Death Wish
Dir: Michael Winner
Prod: Hal Landers, Bobby Roberts, Michael Winner, Dino de
Laurentiis (uncred.)
Scr: Wendell Mayes
Phot: Arthur J. Omitz
July 24, 1974
The Longest Yard
Dir: Robert Aldrich
Prod: Albert S. Ruddy
Scr: Tracy Keenan Wynn
Phot: Joseph F. Biroc
August 30, 1974
Lake Shore Drive In
17th Avenue and Sheridan Boulevard
Edgewater CO
Into the valley of
misanthropy, misogyny, and substance abuse we go.
No, I’m not talking about a trip to the Elks’ Club (kidding
guys -- Dad was a faithful member. The hour of 11 has a tender significance.)
I’m talking about the drive-in trash we undoubtedly were,
the last wave of the target demographic for the boom in films projected
outdoors and watched from your car. My latest historical tally of drive-in
theaters in the Denver/Boulder area runs to 21 – marvelous names such as the Star
Vu, the Kar-Vu, the Star-Lite, and the Motorena, as well as the prosaic Compass
Drive-In chain, which consisted of the North, South, East, and West, and others.
The first one to go up was the East, in 1947. The Valley Drive-In
came down in 1977, and housing developments began to gobble up the rest. By the
time we were parents ourselves, there were few left, and most of them were
eyesores that collected wind-blown garbage crucified against the chain-link
perimeter fences, and abandoned furniture and clothing in the rear corners of
the lots.
Now, outdoor cinema is booming. For the first time in
decades, a new drive-in was built and opened, in 2015 – the Denver Mart at I-25
and 58th. Of the original drive-ins, only one survived, the
venerable and renovated 88 at 8780 Rosemary in Commerce City. That it did is a
tribute to its unwieldy location – in a largely industrial area smack up
against the former Rocky Mountain Arsenal. It’s as close as you’re going to get
today to the vintage experience.
Our Denver days were marked with drive-ins. The night we
moved to town, we stayed in a motel that overlooked the Wadsworth Drive-In –
and there, moving with silent authority, was the 40-foot-tall Cinerama puss of
Sean Connery as James Bond in You Only
Live Twice. This was a mind-blowing experience I deal with more thoroughly
here at an earlier Formative Film chapter.
Of course, we went a lot as a family (it was cheaper, even
more so if they charged by the carload). You brought your own food (and dad
brought his beer, both parents smoking freely, at will, copiously) and you
jammed a filthy metal speaker, looking like a refugee from a steampunk/Flash
Gordon collision, into the viselike grip of your driver’s-side window against
the doorframe of your car.
We put on our jammies and ran around like little maniacs,
high on Mountain Dew (no one thought it had caffeine in it) and Sugar Babies,
playing on the little playground that, unfortunately for all al fresco
cinephiles actually trying to enjoy the film, set right in front of the screen.
We stuck with the Wadsworth, and included the Nor-West sometimes. After a few years of this, we kids got bored. We dawdled back
and forth from the snack bar, and crept into the back of the lot, where it seemed
more interesting things were happening. We could smell weird things burning,
and hear the clink of bottles, and the windows of some of the cars were steamy
and some weren’t and guys yelled at us to get the fuck out of there.
This was for us! When did we get on this action?
Later than sooner, my friends starting getting their driver’s
licenses. At last, we had scroungy little half-jobs and had a little folding
money. (Allowances were for rich kids, no one of whom we knew. We thought they looked
like Reggie in the Archie comics – tennis racquet, sneer.) We gathered our
forces. Once we had accumulated four cars and someone who looked old enough to
buy beer, we planned our escape.
We determined to go to the Lake Shore, at 17th
and Sheridan across from Sloan’s Lake, for two reasons. One, none of our
parents would go there and two, there was a giant tear in the chain-link fence
at the dimly-lit southeast corner rear of the lot. Scouting missions consisting of smaller
groups had successfully penetrated the perimeter in recent, evaluative forays.
It was time to get most of the 27 14-to-16-year-olds in for free. (At other times, did we really use to smuggle people in the trunk to save money? Absolutely.)
They dropped us off in small groups, the advantage of we
immediately canceled out by gathering together and creeping noisily along under some streetlights. I’m sure that, if we had looked deep into the minds of those
running the theater, we would have found the words COULD CARE LESS. No one
jumped us as we contorted through the gash in the mesh.
Trunks full of illicitly purchased beer, the quartet of
vehicles made their way into the entertainment area, springs squeaking,
headlights bouncing violently up and down. The preferred method of speed
control in drive-in lots was to make every path a moto-cross-like pattern of
hill and gully. Many a brave muffler was struck off its prime. Finally, the
show began.
I had never deliberately sat own and had a beer before. Of
course, there were the humiliating public sips proffered by adults, who laughed
uproariously when you tried it and made a face. I still made a face. It still
tasted awful. Still I worked at it in as manfully a manner as I could muster.
My friend Carl Johnson was a lot better at it. We always
called him by his full name; it had always been thus. Carl Johnson was my soul
brother forever, as we had listened to Wish
You Were Here for the first time together. Minds blown. Carl Johnson was
cracking beers and cackling.
This was really new cinematic territory for us. We were
finally breaking into brown-up films. That we started with Death Wish was unfortunate. This is the genre film that started the
whole film and TV cycle of grim men with big guns taking the law into their own
hands, until we were flooded with wisecracking vigilantes.
The impulse is understandable. The country was in the trough
of apathy, distrust, and cynicism. The economy was lousy (remember the New York
Daily News headline of October 30, 1975, “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD”). The cities
were crime- and drug- and poverty-infested shitholes – ironically, the war-zone
New York City of my later youth. People felt powerless, especially insecure
middle-aged professional white men, oddly the first to feel aggrieved if not emasculated
by anything less than smooth control of their environment and others.
Enter Paul Kersey, architect. He’s played in Death Wish by Charles Bronson, who was
at the apex of his popularity. He went to Europe to make a name for himself in
movies such as Once Upon a Time in the
West and Rider on the Rain, and
now the French called him the monster sacre
– the holy monster. He was cranking out a string of tough-guy actioners, but
Kersey is a more troubled soul.
In fact, Brian Garfield’s original novel specifically
condemns vigilantism and gun violence. Director Michael Winner took it the
opposite way, invoking metaphors from and references to movie Westerns to
instill an Old West mentality into Kersey, making him the archetypal good man
pushed into violent action after his wife and daughter are assaulted by thugs.
The initial assault is one of the most problematic in film,
just as disturbing as Peckinpah’s Straw
Dogs three years earlier, and much less thoughtful. Kersey’s wife and
daughter, barely sketched as personalities, are ambushed in their Manhattan
apartment. The wife is killed and the daughter is graphically sexually
assaulted. In fact, pretty much every woman in this film is a victim.
Even at that young age, beer in my lap, it did not feel
right. In that scene, the camera is a bystander, a voyeur. The shots are not
trying to invoke our compassion, they are not condemning what we see, they are
simply recording sexual humiliation, making a sex object out of the character
just as much as the thugs are. An anti-crime film is trying to have it both
ways, to ogle the forbidden while condemning it. My eyes were drawn to it, and
I felt bad. (That one of the thugs is Jeff Goldblum in his film debut doesn’t
help any. When viewing today. There are a surprising number of familiar faces here
– the always-great Vincent Gardenia, and Christopher Guest, Olympia Dukakis,
Paul Dooley, Al Lewis, William Redfield, and Sonia Manzano, Maria of Sesame Street fame. She recommended Herbie
Hancock, who wrote a great score for the film)
Of course Bronson is up to the challenge of baiting,
hunting, and killing no-goods, all poor, few Caucasian. People are no damn
good, rehabilitation is a joke, might as well blow them away. The message here
has the simple appeal of brutality – it is swift, unthinking, undiscriminating,
easy to implement. It turns live problems into corpses. Death Wish gave gun nuts, open-carry martyrs, and murderers scads
of justification and positive reinforcement – Bernie Goetz, anyone? The
epidemic of would-be gunslingers, springing up and killing randomly almost every
day? It would be much appropriate if Brronson just sodomized every bad guy he came across. As another classic 1974 film, "Zardoz," puts it, "The Gun is good! The penis is evil!"
And of course having a random killer on the streets in Death Wish really helps keep the crime
rate down, so the cops love him. When he’s wounded and captured, the police let
him leave town. “By sundown?” Bronson ripostes, his flinty eyes glinting even
under sedation. The last we see of him, he’s pointing his finger at some
punk-ass teens. Our psychopathic hero inspired four sequels.
By the time this film was over, I was busy helping Carl
Johnson puke. “It’s OK, Carl Johnson,” I said as I patted his back. “BLUKKKUKGAK,”
he replied. On to our second feature!
The original version of The
Longest Yard was much more upbeat. Burt Reynolds as a washed-up former
quarterback leads a wacky bunch of misfit imprisoned underdogs – a kooky mélange
of murderers and rapists -- against the prison guards in a game and wins, and
Burt learns about himself and grows as a human being and all that stuff.
Unfortunately, he gets to jail by assaulting a woman, which
we get to watch. He’s drunk at the time, and she’s a “bitch,” which evidently
makes grappling her by the face, throwing her to the ground, and stealing her
car an amusing comeuppance. This is not the wit of Cary Grant face-shoving
Katherine Hepburn in The Philadelphia
Story. It’s ugly.
The only other woman in the film is played by Bernadette
Peters. She’s the warden’s secretary who hands over game film of the guards --
in return for sex with Burt of course. Oh, ladies.
While we absorbed all these subliminal moral lessons and the
beer, the climactic football game came up. We dashed to the restrooms and stole
all the toilet paper. Every time the convicts scored, we launched huge, curling
ropes of t.p. at and over the screen, hooting and shouting, flashing our
lights, honking our car horns and jumping up and down. Except for Carl Johnson.
By now he was fast asleep.
Next time: Rocky Horror and the rage for living
Next time: Rocky Horror and the rage for living
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