Keyes novel, which Victoria Lucas gave five stars to back in ’66. And while this film isn’t nearly as good as the novel, Charly still is a clever movie, somehow both a real change-of-pace and a film very much of its moment.

(If you’re confused by that contradiction, dear reader, stick around and I’ll explain myself to you.)

Picture 1 of 1

As we come to know him, Charlie Gordon (as the book names him; the movie calls our lead character Charly) is a man with the mind of a small child. He’s mentally impaired, with a low IQ, a childlike take on the world, and a temper to match his frustrations. When Charly is offered the opportunity to become the subject of an experiment to give him super-intelligence, he jumps at the chance. But Charly soon discovers how brilliance and happiness don’t always go hand in hand, and his new intelligence just makes him feel deep angst.

Victoria loved the book for its unique epistemological structure and the way writer Keyes gives the reader deeper insights into Charly’s perceptions of the events which happen to him. That subjective nature gave the book a certain amount of pathos which makes the novel embed itself into readers' minds.

Of course, no film can simulate the effect of a series of journal entries, so we are forced to get by with the events which play out on the screen.

Robertson in this film feels like Fredric March starring in a kind of odd version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In this case dumb Charly is a kind of monstrous identity. Not because of his low IQ, but more because dumb Charly acts weirdly. He feels like someone we don’t quite comprehend because he’s so different from most of us.

Robertson method-acts and method-acts all throughout this film, seeming to inhabit Charly’s body and mind. When he has a low IQ, he seems twitchy and odd, a man distorted and damaged by his impairment. It’s a grand, actorly performance, a transformation on the screen, but somehow I just never connected to Charly's humanity. It feels a bit much. For instance, Charly acts kind of jolly when his coworkers at a bakery play a nasty prank on him, and Charly's penmanship feels a bit like gilding the rose on his disabilities.

The prank-playing bakery coworkers

There are some quite moving scenes, though. One which really stands out happens when Charly attends a class with other severely disabled people. He's the only adult in a room full of children with Down's Syndrome and other disorders. The kids are filmed realistically and respectfully while Charly comes across as a real freak. This wonderful sequence gives the character some real pathos, an undercurrent of sadness which helps to explain his transformation.

Charly playing with kids

Robertson delivers the kind of performance which feels like it’s specifically planned to garner its actor an Oscar nomination. There’s nothing really wrong with aiming for a precious golden statuette, but his performance does seem a bit calculated somehow. I felt like Robertson seemed too smart for the dumb Charly, planned out rather than spontaneous, considered rather than active in his scenes.

The best parts of this film are when Charly is transitioning to becoming smart. He hides out from people, seems to be really beginning to think through his experience, and we can actually see signs of emerging intelligence in these scenes.

As you might imagine, this sequence is where Robertson's calculated performance shines. Here we see the intelligence at work and feel we are watching a real person as Charly figures out how to live in his new experiences.

And then the movie takes a decided turn for the weird when Charly actually does become smart. At first he seems happy to be able to both lead seminars and be the lead subject them. His newfound genius brings intellectual intelligence but not emotional maturity nor insights into the world around him. Charly learns he may have actually been happier when he was innocent about everything which happened around him.

Charly begins to become paranoid, and his paranoia plays out in a series of increasing surreal sequences in which he imagines himself leading a motorcycle gang, endlessly professing love for his psychologist Alice (well played by Claire Bloom), and some oddly brilliant split-screen effects.

Charly even includes an undercurrent of paranoia in Charly's actions, as if he's being watched as part of a government conspiracy. Of course, he may actually be surveilled but we only see the paranoia from Charly's viewpoint, never from an objective viewpoint which might actually provide context for Charly's actions.

We even get a double-exposure shot in which director Ralph Nelson shows Charly running away from his old self, a very over-the-top bit which unfortunately made me laugh. This surrealism is just a bit too much for the narrative structure Nelson has set up in the first half and the movie threatens at times to teeter and  fall under the weight of his ambitions.

I do have to mention the excellent soundtrack by Ravi Shankar. The music in this film feels both exotic and comfortable, a fascinating mix of west and east which helps to elevate this film, and certainly gives the soundtrack a very contemporary feel.

Charly is a fairly conventional film in its first half and a determinedly surreal film in its second half.  Nelson seems up to the task in the first half but pretty much falls on his face in the second. It's somewhat worth watching for Cliff Robertson's interesting performance. I think his performance will be discussed come Oscar season. And though I only kind of liked this movie, it would be fun to see an Oscar won by a lead actor in a science fiction movie.

Three stars.




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Horror, Movies

[August 18, 1968] The Horror is Real (Targets)

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by Jason Sacks

I’ve reviewed some frightening movies in this magazine before – the existential middle-aged angst of Seconds, the gothic horror of Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf and the eerie uncanny feeling of Planet of the Vampires, among others. But I’ve never reviewed a movie that’s scary in quite the same way as the new movie Targets.

Targets is frightening because it’s so real. It’s loosely based on the story of the Texas Tower Sniper. This real-life horror happened on August 1, 1966, when a seemingly ordinary man, a Marine veteran named Charles Whitman, climbed the long stairs of the Main Building at the University of Texas with rifles and a sawed-off shotgun and then began indiscriminately opening fire during a class break on campus.

Whitman killed 14 people that day, students walking on the campus mall and people shopping along distant Guadalupe Street, people cowering and people walking innocently. 31 more were injured, stark and frightening numbers we all hope will never be reached again.

A news photo from that terrible day in Austin, Texas.

As subsequent news reports shared, Whitman was a man with a bit of a broken life. He was an orphan who was adopted by an exacting family in which the father was never satisfied. He served in the Marines but never saw battle, instead studying engineering. At the time of his shooting, it seems he was in an unhappy marriage and struggling with mental health. And though we might try to guess what caused Whitman to snap that day, in the end, the inner life of Charles Whitman will always be a mystery. And in that lack of closure lies perhaps the greatest horror of all, because Whitman is a Rorschach test, a person onto whom we can project our own confusion, our fears and our worries about the modern world.

The blurry line between fiction and reality

In Targets our killer has the banal name of Bobby Thompson, played by Tim O’Kelly. Thompson lives in the quiet and peaceful San Fernando Valley. He’s in his 20s, lives with his parents and seems like an ordinary young man who suddenly seems to get into his head to… murder his family brutally.

Director Peter Bogdanovich, in his feature debut, does a fantastic job of creating that shock value for viewers, as we are lulled into a calm, false sense of security. Everything at the Thompson house seems very calm and serene on the surface, very 1968 you might say, in which everything seems quite placid on the surface of things.

And just like in our terrible year of assassinations and wars and riots in the streets, below the surface of a seemingly peaceful existence is an unbelievable amount of roiling turmoil desperately trying to escape.

But in this movie, Bogdanovich also brings in another element, one that really gives this film a smartly designed feeling of tension. Because there’s another plot in this film. Boris Karloff essentially plays himself in this movie, in documentary-like scenes in which washed-up old horror actor Byron Orlok decides he is out of step with the times. Nobody likes his outdated style of horror anymore. His work and his style are no longer relevant, so Orlok has decided to return to London to retire.

Mr. Bogdanovich on the left, Mr. Karloff on the right.

But Orlok’s companion, film director Sammy Michaels – played by director Bogdanovich! – persuades Orlok to make one final public appearance in Los Angeles. They decide to attend a premiere of his final film at a drive-in in LA suburb Reseda and arrange his appearance there.

As the day goes on, we witness two parallel threads. In one, we see Orlok make his preparations to attend the premiere and hear him talk about the changes in modern society from his time in the limelight. In the other, deeply chilling thread, we witness Thompson on top of an oil tank in the San Fernando Valley, assassinating innocent people who are just driving down the freeway.

Those assassination scenes feel like they take an eternity because of the smart ways Bogdanovich, designer Polly Plott and cinematographer László Kovács compose the scene: with bland, sun-washed colors, an alienating sense of distance, the random way Thompson seems to be sprawled on the tanker floor. And his escape is also presented in an equally powerful, equally bland way. Though an oil company employee discovers him, that man is dispatched in an un-cinematic manner and Thompson’s escape does not present him in a light that makes the assassin heroic in any way.

Eventually Thompson flees to a movie theatre, the same theatre where Orlok’s film will be premiering. In an ironical fulfilment his own fears, Orlok’s is rendered irrelevant by the real-world horrors of 1968. We see a few scenes of the film. It looks like a Roger Corman adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe story, and ten years ago that film would have fit the times well. But 1968 requires sterner horrors. ‘68 requires Rosemary’s Baby and The Hour of the Wolf and the more existential fears of Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey.  It perhaps requires a different type of horror as in The Devil Rides Out. And it requires the profoundly upsetting horror of Targets.

Targets is not a perfect film. It’s a bit fannish feeling, no surprise because Bogdanovch is a prominent writer for film journals and reportedly is working on a documentary of the great director John Ford. Orlok is named after the lead character in the classic 1922 German expressionistic vampire film Nosferatu – a film student reference if I ever heard one – and the slightly postmodern feel of the Orlok scenes take away from the horror of the massacre.

The drive-in before it was full.

But despite that, in this year of Kennedy and King, when Cronkite is talking over scenes from Vietnam every night at 6:00 and American cities are on fire, Targets hits close to the bone. I had real trouble overcoming my sheer personal horror at the events on the screen. In other words, I appreciated the artfulness of this movie but it took every force of will to keep myself in my seat and not walk out on it. Sometimes horror is too difficult to face, or maybe it’s too pervasive to face directly. Maybe we need something more indirect to allow ourselves to appreciate the fear. Poor innocent pregnant Rosemary isn’t like us. But Bobby Thompson? Any of us can snap, for no reason. That evil within every one of us is the most frightening thing I can imagine.

3½ stars – but again, be warned this is a very upsetting film.




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Movies, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[May 28, 1968] Danger: Diabolik is the Grooviest Spy Movie of the Year So Far

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by Jason Sacks

Danger: Diabolik is the epitome of a comic book movie: it has a wild, often surreal plot. It features outlandish lead characters who could never exist in real life. It includes absurd twists and turns. It has a surreal visual style.

And yeah, Danger: Diabolik is an absolutely wild groovy gas of a film.

It seems appropriate for this to feel like a comic book movie because Danger: Diabolik is adapted from an Italian comic strip which has been running since 1962. One of my favorite comics zines, the Rocket's Blast Comicollector, recently ran an article that talks about how Diabolik is massively popular for its wild spy hijinks, its beautiful lead characters, and for its convenient small size that makes it easy to carry on a train or bus.

Diabolik was created by a woman named Angela Guissani, a former fashion model turned founder and editor at the Astorina publishing house. Astorina started with board and card games, but Guissani hit the jackpot when she invented an idea for a magazine that commuters to Milan could read on their way to work. With insipration from the French character Fantômas, Angela invented a masked criminal who always seemed to escape the law, an anti-hero who could be embraced by the average middle class reader.

And so Diabolik was born, chased by Inspector Ginko, monthly. Within seven issues, the comic was a smash hit as readers fell in love with the masked rogue who could do almost anything, wearing his black suit or special masks as he robbed from the rich, loved his beautiful girlfriends, and traveled between his own secret lairs. He and his women also dressed in gorgeous, of-the-moment fashion, which seemed to sparkle off the page.

All of which makes it a natural to adapt Danger Diabolik to the big screen, especially under the direction of Mario Bava, a man who loves to use color and fashion to tell a story.

And what a wild, wonderful, groovy story this is.

Diabolik the film is true to its comic book roots. Diabolik himself, played with gusto by John Philip Law, is a lover and a fighter. He's a man who clearly can't do anything halfway: during the film we watch him commit not one, not two, but three different heists–plus he blows up a tax building. After one of the heists we watch him make love to his partner Eva Kant, played by the glorious Marisa Mell, on a bed covered with $20 bills, and it's hard to tell if their orgasmic ecstacy is due to Diabolik's superhuman lovemaking or because the couple's lust for cash is satiated at last.

But any satiation only lasts until the next opportunity comes their way, and Diabolik soon is on the trail of the most valuable emerald necklace in the world, stored high in a tower. This set of scenes allows us to watch Diabolik scale high towers, smartly elude guards with diversions and sleight-of-hand, and bring home the jewels to a loving girlfriend.

Even that isn't enough, and in the film's wild and wonderful ending set piece, Diabolik goes from underwater scuba craft to train to steal a giant gold ingot worth more than many small countries which he can use for his own reasons which might involve more sexual relations or might involve building even more elaborate structures for him to live in.

Of course Diabolik is a zillionaire, so that means he has all kinds of gadgets even James Bond would envy – Ferraris and Maseratis of course, the aforementioned scuba craft, fog jets and knockout pills, white action suits and black action suits, groovy showers and an amazing Batcave-like place and wow really doesn't this all sound a little like a world even Bond's nemesis Blofeld would envy?

Honestly, it's all a bit over-the-top at times, like drinking three Italian droppio shots all at once. Diabolik is hyperkinetic, absurdly colorful, ridiculously dynamic and wonderfully silly. Of course it is; with famed British comedian Terry-Thomas as one of the Diabolik's nemesis, it's no suprise this film sometimes veers close to Batman style camp, and even goes over it.

Director Mario Bava does his best to keep this movie on some kind of even ground. He's one of the finest action/horror directors working right now in Italy. I had high praise for Bava's'65 flick Planet of the Vampires, which was spookier and weirder than it had any right to be, and Danger: Diabolik is sillier and wackier than it has any right to be.

The film seems saturated with primary colors, so saturated at times that it almost seems to glow from the brilliant color pallette. The sets, too, seem selected not for their utiliarian use but for their garish weirdness. The chairs and tables in this movie look great, and that's all we need as viewers to suspend our disbelief and glory in the near neon glow of Bava's wild creation.

I should mention that the music in this film is composed by the great Ennio Morricone, whose unprecedented score for 1967's grand epic The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was one of the greatest media events of last year. His work here doesn't match those unbelievable heights, but it's charming how, for instance, we get a little guitar riff every time Diabolik's car appears on screen, or how occassionally the soundtrack would riff on 1960s surf music.

The spy genre seems a little played out in 1968, with Sean Connery walking away from the Bond role after You Only Live Twice, the Matt Helm movies playing as NBC network movies, and TV shows Man from UNCLE and I Spy soon to be off the air. But if Danger: Diabolik is one of the last of a dying genre, spy films are going out with a kiss kiss bang bang.

3.5 stars




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Comics, TV

[May 6, 1968] Does Whatever A Spider Can! (Spider-Man Cartoon)

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by Jason Sacks

It's hard to be an adult fan of super-hero TV shows these days. The Marvel Super-Heroes cartoons by Grantray and Lawrence are notorious among fans for their super cheap animation. Batman limped through its third season, with its jokes worn out and its campiness turned up past 10 (don't talk to me about the "Joker's Flying Saucer" episode, please!). The new Fantastic Four cartoon is inane, poorly animated and plain annoying.

And then there's Spider-Man. And hey, at least the music in this cartoon is pretty good.

Most every weekend since September (football pre-emptions notwithstanding), we've been granted the pleasure of watching a certain web-head soar through the concrete towers of New York, stalking a never-ending crew of slightly inept criminals while evading the slings and barbs of the editor of the Daily Bugle, J. Jonah Jameson.

Every weekend I perk up when I hear this fun theme song. Seriously, you should pop out to see if your local Korvettes sells the 45 of this song because it (pardon the pun) swings!

Spider-Man, Spider-Man
Does whatever a spider can
Spins a web, any size
Catches thieves just like flies
Look out
Here comes the Spider-Man

Is he strong?
Listen bud
He's got radioactive blood
Can he swing from a thread?
Take a look overhead
Hey, there
There goes the Spider-Man

Oh yes, that gets me on my feet (granted, I really need that cup of Folgers, but still)…

What keeps me on my feet is… okay, waiting for the toaster to pop, but also to see which classic Spidey villain will appear in this episode. As you can see, we've gotten the Vulture, Electro, Green Goblin and many more on screen so far. It's been a delight to see how the production team modify Steve Ditko and John Romita's designs for the villains for the small screen.

Yeah, the designs have been kinda distorted compared to the original comic versions, but the cartoon designs have been fun.

Too bad the stories have been pretty subpar.

One of the few good things about the Marvel Super-Heroes cartoon is that the stories were – quite literally – torn from the pages of the actual comics stories. In this cartoon…less so.

For instance, an episode starring the Sandman as villain has Sandy stealing the largest diamond in the world for some unexplained reason. In another episode, Green Goblin takes up magic as a way of defeating our hero, when magic was never remotely a part of his M.O. Then there's the episode where Electro takes over an amusement park as a way of defeating Spider-Man. We never saw Stan Lee write that story. At least in the episode with Ditko-created villains The Enforcers, they are simply trying to rob a bank. That much makes sense!

I have to admit that despite my whining, the stories do maintain some fidelity to the comics. Just like Stan and John depict each month, Peter Parker is a genius scientist who also has a part-time job at the Daily Bugle, where he works for a nasty brutish J. Jonah Jameson and flirts with the pretty Betty Brant — though Betty is colored with red hair instead of her usual brown, for some reason. Perhaps they mixed her up with Pete's friend Mary Jane Watson).

It's in those sorts of moments, like when we see Peter struggle with his webbing recipe or complain about Jameson not paying enough, that this show becomes the most fun. I also never grow tired of JJJ blaming Spider-Man for every crime the villains commit, no matter how events turn out. You gotta appreciate Jameson's commitment to his own sort of false news! Of course, those moments also echo some of the finest Marvel stories we've seen so far.

There have even been a couple of episodes in which JJJ is basically the villain. In one, he pays for the construction of a suit for villain the Scorpion. Spidey beats Scorpion easily, but at least an effort was made to have Jameson show his hatred of Spider-Man in villainous form. In another episode, JJJ creates a spider-slayer, right out of a classic Ditko issue, but the animation is so awkward and cheap-feeling, that the story just loses its flair.

I guess I'm saying that this show seems cheap. We know from latter-day SatAM classics like Jonny Quest, Herculoids and Space Ghost that a TV cartoon doesn't have to look cheap. But the look at that panel above! You can see the producers didn't even draw in all of Spider-Man's costume, in the interests of saving time and money.

The animators also reuse scenes over and over again to the point of absurdity. If I drank a sip of coffee every time we see Spider-Man swing his web far above any office towers, I might not sleep for a week. The producers seem to have a basket of six or seven specific images of Spider-Man doing his webbing thing which they love to use over and over. I noticed the other week when watching the episode called "The Menace of Mysterio" how the animators will string all six of those images one after the next, then have an inset scene, and then repeat the sequence. I always find myself yawning and reaching for the coffee cup when I see those scenes.Once again, the notorious Grantray-Lawrence studio was behind this quickie cheapie, as they were behind the Super-Heroes show. G-L obviously had a few more dollars to spend on Spider-Man, but twice zero is still zero, and the production values doom this show to be second-rate.

But hey, the theme song and a lot of the incidental music is terrif!

Rumor has the show returning this fall. Hopefully ABC will up the show's budget and G-L will spend a few more dollars on the production of this show. In the meantime, I feel the same mockery for Spider-Man that the Green Goblin shows above. Get on your feet, Spider-Man, and make a fight of it!


by Gideon Marcus

Don't listen to old sourpuss there. While there are episodes that are less than terrific, there are several which are…terrific. Compared to the concurrently running Fantastic Four cartoon, and certainly to the virtually static Marvel "cartoons" of last season, Spider-Man is nothing less than a revolution.

The voice acting is stellar, with the fellow playing Spider-Man and Peter Parker doing an excellent job of distinguishing the two roles. JJJ is an absolute riot. As for the animation and art, the palette is also stunning, especially compared to the drab FF. And it's absolutely accurate; New York is chock full of pink buildings.

The animation is (for TV anyway) stellar, and the composition stands up to any comic book.


One of my favorite episodes, and a scene so good, it got incorporated into the end credits.

Is it a little goofy? Absolutely, though no more so than Batman, and it the show plays off the silliness with an infectious sense of fun.


Mysterio's true form may have been a tiny bit influenced by another contemporary character…


Alright–maybe The Rhino isn't the best villain.

In addition to the theme, Spider-Man has got one heck of a soundtrack, all boffo jazz like Herb Alpert was the band director.

So, give the show a watch. It's already in reruns on Saturday morning, and it's a stand-out. Would it have been nice to have more Green Hornet than Batman? Maybe. But for a cartoon, it sweeps the competition. If it's not exactly like the comic (which is actually currently the best in the Marvel stable), at least it's its own thing, and it does that thing pretty well.

And that's a headline I'll stand by…




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Movies

[April 24, 1968] Terrifying Psychological Horror (Hour of the Wolf, by Ingmar Bergman)

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by Jason Sacks

Ingmar Bergman is back in the cinemas at last! His last movie, 1966’s Persona, received rave reviews of its release, including by me. Persona is a fascinating, deeply haunting film about identity and personality. It is a demanding film in its style, pace and plot but is also an intensely rewarding viewing experience.

Hour of the Wolf continues exploration of many of the ideas he presents in Persona.

Again Bergman films his new feature in his usual black and white, a stark palette which gives his films a kind of painful emotional resonance. Again Bergman sets his film on a remote Swedish island far from most people. And again Bergman provides a meditation on identity, on memory and on the nature of personality.

There’s also one key difference between Persona and Hour of the Wolf that might interest the Galactic Journey audience: Hour is a horror film.

The film stars Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullmann as a married couple who go off to live on a small island off the Swedish coast. The Von Sydow character, named Johan Borg, is a painter who decides to travel to the island with his wife to find some peace and to do his work. He also wants to help his wife, Ullman as Alma Borg, find peace from what appears to be a recent psychological breakdown.

At first everything seems calm and ordinary on the little island, as the couple find happiness in their togetherness. But it soon becomes clear that Johan is fighting his own inner demons. He is a man of the bourgeoisie who does not belong in society, who has pain and torment from his previous life. It’s clear he has been sexually abused and is tortured by his own sexual inclinations. He becomes distant from Alma and seems to fall apart emotionally.

When the couple is invited to a party held by some other island dwellers, all of this angst comes to the surface in a phantasmagoria of psychological fear. At their castle, he is gawked at and treated like a freak by snobbish and condescending people who are also psychologically broken in their own ways.

The banal madness of the castle dwellers sends Johan into paroxysms of breakdown, imagining the castle dwellers laughing at him (delivered by Bergman in a beautifully componsed, tremendously spooky medium shot which could come out of  last year's terrifying Japanese film The Face of Another). From there we get a whole series of terrifying moments – a woman takes off her face like plastic and eyes like they're balls, a man crawls up walls, a man has wings, a character attacks Johan and we see blood. It all builds and builds with anguish and pain.

With all that, somehow there are two moments of deeply contrasting feel which nevertheless each create dread and fear in the viewer. During the dream sequence, Johann’s face is lathered in makeup and he is painted to be a frightening in-between of man and woman. He’s not quite one or the other, and that profound personal ambiguity makes the scene feel full of dread. His identity is nullified, and without identity what are we, anyway?

In the other terrible moment, Johann has a fateful encounter with a young boy while fishing, and the whole scene comes to a dreadful end, and it’s not clear if this is parable or actual, a distorted memory or a moment of terrifying breakdown.

Those scenes, together with the intense feelings of fear and confusion Alma displays on her face, describe a journey into madness and pain that help elevate this film above mere melodrama into something transcendently terrifying.

Though Bergman has never been known as a genre director, Hour fits comfortably in his oeuvre of work. Bergman has always displayed a deep fascination with the elusive nature of human psychology, exploring the nature of relationships in elliptical, often dreamlike ways which expand out perceptions of personality and truth. We see those ideas explored throughout Hour of the Wolf.

Tied to that is his attention to the nature of human relationships and individualism. Each of us is an island, but each of us has deep effect on our loved ones, Johann's breakdown affects Alma's breakdown, and each works in a cycle of cause and effect on each other. Bergman dwells on this topic frequently, and Wolf is no exception.

I've indirectly priased Von Sydow and Ullmann several times here, but I should also take a moment to single out the brilliant cinematography of Sven Nykvist. Nobody shoots a film with the austere beauty of Nykvist. He's the perfect collaborator for Bergman, and I'm so happy to see their collaboration continue with this powerful, starkly beautiful film.

Hour of the Wolf seems to elude meaning on a purely intellectual level. Bergman gives us a narrator whose intentions seem unreliable, so we never quite have a grounding in exactly why he takes the actions he does.

But who among us is always honest with themselves?

On the emotional and psychological levels, however, Bergman’s latest film displays his deep interest in the mysteries of the human soul. The darkest nightmares come from within, and those nightmares are on full display in this remarkable film.

4 stars




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