THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN 1969

If You Want It, Here It Is, Come and Get It. Mm...Mm...Mm...Mm

State of the World - 2022: The world’s richest men are eccentric billionaires who, proportionate to the degree to which their hoarded obscene wealth could ease human suffering, have fundamentally taken on the role of real-life supervillains.

State of Mind - 1969: Terry Southern’s anti-capitalism satire The Magic Christian – about an eccentric billionaire who spends his money orchestrating elaborate practical jokes exposing the avarice, bigotry, and hypocrisy of the over-privileged classes – is made into a major motion picture.

Peter Sellers as Sir Guy Grand

Ringo Starr as Youngman Grand

One of the nicer things I remember about the late-‘60s was its social and political idealism. From my pre-teen perspective, it felt like young adults all across the country were collectively waking up to the inequities and injustices of society and were serious in their commitment to the belief that change was possible. 

Capitalism, being what it is, was also doing some waking up at this time. In the form of noticing that the disposable income of this sizable demographic was being freely spent on goods and entertainments that reflected their values, supported and promoted their beliefs, and gave the appearance of being, if not exactly one of them, at least at one with them. 

Raquel Welch as Priestess of the Whip
Despite her prominence in the film's marketing, the striking Welch shows up ten minutes before the film is over for all of 30 seconds. Though marvelous-looking, she comes off much like she did in her cameo in the satiric Bedazzled (1967)...looking like she doesn't quite get the joke.    

As usual, Hollywood…sometimes the trendsetter, often a step behind, but only rarely ever in pace with the times…found itself in the position of playing “catch-up” in trying to develop projects that appealed to this newly-recognized audience. But the world was changing so fast that the crunch to meet the market demand for suitably “now” motion pictures only exposed Hollywood’s bloated, slow-moving studio system as ill-suited to compete with the immediacy (and, by extension, relevance) of inexpensively-made independent and underground films. 

Sheer law of averages accounted for the rare youth-market breakout success: e.g., The Graduate – 1967, Bonnie and Clyde -1967, Easy Rider – 1969, and Midnight Cowboy – 1970. But as the major studios were still a bunch of conservative white men well past the age of 30 trying to make a quick buck off of the liberal and diverse “Don’t trust anyone over 30” crowd; more often than not the haste to get “Where it’s at” movies into theaters before they became “Where it was” cultural artifacts, resulted in a glut of big-budget miscalculations like Skidoo (1968), Myra Breckinridge (1970), and Terry Southern's Candy (1968). 

Ewa Aulin & Ringo Starr in Candy (1967)
Counterculture icon Terry Southern (contributing screenwriter for Dr. Strangelove, Barbarella, Easy Rider, Casino Royale) wrote the sex satire Candy in 1958 with Mason Hoffenberg. Buck Henry adapted the script for the truly dire film version. 

Relying heavily on the most exploitable signifiers of youth-cult marketability—profanity, nudity, sex, & drugs—these blatantly pandering exercises in desperation were so arrogantly clueless in their lack of understanding of the very public whose dollars they so cynically courted that they came across as being almost hostile to young people. 

By all accounts, the film version of The Magic Christian started out as a sincere, well-intentioned ideological passion project spearheaded by Peter Sellers (who, in his 40s, had joined show business’ ever-growing ranks of over-age flower children and millionaire hippies). But the finished product wound up illustrating the Grand-ish point - “Nothing is so sacred that it can’t be corrupted by money” in ways not intended. 

Grand & Son
A man who has everything joins forces with a man who has nothing,
and together they set about to prove that "Everyone has their price."

Over the film’s opening credits, we’re introduced to Sir Guy Grand (Peter Sellers), the world’s richest man. Before the credits are over, the unmarried, childless billionaire meets and promptly adopts a homeless man (Ringo Starr), dubs him Youngman Grand, and makes the shaggy young derelict the heir to his fortune. Since the film begins mid-stride and hits the ground running, we never learn what prompts Grand’s impulsive want for offspring, nor what’s behind his mania for using his great wealth to take the piss out of the posh. But it’s certainly not out of the question for us to assume that he's perhaps insane, for it’s something of an anti-establishment movie tradition (a la, King of Hearts – 1966 and The Madwoman of Chaillot - 1969) to depict the lunatics and madmen in our world as the only sane people left. 

Laurence Harvey (in a bit originally intended for David Hemmings)
performs Hamlet's soliloquy as a striptease

The darkly comic “capitalism kills” satire of The Magic Christian was written by Texas-born Terry Southern in 1959, but the climate of counterculture rebellion that was America in the late-‘60s made his episodic evisceration of American excess feel more relevant than ever. At least in theory. 

Peter Sellers had expressed interest in making a movie of The Magic Christian as far back as 1964 while filming Dr. Strangelove (he’d hoped to get Stanley Kubrick to direct). Drawn to what he saw as the satire’s idealistic principles— "It illustrates to the public the truth about power, money, and corruption,” he intoned to a skeptical press— the recently spiritually and politically awakened actor acquired the rights, secured financing, and corralled a slew of celebrity friends to work for scale.

Richard Attenborough as the coach of the Oxford Rowing Team

But in taking four years and some 14 screenplay drafts to reach the screen, a movie idealistically espousing the hippie ethos (signaled by the film’s finale which finds Grand and Youngman choosing “A simpler way,” and opting for a life of vagrancy) felt as though it had arrived a bit late to the party. Close to the 1967 Summer of Love would have been great. During the global student protest year of 1968 perhaps better.

 But the out-and-out worst time for the release of a movie advocating the longhair generation as society’s saviors was in the wake of the two most defining moments signaling the end of the hippie era: the Manson Murders (August 1969) and the Altamont Festival killing (December 1969).

I can’t speak for the UK, but in post-Manson Family America, the notion of a put-on artist staging guerilla acts of protest against the rich to incite anarchy and chaos had lost a great deal of its subversive appeal.

Peter Sellers with friend and fellow Goon, Spike Milligan

Peter Sellers’ involvement assured The Magic Christian would be made, but it also turned Terry Southern’s very American satire into a very British one. Hiring friend and Casino Royale co-director Joseph McGrath to helm and Southern to adapt (with the too-many-cooks assist of Sellers, Magrath, and a pre-Monty Python John Cleese and Graham Chapman), The Magic Christian became (perhaps intentionally) a kind of filmed version of The Goon Show radio program that got Sellers his start in the ‘50s’.

British humor tends to be a little tough going for me anyway, especially when it's very male-centric and sophomoric (I was never a Monty Python fan). But my main complaint with the British setting is that from an American perspective, the targets of Guy's pranks are such obvious prigs and snobs that the satire feels toothless. 

Poking fun at a culture that appears (to us, anyway) to be more openly classist (Royalty, observance of historical traditions, accents denoting class distinctions) is quite different from poking fun at a country that pathologically waves the flag of its egalitarianism when in fact it's ragingly racist, wealth-worshipping, and classist as hell.

John Cleese as the Sotheby's director

Wilfred Hyde-White as Capt. Reginald K. Klaus

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I was 12 years old when I saw The Magic Christian in 1970. Then, funny to me meant: Mad Magazine, The Three Stooges, Bugs Bunny, and Laugh-In. Countless trips to the theater to see Casino Royale (1967) and The Party (1968) had cemented Peter Sellers as my #1 favorite comic actor. And, thanks to several years of involuntary exposure to the music and movies of The Beatles (thanks, sis), I was also a bonafide Beatles fan myself. So, of course, I thoroughly loved The Magic Christian. I thought it was hilarious. And my finding it so made me feel oh-so-hip and oh-so-sophisticated.

Christopher Lee
For those still in the dark, The Magic Christian is the name of an elite luxury liner
with an interior straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Being at that awkward tween-age—socially invisible, politically powerless, desperate to assert individuality—my inner anarchist delighted in the Bugs Bunny/Marx Brothers-style of “comedy of disruption.” As one critic put it, The Magic Christian was all about "...deflating the pompous, punishing the greedy, and discomfiting the complacent." So, in the adolescent spirit of being attracted to anything you’re certain your parents will disapprove of, I reveled in The Magic Christian’s raciness (bodybuilders in skimpy bikinis!); bad taste (the hunting party with heavy artillery); and ham-fisted satire (the Oxford/Cambridge race). It was an issue of Mad Magazine come to life.

The audacious notion of tossing money into a vat filled with blood, urine, and manure and then getting people to wade through it for the free cash would have a lot more satirical bite today if it didn't sound like something the GOP would actually propose to replace Social Security. 

I also imagine that some of the appeal The Magic Christian held for me was that Sir Guy Grand was like an adolescent boy’s wish-fulfillment fantasy of adulthood. The asexual Guy Grand has no interest in either women or men (nudity and sex are things to be giggled at); never has to answer to anyone, and is saddled with none of the pain-in-the-ass responsibilities of being a grown-up. He just gets to spend all of his time hanging out with his best buddy (adoption adding a new twist to BFF) playing games and pulling wise-ass pranks on authority figures. 

Yul Brynner & Roman Polanski

There are times when you've just gotta let an image speak for itself

"Ah, but I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now." -  Bob Dylan

Revisiting The Magic Christian after a nearly 40-year gap was an experience by turns amusing, nostalgic, and bewildering. It was great seeing the movie looking so good on Blu-ray, and I especially got a kick out of the many cameo appearances and discovering what things about the film had stayed with me over the years. For example, it was gratifying to find that the pre-credits sequence (my favorite part of the film) was still as clever as I’d remembered it: a distinguished portrait of the Queen is revealed to be a British 10-pound note, after which the audience is encouraged to sing along to a follow-the-bouncing-ball stanza of the Paul McCarney composition (sung by Badfinger) “Come and Get It.” (How tragic is it that my favorite part of The Magic Christian takes place before the film proper even begins?)

Tangoing bodybuilders Lincoln Webb & Roy Scammell provoke and 
 tantalize the racist and homophobic passengers on The Magic Christian. 

What bewildered me was just how unfunny the film now seems to me. I wasn’t bored, I enjoyed myself, and the film kept my interest, and I still champion the overall idea of the film. But the experience of watching it was entirely laugh-free. Granted, so much of the film’s humor is reliant on shock and the element of surprise, so it can be said that my reaction is at least in part due to my being so familiar with the material.

But that doesn’t account for the benumbing effect of the wash-rinse-repeat satire cycle of the screenplay or the loose-moorings structure of the film itself. It's weird watching an entire film that has no real human behavior in it. At the start of the film, there's a series of crosscuts between the morning rituals of Sellers and Starr that juxtapose and contrast the lives of the haves and the have-nots. There's a sweetness to it that sets the stage for an anticipated humane political polemic that never materializes.

Leonard Frey as Ship's Physician Laurence Faggot (pronounced, Fa-goh)
The Magic Christian -- a movie "The Celluloid Closet" author Vito Russo called "A viciously homophobic film" --never met a gay joke it didn't like. Funny then how it never once addresses the comic or homoerotic implications of a middle-aged man adopting a young man he just met in the park.

Not helping matters is the inconsistent nature of Guy's pranks. The point he's trying to prove to Youngman grows murky as his stunts veer from harmless (turning Shakespeare's Hamlet into a burlesque) to mean-spirited (grossly overpaying a hot dog vendor and insisting on his change from a moving train).

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

Bedazzled (1967)

I'm of the opinion that the truest screen interpretation of Terry Southern's Guy Grand is to be found in Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka (think about it...all he does is play tricks on the greedy and self-interested!). And for a good example of the kind of lively, in-the-spirit-of-mischief chemistry lacking in the pairing of Sellers and Starr, I really think Peter Cook and Dudley Moore hit paydirt in Bedazzled. 

PERFORMANCES

I’m gonna lead off by saying that I truly love the look Peter Sellers devised for Sir Guy Grand. Simultaneously dashing and screwball, it’s said that Sellers sought to approximate the look of a young Albert Schweitzer while portraying Grand as a kind of British Groucho Marx. He’s considerably more successful in the former than the latter. I think Sellers is far too inspired a comic actor to ever be uninteresting, so I can’t say I don’t enjoy him in The Magic Christian. But the screenplay doesn’t provide a character for Sellers to play and he doesn’t appear particularly interested in supplying one on his own. So, outside of an accent and a whimsical swath of hair, his Guy Grand very nearly doesn’t exist.

But he's in good company with the charming but wholly superfluous Ringo Starr. In a role not in the book and written with him in mind (contrary to erroneous claims that John Lennon was first considered) I suspect the intention was to supply a little youth-identification for the audience while mining the silent, Chaplinesque quality Starr brought to his well-received solo bits in Help! and A Hard Day’s Night. And certainly, if you saw him in Candy, you know a Ringo Starr with no dialogue is the best possible course of action to take. But, like Sellers, he's not given a character to play and brings nothing to the part but a droopy mustache and Rita Tushingham eyes.

"Well, you know, Youngman, sometimes it's not enough merely to teach. One has to punish as well."

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

At least one aspect of The Magic Christian has not changed a bit for me over the years. The soundtrack to this movie is terrific. I love the infectious "Come & Get It"--particularly the soaring strings instrumental arrangement that accompanies the closing credits. It gave me goosebumps the first time I heard it blaring through the speakers at the movie theater. 

But the song that really stands out as the one I most associate with the film is Thunderclap Newman's youth rebellion anthem "Something in the Air." I think it's brilliant. I heard it for the first time in The Magic Christian theatrical trailer and instantly fell in love. And I'm still crazy about it. One of my all-time favorite '60s songs. In 1973 the singing group Labelle covered it in a version that combined it with Gil Scott Heron's poem "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." You owe it to yourself to give it a listen...to use one of my favorite Magic Christian quotes: "It'll tighten your wig."

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

What keeps The Magic Christian among my list of "tarnished favorites" is that despite not feeling as strongly about it as I did when I was a kid, I tend to think of it as one of the last of the optimistic flower-children/hippie films. The Nixon era of disillusionment and cynicism was right on the horizon and the idealism at the heart of The Magic Christian had already started to be replaced by the snark and smirk of movies like M.A.S.H. (1970).

In the ensuing decades, capitalism has done its job so well that today, social media is full of individuals just managing to get by financially who nevertheless seize every opportunity to be the white knights and front-line defenders of the Jeff Bezos and Elon Musks of our culture whenever a legitimate criticism is voiced regarding the morality of being grotesquely rich in a civilized society that tolerates hunger.

In such an atmosphere it's impossible to completely dislike a movie that associates wallowing in money with wallowing in feces, blood, and urine.

A hippie at heart, Sir Guy Grand has the three-pointed star hood ornament

 of his Mercedes-Benz reconfigured as a peace symbol. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2022

TRILOGY OF TERROR 1975

Spoiler Alert: Crucial plot points are revealed in the interest of critical analysis and discussion

An unforeseen dividend in being a movie fan “of a certain age” is living long enough to see what films end up being the legacy benchmarks in the careers of actors I grew up watching. There’s something democratically perfect about the idea that no matter how accomplished, acclaimed, varied, or lengthy a career, no actor gets to decide what movie will "stick"...be the one they’ll most be remembered for. 

It can be a film that kickstarts a career (flying in the face of the accepted dictum that this is just a taste of things to come, often it turns out to be their finest career hour): Mia Farrow (Rosemary’s Baby) and Liza Minnelli (Cabaret). Or a movie of such nagging popularity that even a career's worth of an actor’s best efforts fails to diminish its influence: Patty Duke (Valley of the Dolls) and—Bless her heart—Faye Dunaway (Mommie Dearest). 

If internet saturation is any indicator, Breakfast at Tiffany’s has been branded Audrey Hepburn’s official signature motion picture. I've seen almost everything Jane Fonda has ever done, but she will always be first and foremost my Barbarella psyche-della. And when I think of Shelley Winters, my mind zips right past Lolita, A Patch of Blue, and The Diary of Anne Frank only to land squarely on the deck of the S.S. Poseidon. Go figure.

Time becomes the great leveler. The public, the ultimate determiner of what film in an actor's resume has left the most indelible impression.

The Day of the Locust - 1975

No one symbolized the cinema of the 1970s for me quite like Karen Black. One of the more prolific and visible actresses of the decade, Black was a true original whose every virtue embodied the iconoclast spirit of Hollywood’s new wave of filmmakers (indeed, seeming to be everywhere at once and in every new movie that came out, she was like the Jack Carson of the New Hollywood). 

I first saw Karen Black in Francis Ford Coppola's coming-of-age comedy You’re a Big Boy Now (1966) when it was shown on TV in 1969. I didn’t know her name then, but as the unglamorous “good girl” waiting on the sidelines for the hero to notice her (a type she was never cast as again), she radiated such a sweetness and oddball vulnerability that I was drawn to her character immediately. Later that same year when I saw Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda's Easy Rider (1969) at the theater, I didn't even recognize her (even after sitting through it twice) as the long-legged, scene-stealing New Orleans prostitute. So thoroughly has Black transformed herself from the soft-spoken love interest in Coppola's film, she was like a different person. 

SF Examiner Sunday, March 9, 1969
That's actually not-yet-famous Karen Black all but obliterated in the grainy photo
promoting the television broadcast premiere of what was her first feature film appearance 

By 1970 the chameleonic character actress was being earmarked for major stardom after her breakout, Oscar-nominated, Golden Globe Award-winning supporting performance in Five Easy Pieces (1970). Between 1971 and 1978 Karen Black appeared in 18 feature films, and I tried to see as many as I possibly could. Karen Black had become my new favorite...a kind of Stateside Glenda Jackson when it came to glamour-free fearlessness and risk-taking...and I was certain there was no one else quite like her in the movies.  

Five Easy Pieces - 1970

To me, Karen Black's particular gift was her emotional authenticity and talent for making her characters relatable. She made the arcane and artificial “establishment” standards of beauty that once defined what movie stars looked like seem obsolete. She always seemed to “be” who she was playing, and the lack of self-consciousness in her acting style had a way of granting even the most extreme characters a personal dignity.

Although Karen Black's tenure as a mainstream, A-list star was surprisingly brief (she didn’t get first billing in an American movie until 1976’s Family Plot, and by 1977 she was appearing in stuff like Killer Fish), but during that period she had the great good fortune to have appeared in what are currently recognized as some of the most iconic, influential, and enduring films of the decade: Easy Rider–1969, The Great Gatsby–1974, Airport 1975–1974, Nashville–1975, Family Plot–1976, Burnt Offerings–1976, and my personal favorite The Day of the Locust–1975. 

Comeback
The end of the '70s signaled the end of Karen Black's mainstream ascendence. Before her latter career became subsumed by the horror genre (a term she resisted), Black made a brief return to her glory days in Robert Altman's Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean giving one of her career-best performances

When Karen Black died on August 8, 2013, the films obituaries singled out as her most memorable were: her vulnerable waitress in Five Easy Pieces, the pathetic Myrtle in The Great Gatsby,  Nashville's country singer Connie White, and the plucky Nancy ("The stewardess is flying the plane?!") Pryor of Airport 1975. No argument from me.

But I'm sticking to my guns when I contend that when the respectability smoke clears and the prestige-impressed voices of the critics and cineastes die down, the first movie that comes to mind when the average person thinks of Karen Black is 1975s Trilogy of Terror...arguably the most widely-seen and most well-known of all of her films.

Woman Times Four

In the ‘70s, the division between movie star and TV star was far more pronounced than it is today, so it was big doings in the Anderson household (my corner of it, anyway) that THE Karen Black was starring in a made-for-TV movie; a genre that, to my mind, had heretofore been the near-exclusive domain of Donna Mills, Kay Lenz, and William Windom. It was especially notable because career-wise, Karen Black was mainly a cult-popular actress who was just starting to make a mainstream name for herself. 

Trilogy of Terror aired just a couple of months after Black was awarded the Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe for The Great Gatsby. In fact, both Gatsby and Airport 1975 were still playing in theaters when the TV-movie was broadcast. Adding further to the feeling that 1975 was The Year of Karen Black was the fact that all over town and everywhere you turned you were confronted with ads, articles, and posters heralding Black's forthcoming summer releases—The Day of the Locust in May, Nashville in July. 

Airport 1975 - 1974

Hotly anticipated by yours truly, Trilogy of Terror was broadcast Tuesday, March 4, 1975 at 8:30 pm as one of the last entries in the final season of the immensely popular ABC Movie of the Week series that began in 1969. Directed and produced by Dan Curtis of Dark Shadows fame, the trio of terror tales making up this anthology are all based on short stories by Richard Matheson (Die! Die! My Darling! – 1965). William F. Nolan (screenwriter for that other Dan Curtis/Karen Black collaboration Burnt Offerings) wrote the teleplays for the first two, and Matheson himself adapted the iconic final episode.

TRILOGY OF TERROR

Based on the short story: The Likeness of Julie - 1962

The male gaze is given a (Karen) black eye in this first tale of “terror” which casts Ms. Black as a buttoned-up, dressed-down English Lit teacher who finds herself the target of the abusive sexual attentions of a student (Robert Burton, then Mr. Karen Black).

Karen Black as Miss Julie Eldridge

Robert Burton as Chad Foster 

JULIE is my second favorite story in the trilogy. Not least in part due to its singularly emphatic kink factor, and for its devilishly clever affiliating of the proprietorial dominance of the male gaze (a form of presumptive access to, and ownership of, the female body) with voyeurism, scopophilia, date rape, and sexual exploitation. A psychological thriller with a touch of the occult/ supernatural, JULIE is a fine work of feminist horror and made me think of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives.

Hot for Teacher

Of course, Levin’s contemporary gothics were at the forefront of my mind back in 1975 because the movie version of The Stepford Wives had opened in theaters just a month before Trilogy of Terror aired. In fact, the darkly satirical horror of The Stepford Wives…an ideal distillation of post-Women’s Lib male panic…felt in parallel with JULIE’s use of the micro-inequities of day-to-day male/female sexual politics as the springboard for a horror story centralizing what we now understand to be the hidden-in-plain-sight atmosphere of harassment and potential violence women are exposed to on college campuses (well, everywhere, honestly). A point emphasized in the opening sequence where self-styled campus Casanova Chad and his buddy Eddie (Jim Storm) voice their toxic opinions while engaged in the “harmless” act of girl-watching: Chad -“God, have you ever seen so many dogs in one place?”

The Objectifying Gaze

With the villain early-identified and the story’s rising mostly the intensifying degrees of Chad’s abuse, dramatic tension becomes largely of the pressure-cooker variety; Julie will either break or break free…but something’s got to give. And it does. Rather effectively, I must say, in a nifty twist ending I did NOT see coming at the time. 

Though the most heavily populated of the three stories—affording an almost orgasmic parade of outré ‘70s fashions—JULIE is essentially a two-hander. Robert Burton makes for a convincing chauvinist sleazeball (coyly alluded to as being a natural talent by Karen Black on the DVD commentary, perhaps explaining why their 18-month marriage had already dissolved by the time the TV movie came out), but it’s Karen Black’s show all the way. 

Chad blackmails Julie with obscene photos he took of her when she was unconscious.
 Thanks to this nanosecond blooper reveal, it looks like his fetish
was dressing Julie up to look like Charles Foster Kane 

Black is always fascinating to watch and never less than believable in depicting Julia’s trauma. But it’s only after I saw the entire vignette and the twist was revealed that Black’s traditional, almost cliché characterization of an “academic” (precise diction, books clutched to the bosom, mainspring-tight hairdo, owlish spectacles, soft voice) struck me as being perhaps the “performative” display I think it’s intended to be. Until the very last scene, Julie is more or less “acting” the part of the meek bookworm.

By the way, double kudos to whoever’s idea it was for Julie to keep her spectacles on during the film’s big “reveal” scene. 

The framing of the final sequence emphasizes Julie's physical dominance over Chad

After decades of women whipping off their suddenly-useless glasses after letting their hair down, Julie exercising her power while wearing glasses (this is a woman who doesn’t care if men seldom make passes) is an almost Hitchcockian touch (apropos that director's well-known fondness for women in eyewear). Particularly in a story about the power of the gaze.

Based on the short story: Needle in the Heart - 1969

“There are just some people who’ll come to any [movie] with story overviews. It’s nothing to do with the acting or with the writing at all. It’s just that . . . they say, ‘well if the story’s going this way, a great ending would be this. And if a  story’s going that way, the surprise would be that.’”

That’s Karen Black on the Trilogy of Terror commentary track explaining to teleplay writer William F. Nolan her insightful theory on why Millicent & Therese, the trilogy's second terror tale, is so often dismissed with the claim of being predictable. Black is correct in recognizing that when a viewer is presented with something as overworked as the “good twin-evil twin” trope in a horror movie, it takes no great feat of cleverness to guess that if there's going to be a twist ending, that twist will reveal the twins (who are never shown occupying the same frame) are the same person. 

Karen Black as Millicent Larimore

Karen Black as Therese Larimore

But I don't think surprise twists are essential to a good horror story. Sometimes the surprise of a performance that makes the familiar seem new can be very satisfying. Millicent & Therese, the story of two identical twins (moral Millicent, amoral Therese) engaged in an antagonistic battle of wills is so slight as to be little more than a sketch, so even as a teenager, I guessed the “twist” of its plot (linked to my obsession with the 1971 novel and subsequent film version of Tom Tryon’s The Other - 1972). 

But what made the whole thing seem new was the hinted-at cause of Millicent/Therese’s split personality. Behind the genre trappings of voodoo, witchcraft, and demonology is a poignant story of ongoing childhood sexual abuse and how the victim dealt with her trauma by slipping into a catastrophically extreme form of dissociation. A splintering off of her psyche to protect herself from dealing with what is happening (and, in the matter of the death of her mother, what she has done).

Significantly, it's the death of the father that precipitates the showdown between the two sisters. The child is at last "safe" but too many years of identity suppression has clouded the awareness of which personality was genuinely that of the child and which developed as a defense mechanism.  

It's nice seeing Dark Shadows' John Karlen as Mr. Anmar, one of Therese's lovers 

Despite its dark overtones, Millicent & Therese is actually the most fun of the three episodes. Even if sometimes unintentionally so. For instance, the comically broad-stroke visual shorthand used to distinguish the personalities of the two sisters has Black dressed alternately like the illustration on a pack of "Old Maid" playing cards, and a Party City Halloween costume labeled "peroxided trollop."

But when it comes to acting, Karen Black transcends the obvious and gives two rather terrifically realized, distinctly separate performances. Veering effortlessly between compelling and camp, Black gives what amounts to a “best of” performance medley of the quirks, idiosyncrasies, and unique talents that made her one of the most intoxicatingly watchable actresses of her time.

Based on the short story: Prey - 1968

A woman spends a nightmarish evening fighting for her life after inadvertently releasing the spirit of a Zuni warrior encased in an ancient fetish doll. 

When the topic turns to Trilogy of Terror, the now-iconic AMELIA episode is what everyone thinks of exclusively. And for good reason. Even after all these years, the idea of an ankle-high, razor-toothed, knife-wielding Zuni warrior speeding at you across the wall-to-wall carpet is still pretty hair-raising shit. Coupled with Karen Black’s glass-shattering screams, frequent falls, and oh-so-relatable shock reactions; there can be no mystery as to why this memorable horror vignette has achieved the status of kindertrauma klassic.

Karen Black as Amelia

I was a senior in high school when Trilogy of Terror aired, so while the widely-watched TV movie was all any of us could talk about at school the following day, it was never the stuff of nightmares as it was for so many who have claimed it as their seminal childhood freakout. 

(Curiously enough, my own kindertrauma moment was a different teleplay written by Trilogy of Terror’s Richard Matheson. It was that 1961 episode of  The Twilight Zone titled “The Invaders.” It starred Agnes Moorehead as a woman alone in a deserted farmhouse terrorized by ankle-high, knife-wielding spacemen.)

Karen Black’s performance in this episode is the jewel in the trilogy’s crown. It’s a one-woman show-stopper (she should have been Emmy-nominated for the self-penned phone monologue sequence alone) that sees Black’s wholesale commitment to her character and Matheson’s fantastic premise saving the whole thing from slipping into macabre silliness.

Playing on primal fears and familiar phobias, AMELIA is a “fun” scare all the way, allowing the viewer to jump in surprise, squirm at the suspense, giggle at their own jitters, and yell at the screen “Don’t open that suitcase!” Best of all, Amelia is a character we really root for. So much so that the film’s literal killer ending is hard not to be perceived as a triumph for Amelia, for she is at last in a position (a warrior’s crouch, in fact) to have the last word with her mother.

Burnt Offerings - 1976

Although it’s well-known that Trilogy of Terror was a movie Karen Black initially had no interest in making and that she perhaps ultimately regretted the role the film’s popularity played in pigeonholing her as a Scream Queen and taking her career into a direction she hadn't intended. But as a Karen Black fan who has always been a little bit frustrated by how little camera time she has in some of her most famous supporting roles, I’m grateful as hell for Trilogy of Terror. Not just because it represents some of her best work, but because it's a stellar, front-and-center showcase for a brilliant actress who too often had to shine from the sidelines.

Sweet Dreams

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2022

PAYDAY 1973

"We only pass this way once, might as well pass by in a Cadillac."

Two years before Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) gave us an epic vision of America viewed through the “politics is show-biz” prism of the Country & Western music scene, Canadian television producer/director Daryl Duke (The Silent Partner -1978) and novelist Don Carpenter (Hard Rain Falling - 1966) made their collective feature film debuts with the audacious indie character-study Payday. 

Chronicling 36 full-throttle hours in the life of hell-raising, second-tier country music star Maury Dann (Rip Torn), the focus of Payday’s lens may be narrower than Nashville’s, but in its depiction of the squalid glamour of an entertainer’s life on the road—fast money, fast food, & fast-living—it provides a picture of '70s American culture that is no less funny, raw, or keenly-observed. And thanks to Torn's career-best performance, it feels considerably more authentic. For this road-movie odyssey (described by one critic as “A study in amorality without a moral”) Duke and Carpenter have devised a wittily apt visual metaphor for Nixon-era America: an all-white Cadillac speeding heedlessly along a highway at 95-miles-an-hour on a path predetermined to be the road to success, but is just as likely a collision course headed straightaway to a dead-end.

Rip Torn as Maury Dann

Ahna Capri as Mayleen Travis

Michael C. Gwynne as Clarence McGinty

Elayne Heilveil as Rosamund McClintock

Cliff Emmich as Chicago

Imagine a Nashville sequel that abandons the ensemble format and instead focuses entirely on Keith Carradine’s callous, womanizing balladeer, Tom Frank—his future, burn-out years—and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what Payday is like. 

Maury Dann is a 35-year-old country-western singer/songwriter who’s achieved an appreciable degree of success in his career (his face recognizable enough to get him out of speeding tickets, his name drawing sizable crowds and an unbroken chain of disposable, star-struck groupies to his roadhouse gigs); but he’s nonetheless driven just a little bit crazy by his so-close-you-can-almost-touch-it proximity to the " big time." 

A growly crooner of shrewdly sincere songs of homespun virtues, the oilily charismatic Dann...a toxic combination of hard-working and hard-living…tours the one-night-stand honkytonk circuit of the Deep South in his chauffeured, cowhide-interior Cadillac, girlfriend-of-the-moment in tow, subsisting on pot, pills, booze, junk food, and sex. More savvy businessman than impassioned artist, Dann is not without talent, but ambition, greed, and love of the perks of privilege have him living for the payday. And it’s not difficult to understand why. 

Maury Dann & the Dandies

Cocooned from both truth and consequences by a small but selflessly loyal entourage of enablers, Dann’s fame and wealth afford him both the means and wherewithal to support his ex-wife and three children (whose ages he can’t keep straight) while providing his pill-popping mother with ample supplies of amphetamines. All with plenty left over for payola payouts to influential disc jockeys and buying himself out of the numerous scrapes his hair-trigger temper and violent mood swings get him into.

Payday kicks off with Dann already three months into his breakneck tour, in Alabama and headed for Nashville where the success he’s desperate for beckons in the form of a vaguely promised appearance on Johnny Cash’s TV special (Dann bitterly hints that he and Cash have been kicking around for roughly the same amount of time). The goal is clear, but the challenge faced is whether or not Maury Dann can steer clear of self-destruct mode long enough to make it.

Were someone to ask me what I like so much about ‘70s films and what I think distinguishes them from motion pictures made in any other era, I would point to Payday as a film representative of precisely those inarticulable qualities I love so much, gravitate to, and often only find in the movies made during the New Hollywood years. What I mean is that I like when a movie feels as though it were made because the filmmaker had a story they wanted to tell. Not because of market research, the desire to make a mint, or as a result of lawyers fashioning a "package" out of the merging of mutual advantage contracts.

Payday suffered at the box-office because it didn't fit into any particular genre and its distributor couldn't find a way to market it.   

Henry O. Arnold as Ted Blankenship
A former waiter and longtime Maury Dann fan who aspires to be a songwriter

With so many of today's movies being greenlit only after their market viability has been analyzed to the nth degree, my perhaps rose-colored nostalgia for the '70s stems from the number of unique, personal, difficult-to-categorize, and downright weird movies that came out of that era.  

That being said, how is it then that I only got around to seeing Payday for the first time just a couple of years ago?

I remember when Payday came out in 1973. It was one of a spate of intimate, personal films released during the Vietnam/Nixon years that sought to challenge Hollywood’s outsized and outdated “mythic hero” tradition by training its lens on the small, often ineffectual lives of ordinary people (Kansas City Bomber, The Last American Hero, Play it As it Lays, Electra Glide in Blue). 

Jeff Morris as Bob Talley, a member of Maury Dann's band
Actor Jeff Morris would play another country boy named Bob in 1980s The Blues Brothers
- proprietor of the roadhouse Bob's Country Bunker

Payday--whose newspaper ads targeted the arthouse crowd in urban markets while (misleadingly) pitching itself as a Burt Reynolds-style redneck romp in rural districts--received laudatory reviews on its release, was selected to be shown out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival, and at the end of the year, appeared on many critics' Ten Best lists. Yet despite bearing all the potential earmarks of becoming a sleeper hit or "critic's darling" underdog during awards season, nominations were not forthcoming, audiences stayed away in droves, and Payday wound up disappearing from theaters faster than a knife fight in a phone booth. (Just keepin' in the spirit of things.)

Why didn’t I see it? Well for one, there were considerably bigger cinema fish for this teenage movie buff to fry in '73: The Exorcist, The Last of Sheila, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Way We Were, Lost Horizon. Second, not only did the idea of a movie set in the world of country music fail to grab me (it would take Nashville to kickstart my love of country music), but I didn’t know anything about its director, and the only person in the cast I’d ever heard of was Rip Torn. And what little I’d seen of him in supporting roles in Sweet Bird of Youth (1962) and You’re A Big Boy Now (1966) was impressive, but not enough to convince me that seeing Payday was a better weekend option than going to see The Poseidon Adventure for the fifth time. 

On the Road Again
Dann and his ever-busy road manager McGinty

Of course, after finally seeing Payday (three times, so far), I truly regret having missed out on the opportunity to see it on the big screen. And I wonder how seeing it would have impacted my experience of Nashville two years later. Payday impressed me with the way it manages to be so familiar (A Face in the Crowd, The Rose, I Saw The Light: The Story of Hank Williams), yet via its dimensional characterizations and insightful script, was capable of catching me totally off guard. Narratively, nothing went where I expected. I know my 15-year-old self would have been thoroughly enraptured by it all. I think Payday is one of the best films of 1973, and Rip Torn was robbed of a Best Actor Oscar nomination (especially when I think of Robert Redford's department store mannequin performance in The Sting clogging up the category that year).  

In one of the film's best scenes, real-life Tennessee disc jockey Earl Trigg portrays an unctuously coercive fictional radio DJ named Bob Dickey. Earl Trigg is a former child actor (billed as "Tookie" Trigg) who appeared in some 30 features and Our Gang comedies.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Out of a naïve-but-purposeful desire to be in a music star’s orbit, a central character in Payday allows herself to be swept up in the counterfeit glamour of Maury Dann’s chaos-addiction lifestyle, whisked away in his Cadillac headed for god-knows-where…without money, a change of clothes, or notice given to the 5 and Dime where her cashier services are anticipated the following day. 

Watching Payday for the first time felt a little like that.

Payday unfolds in a non-stop, barely-time-to-catch-your-breath style ideally suited to the subject matter. An intimate, almost documentary style that made me feel as though I had been invited to see a country singer perform (I’m crazy about Rip Torn’s voice! It’s not good, but it’s right) only to find myself the unwitting recipient of a front-row seat to the spectacle of a dishonorable man’s disintegration.

Maury Dann - Living for the Payday

McGinty - (referring to roadhouse owner) He wants a piece of the gate next time out.

Dann - People in hell want ice water, too.

Like its lead character, Payday hits the ground running and sweeps the viewer up in the garish allure (or morbid curiosity) of its authentically-rendered backstage view of life on the road. A world of grungy motel rooms with wood-paneled walls and chenille bedspreads that play host to after-hours poker parties, informal business meetings, impromptu jam sessions, and drunken sexual assaults cloaked in fame entitlement and groupie expectation. Rooms littered with beer cans, Jack Daniels bottles, cigar butts, Hardee’s cups, and fast-food wrappers. Capturing the isolated, on-the-move, “what town are we in?” feeling of being on tour, Payday depicts Dann’s life as an episodic string of personality-revealing vignettes. A kind of road odyssey of self-confrontation headed down the road toward the inevitable day of reckoning. 

MEETING IN THE LADIES' ROOM
Girlfriend #1 confronts potential girlfriend #2

Most movies set in the music industry are about performers who can’t handle success. What eats at Maury Dann is not having achieved the kind of success he thinks he deserves. Indeed, one senses that behind Dann’s manic restlessness, quick-trigger temper, and hell-raising antics, is a man terrified of standing still. As the late Daryl Duke states on the DVD commentary, if Dann ever stopped moving, he'd be forced to confront the fact that he's a failure. Certainly, a failure as a husband and a father and as a human being...but also in failing to achieve the stardom that's obviously so important to him. Realizing that it will forever be out of his reach, fading further into the distance with each passing year.

Just a liquored-up good ol' boy firing a gun out the window of a speeding car for fun

Like all malignant narcissists, Maury Dann goes through life challenging

 fate with the dare: What can't I get away with?

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Though my love for dark-themed movies is clear and well-chronicled, I nevertheless understand that most people, when faced with a movie whose main character is a lout and a heel, ask why they would want to spend time in the celluloid company of someone they’d cross the street to avoid in real life. 

Eleanor Fell as Galen Dann
Maury's ex-wife and mother to Billy, Kitty, and Elmore (Rip Torn's real name)

But the anti-hero trend in ‘70s films was always less about liking or even relating to the character in question; it was about confronting the "hero" myths we've bought into and examining the lies we tell ourselves through our traditional screen idols. The purpose served by the heroes of mainstream films was to perpetuate myths of honor and valor that flattered the audience's image of themselves. Hollywood in the '70s continued to lean into metaphorically simple concepts of evil and heroism: villains wore black hats, good guys were white, heteronormative males in the John Wayne tradition.

But the '70s reality is the same as it is today...the real villains don't wear black hats. They look like the people we had been taught to put our trust in and/or look up to: the politicians, the powerful businessman, the police, the celebrity, the military, the clergy. The '70s anti-hero...a by-product of the betrayals of Vietnam and Watergate, sought to make us look at the dark side of American myth and the traditional hero--in this instance, the family-values country-western singer--and in doing so, look at the dark side of ourselves as a society and a country.

Striking a Deal with the Devil
If you're famous and rich in America, there's no moral bottom
 you can hit that cannot be forgiven, enabled, or covered up 

In Payday Maury Dann is America. Or rather, those hypocritical aspects of American culture that seem to produce, reward, and encourage the Maury Dann’s of the world while simultaneously lying to itself about the supposed value it places in simpler virtues.

In Dann's relentless pursuit of money, fame, and the privilege perks of same (aka power) are written the very tenets of America's success ethic. Does it matter that in the achievement of these things, Dann has become a cruel and remorseless monster? Not likely. For Dann has learned--like most politicians, religious "leaders," and pop-culture celebrities--that for a public that loves to be lied to, having the appearance of being principled and moral is far more important than actually being those things.

Two Sets of Laws / Two Americas
Maury signs an autograph for a starstruck cop and gets out of a ticket in the bargain. Payday features several scenes showing Dann always being able to use his fame and wealth to skirt the law and avoid the consequences of his actions

It strikes me as both purposeful and perfect that Payday is set in the world of country music. As a genre that has long aligned itself with (and exploited) the so-called Christian, blue-collar, America's heartland, family values myth, it serves as the perfect illustrative metaphor exposing how America's persistent lies to itself have become its truth. The ethics of country singers are no more resistant to the usual temptations and corruptions of wealth and fame. In fact, their tendency to cloak themselves in the flag, the Bible, and those ever-illusory, gun-totin' "family values," likely makes them more susceptible to the sins of duplicity and hypocrisy.

Sex, Drugs, Country & Western

PERFORMANCES

Rip Torn’s raw, lived-in performance is the electrifying core of Payday. Bringing a homegrown gravitas to the character, Torn’s is the type of bravura screen performance given by an actor finally granted a role on scale with his talents (Don Carpenter wrote it with Torn in mind, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role). He's positively riveting. And though it sounds like just the kind of quote-ready critical assessment that movie publicity departments pray for, I genuinely think Rip Torn's performance in Payday is one of the best American screen performances of the '70s. 

Adding considerable support is Ahna Capri as Dann’s vigilant girlfriend, whose continued, hawk-eyed efforts to guard her interests are both amusing and reminded me of a pragmatic, more resilient version of Ann-Margret’s Bobbie Templeton in Carnal Knowledge. Very strong performances are also given by Elayne Heilveil, Michael Gwynne, and Cliff Emmich.

Payday is the day you get what your earn, what you work for, what you deserve. If you’re lucky, what you have coming to you on payday is what you expect. For the morally and spiritually bankrupt characters in Daryl Duke and Don Carpenter's brilliant first film, Payday might just be Judgement Day.

BONUS MATERIAL

Four of the original country songs in Payday’s soundtrack were written by the late, great Shel Silverstein: playwright, poet, cartoonist, author, and Grammy Award-winning songwriter (1969 Best Country Song “A Boy Named Sue”). Payday showcases the Silverstein compositions - “Slowly Fading Circle”, “Baby, Here’s a Dime”, and “Lovin’ You More” (whose chorus “I’m lovin’ you more but you’re enjoying it less” is [for those too young to take notice] a comic takeoff on the 1960’s Camel cigarettes slogan “Are you smoking more but enjoying it less?”). 

My personal favorite is “She's Only a Country Girl,” a catchy, drawling, earworm of a song that got stuck in my head for days after seeing this. It sounds like a song Henry Gibson's Haven Hamilton might have sung in Nashville. 

Payday features three more songs by different composers: “Road to Nashville”, “Flatland”, and “Payday” - leaving me wishing the film had been met with a little more success and produced a soundtrack album.

Elayne Heilveil, who portrays the naive-as-a-fox Rosamund McClintock in Payday, was the original Nancy Maitland (later played by Meredith Baxter) in the 1976 miniseries Family. That's her on the far right of this cast portrait that's so oddly staged that I suspect it's a composite. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2022