All posts by Rod Lott

Mystery

4 Dick Tracy Movies from RKO Pictures

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dicktracycueballDick Tracy! Calling Dick Tracy!

Long before Warren Beatty gave us his big-budget, candy-coated adaptation of the legendary and long-running Chester Gould comic strip, Morgan Conway and Ralph Byrd donned the yellow fedora of homicide detective Dick Tracy in a series of four films.

RKO Pictures was “true to the flavor” of the funny papers without resorting to camp. While the studio didn’t exactly nail it, it didn’t botch the job, either. Each pic clocks in at one hour, give or take — just the right length for these none-too-complex crime stories.

dicktracydetectiveDick Tracy, Detective (1945)
With Conway starring, Dick Tracy, Detective is hot on the trail of the slasher Splitface (The Centerfold Girls’ Mike Mazurki), so named for his hideous facial scar. Two die before Tracy starts to get wise, nabbing the villain with the help of wannabe-private eye Junior, and rescuing true love Tess Trueheart (Anne Jeffreys, Zombies on Broadway) in the process.

Dick Tracy’s Dilemma (1947)
Following the theft of a bunch of furs in an insurance scam, square-jawed Tracy (Byrd, who also played the hero in the serials and the TV show) is on the hunt for The Claw, (Jack Lambert, 1946’s The Killers), a burly, hulking bad guy with a metal hook for a hand, in Dick Tracy’s Dilemma. The utensil comes in handy for knocking people out and cutting up their faces. Meanwhile, Tess (Kay Christopher, Gasoline Alley) gets stood up repeatedly because Dick’s priorities are all out of whack, and has to spend much of her time with effeminate actor Vitamin Flintheart (Ian Keith, It Came from Beneath the Sea), who likes to perform Shakespeare monologues. But of course he does. All in all, it’s a painless hour of good-ol’-fashioned fun.

dicktracygruesomeDick Tracy vs. Cueball (1946)
Essentially, Dilemma is a carbon copy of the previous year’s Dick Tracy vs. Cueball, right down to the bumbling cop sidekick who gets hit over the head by the bad guy so often, it’s a wonder he’s alive, still on the force and without a cap in his ass. In Cueball, the main villain is the burly, hulking, bald baddie Cueball (Dick Wessel, TV’s Riverboat), thick-neck-deep in a stolen-diamonds scam. Vitamin even shows up to make some remarks about wanting to be a woman. But of course he does.

Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947)
Finally, in Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome, ex-con Gruesome (Frankenstein’s monster himself, Boris Karloff) leads a trio of bank robbers who commit their crimes thanks to a formula that causes people to freeze. As one might guess, Gruesome is sillier than the others, filled with jokey names like Professor A. Tomic; his assistant, I.M. Learned; and the taxidermist Y. Stuffem. And if Tracy (Byrd) works homicide, what’s he doing investigating a bank robbery?

In all four films, virtually every man wears a hat. —Rod Lott

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Action

Death Race (2008)

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deathraceIb Melchior’s short story “The Racer” — the source material for 1975’s Roger Corman-produced cult classic Death Race 2000 — doesn’t even receive credit in the 2008 remake Death Race until the very end. No big deal — it bears little resemblance to the story, anyway.

That 10-pager — I first encountered it in the Forrest J. Ackerman-edited anthology Reel Future — is little more than a quick morality tale, about Hank and Willie, two guys with a car equipped with bull’s horns on the front, competing in a cross-country race in which scores are obtained by mowing down pedestrians. They’re skilled at making kills until one of them starts imagining the face of his daughter on all of their targets, and decries his participation.

deathrace1For Corman, screenwriter Charles B. Griffith (The Little Shop of Horrors) and director Paul Bartel (Eating Raoul) just took that core idea of the race and amped it up with a bevy of colorful characters with crazy names — Hank or Willie simply wouldn’t do — like Frankenstein, Machine Gun Joe, Calamity Jane, Matilda the Hun and Nero the Hero. They also kept the bull’s horns.

For Hollywood’s big-budget remake and these PC times, however, mowing down innocent people for sport won’t do, so writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson (Resident Evil) makes his competition internal, in an enclosed track on a prison island. The drivers are hardened criminals; five victories and freedom is granted, according to icy warden Joan Allen (Face/Off).

In the ’75 film, former Kung Fu master David Carradine was the star, a heavily scarred racer named Frankenstein who hid his face behind a mask for much of the film. In this ’08 model, Frankenstein is the race’s superstar, but it doesn’t matter much who’s behind the mask. When the first Frank dies in an earlier Death Race, the warden asks new felon Jensen Ames (original Transporter Jason Statham) to take the name and get behind the wheel. Of course, Statham looking like Statham, he only has to wear the mask in a couple of scenes because no one can see through the windows of his souped-up Ford Mustang.

The one element from Melchior’s tale that the new film makes use of is the idea of the daughter. Here, she’s a newborn, but she drives Ames’ conscience. It’s a little out of place and feels tacked on at the end, but doesn’t detract from a stupidly enjoyable hour and a half. Bartel’s film was an all-out satire; Anderson’s is an all-out actioner. Melchior’s “The Racer” lay not quite committed to either. —Rod Lott

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Documentary

The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (2015)

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jinxTechnically, the year’s finest documentary isn’t even a movie, but a six-episode HBO miniseries: The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst. I prefer to think of Andrew Jarecki’s project as a four-and-a-half-hour film; so binge-worthy is the true-crime narrative that you may wish to consume it in a single sitting, if not actually hunker down and do just that. Like the metaphorical cliché holds for many a hardcover whodunit, I just couldn’t put it down.

While Jarecki is best-known for his Oscar-nominated doc, 2003’s Capturing the Friedmans, he made a foray into more conventional filmmaking with the 2010 Ryan Gosling/Kirsten Dunst mystery, All Good Things, a fictionalized retelling of the Robert Durst saga. For those of us living outside the Big Apple’s haute ZIP codes, Durst long has been the scorned scion of his family’s eponymous real-estate empire. Following the limited release of Things — in which, it should be noted, Gosling plays a character named not Bob Durst, but David Marks — the press-avoiding Durst contacted Jarecki with a proposition: that the director interview him on camera, so that he could share his side of the story.

jinx1Given that Durst avoids the press, this move was highly unusual … and one he’s likely to regret deeply, if he doesn’t already.

See, despite his silver-spoon upbringing and all the millions that grew alongside him, Durst allegedly is a murderer three times over, yet somehow escaped arrest and/or prison sentencing each time, starting with his first wife, who disappeared in 1982, and most recently where The Jinx begins: with the 2001 discovery of a dismembered torso in Galveston Bay. Says one of many interviewees, “He’s not crazy. He’s diabolical.”

And endlessly fascinating. With black pools for eyes, the 70-something Durst is not entirely unsympathetic, even with the sky-high likelihood of committing such heinous, disturbing acts. Viewers may find themselves struggling with the realization that they feel a tinge of sorrow for him, even while recognizing that every sentence emerging from his mouth reeks of calculated bullshit.

The less you know about Durst going in, the more compelling The Jinx will be; even if you are familiar with its celebrated and controversial outcome, the series is riveting all the same. Remaining admirably epic while achieving cohesion, Jarecki’s Jinx owes a sizable debt to Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line; like that 1988 groundbreaker and Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost trilogy, it stands as a work of extraordinary journalism, in which the doggedness of the filmmaker “writes” a new ending stranger than any fiction. —Rod Lott

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Mystery

The Scarlet Claw (1944)

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scarletclawOne from the 14-film Sherlock Holmes franchise’s middle, The Scarlet Claw is the most overtly supernatural of the bunch, but we all know Holmes (Basil Rathbone) isn’t a believer in such things. The same can’t be said for Lord Penrose (Paul Cavanagh, 1953’s House of Wax), whose wife becomes the latest victim of a rumored marsh monster that has the village of La Mort Rouge gripped in fear.

Just like the following year’s Pursuit to Algiers, this flick stands at more of a B level than the earlier pictures, yet at 74 minutes, it’s so quick, it can’t help but be fun. As with all of them, it’s difficult not to want to watch at least two in a row.

scarlettclaw1jpgRathbone makes an excellent Holmes, so much so that we tend to picture him when he think of the character. He enjoys a natural rapport with Nigel Bruce, too, although this Watson of the screen isn’t Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Watson of the page; here, the doctor is reduced to a bumbling, occasionally pigheaded sidekick, rather than the detective’s equal. That’s not really a complaint, but an observation.

But here’s one complaint: Typical of the studio pictures of their era, these films are prone to musical numbers in which a character sings an entire song — or several — apparently because audiences liked that sort of thing. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Stay Alive (2006)

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stayaliveI realize the lack of originality in referring to Stay Alive as Stay Awake, but hell, does it ever fit! Beyond being free of original thought, this film makes its own case as the dumbest teen-slasher pic to emerge from a major studio in the post-Scream era. In a world of I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, Disturbing Behavior and Wes Craven’s Cursed, that’s really saying something.

Directed and co-written by The Devil Insider William Brent Bell, Stay Alive borrows the chief conceit of A Nightmare on Elm Street — die in a dream, you die in real life — and replaces “dream” with “video game.” Not Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, but the titular “underground” and unreleased game, which pits players’ avatars against 16th-century blood countess Elizabeth Bathory in a spooky mansion. Die during gameplay and you … well, we’ve covered that.

stayalive2When that happens to his best friend, young Hutch (Jon Foster, 2013’s Mr. Jones) gathers his fellow gamers for a LAN party to see what’s what. This is where Stay Alive immediately goes off the pixelated rails, as you won’t care about any of his utterly vapid pals and their utterly stupid names — not his brooding girlfriend, October (Sophia Bush, 2007’s The Hitcher); not Swink (Frankie Muniz, TV’s Malcolm in the Middle), who wears a poker visor sideways and upside down because he’s “cool”; and especially not October’s über-annoying sibling, Phineus (Jimmi Simpson, Zodiac), he of the “Who Farted?” T-shirt and mannerisms that suggest a neglected prescription refill for Ritalin. (Upon its release, this film served as my introduction to Simpson, and it made me hate him. I’ve since seen him do great work several times over, but it demonstrates the danger of being saddled with thankless douchebag roles.)

The screenplay by Bell and writing/producing partner Matthew Peterman (Wer) is as predictable as a preschooler’s connect-the-dots worksheet. Every insipid move is a given; every inevitable kill is heralded in advance, like the midnight ride of Paul Revere. At least one of the de rigueur death sequences generates a doozy of a line, delivered in earnest grief: “Hutch, somebody ran my brother down in a horse-drawn carriage. I’m gonna find whoever did it and hurt them.” Neigh. —Rod Lott

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