Forgotten Films: THE DION BROTHERS (aka The Gravy Train) (dir. Jack Starrett, 1974)
12/11/2006 6:30:00 PM
Jack Starrett’s loser crime comedy The Dion Brothers (aka The Gravy Train) has built up enough of a cult following that it’s a slight misnomer to call it a “forgotten” film. After all, it’s been featured as part of the infamous Austin geek-out QT Fest, the Ain’t It Cool News-approved, Quentin Tarantino-programmed festival of cult flicks, and Starrett himself, an actor-cum-director who put his name to a number of cult flicks, including 1973’s Cleopatra Jones, has gained something of a reputation over the years. (Sadly, though, it’s been a posthumous one – he died in 1989 at the age of 52.)
The Dion Brothers also holds added value for the average film buff, because its screenplay was co-written by Terrence Malick, who was reportedly also the original director of this film. (I can only assume he got the job after the critical success of Badlands.) Starrett replaced Malick, presumably sometime before production, and Malick’s credit now reads “David Whitney,” a pseudonym the reclusive writer-director has occasionally used.
The film is fairly simple, and could work as a virtual template for other hapless caper flicks – I found myself frequently reminded of Wes Anderson’s debut feature Bottle Rocket while watching it. We open with dreamer Calvin Dion (Stacy Keach) quitting his dead-end West Virginia cannery job, as he rips his clothes off and claims that he looks like Kirk Douglas. We next see Calvin’s younger, slightly dimmer brother Rut (Frederic Forrest) working in a coal mine being asked how his brother is doing up in Washington, DC. Somebody cracks that Calvin’s probably holding up liquor stores. Sure enough, we then cut to DC and see that Calvin has indeed become a small-time hood, working for slightly bigger small-time hood Tony (Barry Primus). Needing an extra hand for a big job they’re about to do, Calvin travels down to West Virginia to convince Rut to come up to DC with him. Calvin’s got dreams of opening a fancy seafood restaurant called The Blue Grotto, and he gets his brother all excited about the idea as well. Back in DC, the brothers get in on Tony’s scheme to rob an armored van. When the robbery goes wrong, however – possibly due to Tony’s duplicity – they find themselves on their own.
It would be silly to read too much of Terrence Malick’s personality into The Dion Brothers, but the early scenes do carry some of his trademarks. Both Rut and Calvin fit into a long line of slightly dim Malick-ian rebels who have issues with authority: When Rut decides to quit his job, he announces his intention by tossing his hardhat through his boss’s window, shattering the glass; it wouldn’t be hard to imagine Martin Sheen’s laid-back sociopath Kit Carruthers in Badlands doing something similar. And Calvin’s conviction that he looks like Kirk Douglas -- along with the various other movie references scattered throughout the script (“Anybody ever tell you you look like Deborah Paget?”) -- echoes the obsession with the same celebrity culture whose burgeoning seductiveness Malick captured so effectively in that earlier film.
But let’s be fair: This is a Jack Starrett film, and it’s full of his distinctive directorial touches: The film’s intense climax, a go-for-broke, bewilderingly chaotic shootout set inside a hotel while it’s being simultaneously demolished, is still eye-popping after all these years and could hold its own with any action film today. As he proved with Cleopatra Jones, Starrett had a unique ability to film complex action scenes. He deftly keeps all his balls in the air, while bringing to it all an immediacy and energy which suggest that he was the best genre director never to direct a James Bond flick.
He may not have directed a Bond flick, but Starrett did direct episodes of Starsky & Hutch and The Dukes of Hazzard, not to mention a Walking Tall sequel. His career took on a low-rent grindhouse journeyman trajectory – even as the mythical Malick became the darling of cognoscenti everywhere. What makes The Dion Brothers so special, then, is its ability to fuse these two, seemingly-irreconcilable temperaments within one coherent work – Starrett’s clear-eyed, tough-minded approach to action and performance, and Malick’s softer, but no less clear-eyed ability to quickly draw terse, likable characters and to create a uniquely odd milieu. The resulting film is decidedly unlike most other films you’ll see – but it’s a wonderful piece of filmmaking that deserves to be seen by many more people.
Sadly, The Dion Brothers rarely pops up anywhere, outside of really late night local TV. I managed to see it thanks to some enterprising eBayer and his VCR, and I seem to recall the film playing the Brooklyn Academy of Music some years ago (during – what else? – a Terrence Malick retrospective). Otherwise, good luck.
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| How funny is this? It's a lot easier to find a picture of recluse Terrence Malick on the web than it is to find one of Jack Starrett, who was a freakin' actor! |
--Bilge Ebiri
Previous Forgotten Films Columns:
- November 28, 2006 -- RACHEL, RACHEL (dir. Paul Newman, 1968)
- August 15, 2006 -- LEO THE LAST (dir. John Boorman, 1970)
- October 30, 2006 -- 7 WOMEN (dir. John Ford, 1966)
- October 16, 2006 -- REIGN OF TERROR (aka The Black Book) (dir. Anthony Mann, 1949)
- October 3, 2006 -- MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON (dir. Bob Rafelson, 1989)
- August 18, 2006 -- LUNA (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1979)
- August 28, 2006 -- OUR MOTHER’S HOUSE (dir. Jack Clayton, 1967)
- August 14, 2006 -- THE CHOCOLATE WAR (dir. Keith Gordon, 1988)
- July 31, 2006 -- THE STRANGER (dir. Luchino Visconti, 1967)
- July 17, 2006 -- WALKER (dir. Alex Cox, 1987)
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Video of the Day 2: Rex Reed on the 1970 Oscars
12/11/2006 4:45:00 PM
After that hilarious Rex Reed story earlier today, I just had to post this: Rex Reed on the Dick Cavett show in 1970 complaining about how the most deserving Oscar contenders of the year were in movies no one saw, and lamenting how it’s all become a popularity contest. My how the catty have fallen.
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What Really Went On Inside the NYFCC
12/11/2006 3:20:00 PM
More ultra-secret exclusive low-down on what happened inside the hallowed halls of the New York Film Critics Circle this morning. And much of it is actually pretty hilarious.
Marvel At...what Rex Reed thinks of this year's winner!
Observe...how one Andrew Sarris bathroom break almost threw the entire Oscar race into freefall!
Contemplate...the lengths to which film nerds will go to make sure the other side doesn't win.
Here are three anecdotes from an inside source for your chuckling enjoyment:
ANECDOTE 1: Best Picture wound up being the most contentious category. Most winners are decided on the second or third ballot; a handful require four. In this case, however, the fourth ballot was a tie between UNITED 93 and THE QUEEN, thus necessitating a rare fifth and tiebreaking ballot.
(First the room voted on whether or not to simply announce a tie in the category; almost nobody wanted to.) Of the 22 critics who were physically present (proxy votes having dropped out after ballot #2), 12 went for UNITED 93, giving it the squeakiest victory since Daniel Day-Lewis beat out Jack Nicholson in '02. Lisa Schwarzbaum suggested that since even this 12-10 vote was a virtual tie, we really ought to award Best Picture to both films. Nobody really agreed (but no vote was taken).
A brief silence. Then, the voice of Rex Reed.
"So that's it."
Pause.
"The best film of 2006."
Pause.
"According to the New York Film Critics Circle."
Pause.
"Is UNITED 93."
Long, uncomfortable pause, plus some tittering.
"A film that no one in America wanted to see."
Leah Rozen: "And how did you vote, Rex?"
ANECDOTE 2: Actually, even closer was the vote for Best Animated Film, which wound up going to HAPPY FEET on what amounts to a technical foul. Miller's penguin-fest beat out A SCANNER DARKLY by a mere two points, but no sooner had this result been announced than Andrew Sarris, who has taken a bathroom break a few minutes earlier, revealed that (1) he had neglected to submit his ballot for this round of voting, and (2) he would have cast his top vote for the Linklater, giving it the victory.
The bylaws don't cover this particular scenario, so far as I know. There was a fair amount of debate about whether or not Sarris' vote should be counted, and also whether this would entail doing the whole ballot over again. Ultimately, the decision was left to Marshall Fine, in his role as this year's chairman. Fine ruled that Sarris should be able to vote as he'd intended, and that his ballot would simply be added to the totals. Sarris confirmed that he was giving A SCANNER DARKLY three points. When asked what his second choice was, he answered FLUSHED AWAY, which wasn't in the running. When pressed for a third choice (worth one point), however, he came up blank. "I just wanted to vote for A SCANNER DARKLY," he said.
Various statisticians pointed out that (a) if he didn't name a third film, his vote for the Linklater would only count for two points instead of three, making it a tie that would require another round of voting, and (b) if he were to name HAPPY FEET as his third choice, that too would result in a tie. Sarris, who seemed a tad befuddled, simply reiterated his preference for SCANNER, at which point Owen Gleiberman complained that he felt Sarris was casting a vote for the sole purpose of altering the winner. Others made noises of assent, and Fine changed his ruling (with Sarris' blessing), saying the original point totals would stand and HAPPY FEET would receive the prize.
ANECDOTE 3: Not really an anecdote, but ARMY OF SHADOWS basically won Foreign Film thanks to a recurring fourth-ballot phenomenon that tends to occur when two rival camps actively dislike the other's favorite. On the fourth ballot, you can only vote for the five top vote-getters on ballot #3, which in this case were THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU, VOLVER, ARMY OF SHADOWS, PAN'S LABYRINTH and I think the last one was DAYS OF GLORY. Anyway, the category was a death-match between LAZARESCU, which led on ballots two and three, and VOLVER -- presumably you can see how these two films' partisans might not have a whole lot in common.
What often happens once we reach ballot #4 is that everyone names their champion first (for three points), and then gives second place (two points) to whatever film they consider least threatening. And then what happens is that a film that nobody loves gets every second-place vote in the room and winds up the surprise winner. That's exactly what happened with ARMY OF SHADOWS, which did have a few ardent supporters, but which could never have won if not for the pitched battle between Almodovar and Puiu.
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Steven Spielberg Embraces New-Fangled Invention Called “TV”
12/11/2006 3:00:00 PM
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| This picture will never be not funny |
Steven Spielberg is developing two new scripts for the Fox network. First is a drama “set in the world of high fashion and follow[ing] five twentysomething friends who work behind the scenes of the industry,” to be written by Edward Burns and his wife Christy Turlington. Second is a series written by Scott Gemmill project, “described as a one-hour drama that combines action and time travel with an epic love story. It revolves around two young physicists during the early part of World War II who find a way to ‘pinch’ time and travel to 2007 to try to bring back modern technology and help the war effort. While in the future, one of them falls in love with a woman whose mother hasn't been born yet.” Does he “pinch” her?
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Stars Speak Out, Stars Get Sued, Stars Get Arrested, Stars Are Tortured, Stars Get Released
12/11/2006 2:20:00 PM
- Turning 90, Kirk Douglas has gotten all Colonel Dax on our generation’s ass. In a birthday message to the world, he says, “Let's face it: THE WORLD IS IN A MESS and you are inheriting it. Generation Y, you are on the cusp. You are the group facing many problems: abject poverty, global warming, genocide, AIDS, and suicide bombers to name a few. These problems exist, and the world is silent. We have done very little to solve these problems. Now, we leave it to you. You have to fix it because the situation is intolerable. You need to rebel, to speak up, write, vote, and care about people and the world you live in…You are the generation that is most impacted and the generation that can make a difference.”
- Kate Winslet is pissed off about the “unbelievably disturbing” trend of “‘size zero’ female stars and models.” Says she: "What I resent is that there is an image of perfection that is getting thinner and thinner." Also, she refuses “to have magazines in the house because of the damaging effect it could have on her six-year-old daughter, Mia.”
- Legendary bad-boy producer Jon Peters, the man behind Superman Returns, Batman, and A Star is Born, is being sued, finally. Shelly Morita, Peters’s former assistant, claims he “often grabbed and kissed her and made ‘rude, sexual and disparaging comments.” She also alleges that Peters “exposed himself to her and her [three-year-old] daughter at his ranch, saying, ‘Look what boys have!’ and later joked about it to other employees.”
- Tax fugitive Wesley Snipes returns from Namibia, turns himself in, pleads not guilty, and is released on $1 million bail. Which he promptly claims as a deduction.
- A pair of chimpanzees who have appeared in episodes of That 70s Show and Evan Almighty have been set free after their renowned animal trainer Sid Yost got sued by the Animal Legal Defense Fund and other groups, who accused him of “using an electric shock stick on the chimps and punching, taunting and intimidating them…Sable, a female, and Cody, a male, have lived at Mr Yost's ranch in San Bernardino for five years with Angel, an older female, who will be shipped to Florida next week.”
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Video of the Day 1: Illeanarama: Episode 1
12/11/2006 1:50:00 PM
Illeana Douglas made this short film a couple of years ago, but has now repurposed it as an online series, in which Illeana, playing herself, gets tired of showbiz and goes to work in a supermarket – where she runs into Justine Bateman, among others.
(Hat tip: Green Cine Daily and Film Ick)
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This Week in Jesus
12/11/2006 1:20:00 PM
- Imagine honcho Brian Grazer’s wife Gigi Grazer is planning a romantic comedy featuring Jesus Christ, called Prodigal Son. “In the film, a woman falls in love with a caring carpenter who turns out to be Jesus Christ who has returned to Earth and is living in Los Angeles and working in Ikea.” Grazer says “the idea came to her when contemplating Britney Spears’s vagina (seriously) and how it might be one of the signs of the apocalypse.” We are so not making this up.
- The Iranians are producing a Jesus movie. Again, we are so not making this up. (Hat tip: Victor Morton.)
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New York Film Critics Circle Awards: Continuously Updated
12/11/2006 1:06:00 PM
(Since we seem to be faster than their own website, we figure we'll post them as they come up.)
Thanks to a furiously updating bud who will go nameless for now, here are the early results for the New York Film Critics Circle Awards:
Best Picture:
United 93
[This took five ballots.]
(Runners Up:
The Queen
The Departed)
[They appear to have decided on Picture early; stay tuned, there are a whole bunch of categories still. I will be updating them below the Best Picture winner, understandably...]
Best Director:
Martin Scorsese, THE DEPARTED
(Runners-up:
Stephen Frears, THE QUEEN
Clint Eastwood, LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA)
Best First Film:
Half Nelson
(Runners-up:
Little Miss Sunshine
A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints)
Best Actress:
Helen Mirren, THE QUEEN
(Runners-up:
Judi Dench, NOTES ON A SCANDAL
Meryl Streep, THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA)
Best Actor:
Forest Whitaker, THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND
(Runners-up:
Ryan Gosling, HALF NELSON
Sacha Baron Cohen, BORAT)
[Ladies and gentlemen, Forrest Whitaker and Helen Mirren are both one National Society of Film Critics Award away from a clean sweep of this thing.]
Best Foreign Film:
Army of Shadows
(Runners-up:
Volver
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu)
[Editor's Question: Does this mean it can't win Best Reissue?]
Best Non-Fiction Film
Deliver Us From Evil
(Runners-up:
49 Up
Borat (!!)
An Inconvenient Truth)
Best Animated Film:
Happy Feet
(Runners-up:
A Scanner Darkly
Cars)
Best Supporting Actor:
Jackie Earle Haley, LITTLE CHILDREN
(Runners-up:
Eddie Murphy, DREAMGIRLS
Steve Carell, LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE)
Best Supporting Actress:
Jennifer Hudson, DREAMGIRLS
(Runners-up:
Shareeka Epps, HALF NELSON
Catherine O'Hara, FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION)
Best Screenplay:
The Queen
(Runners-up:
The Departed
Little Miss Sunshine)
Best Cinematography:
Pan's Labyrinth
(Runners-up:
Curse of the Golden Flower
Children of Men)
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“Lookey” Von Trier: Losing It At Last?
12/11/2006 12:05:00 PM
Up until now, even when he’s failed, Lars Von Trier has been a fascinating and charismatic figure to watch: He had us eating out of the palm of his hand with that crazy Dogme95 stuff, and we were totally with him on his foray into Danish DV art-porn. And the whole Dogville concept, while it got a bit tired eventually, was pretty inspired at first. We did start having our doubts when he announced his latest film was being directed using the “Automavision technique, which involves allowing a computer to choose when to tilt, pan or zoom from a fixed camera position,” but we chalked it up to just Lars being Lars.
But now it looks like our man might have finally jumped the shark. His latest concept is the idiotically-titled “Lookey.” What is it? “The man behind films such as Dogville and The Idiots has included deliberate, out-of-context things in his latest film The Boss of It. It is these things, Von Trier explained, that are ‘Lookey.’” What does it all mean? "’For the casual observer it's just a glitch or mistake but for the initiated it's a riddle to be solved’…The idea is for the viewer to identify all the Lookeys in the film - said to be between five and seven - with a prize of 30,000 Danish kroner (£2,728) going to the first person to do so.”
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Awards Wrap-Up: The Onslaught Continues
12/11/2006 10:20:00 AM
A whole bunch of critics’ orgs announced awards this weekend (and we’ll have more later today), and so far here’s how it’s broken down in the four major categories (including last week’s National Board of Review announcement):
Los Angeles Film Critics Association
Best Picture: Letters From Iwo Jima
Best Director: Paul Greengrass, United 93
Best Actor: Forrest Whitaker, Last King of Scotland, Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat
Best Actress: Helen Mirren, The Queen
Boston Society of Film Critics
Best Picture: The Departed
Best Director: Paul Greengrass, United 93
Best Actor: Forrest Whitaker, Last King of Scotland
Best Actress: Helen Mirren, The Queen
New York Film Critics Online
Best Picture: The Queen
Best Director: Stephen Frears, The Queen
Best Actor: Forrest Whitaker, Last King of Scotland
Best Actress: Helen Mirren, The Queen
Washington, DC Film Critics
Best Picture: United 93
Best Director: Martin Scorsese, The Departed
Best Actor: Forrest Whitaker, Last King of Scotland
Best Actress: Helen Mirren, The Queen
National Board of Review
Best Picture: Letters From Iwo Jima
Best Director: Martin Scorsese, The Departed
Best Actor: Forrest Whitaker, Last King of Scotland
Best Actress: Helen Mirren, The Queen
Movie City News has a pretty good chart here, which will be continuously updated. (The New York Film Critics Circle will announce later today.)
Notice something? Well, aside from the fact that Forrest Whitaker and Helen Mirren have run the board so far, there appears to be little love, at least from these early critics’ orgs, for presumed Oscar frontrunner/shoo-in/unstoppable-juggernaut Dreamgirls. (It has won Best Supporting actress from the New York Film Critics Online and the DC Critics, two of the less influential groups in this batch.) A similar dearth of critical awards followed Chicago, so it shouldn’t be cause for too much concern; at the very least, that perceived snub will have been corrected come the Golden Globe Nominations later this week. Remember, Oscar voters are not critics. Oscar voters are mostly actors and technicians. And actors and technicians love big, bold, show-stopping musicals with outsize performances and garish sets. (As long as they’re not directed by Joel Schumacher.)
The other interesting thing seems to be that Warner’s decision to release Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima early, following the box-office disappointment of Flags of Our Fathers, has worked: If it had been released in February 2007, it would have been hard to see it garnering such awards next December. Does it have a shot at the big award at the Oscars? Probably not – but one suspects that Eastwood’s chance for a directing nod may have increased. Releasing two award contender epics in the same year is certainly impressive.
That said, it’d be a bit dispiriting to think that Marty might lose this one again. Even if Dreamgirls winds up cleaning up, and even if the Academy hasn’t gotten over its Clint fixation, I do hope they will find the heart to show Scorsese due love this year.
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Morning Deal Report: Raimi In The Shadow, Bullock A Guy, Matt Damon Kirk?
12/11/2006 10:00:00 AM
- So, after all that speculation about Sam Raimi producing a film starring a bunch of pulp heroes including The Shadow, turns out he’s basically just producing a film of The Shadow: After a lengthy negotiation, Columbia has acquired the screen rights to The Shadow, the legendary 1930s pulp hero, for a big-screen adaptation to be produced by Raimi and Josh Donen through their Buckaroo Entertainment banner.” Siavash Farahani will write the screenplay. So, given Alec Baldwin’s 1994 version, will this be the quickest franchise re-do since the days of Tarzan? I suppose if that oft-promised Hulk remake materializes, that will be a quicker turnaround.
- Sandra Bullock will star in and produce the comedy One of the Guys, about “a true guy's gal (Bullock) who throws her all-male circle of friends into chaos when she embraces her feminine side.”
- Matt Damon actually says he’d be open to the idea of playing Kirk in a Star Trek remake. Relax. He said he’d do it “if the script was good.” And when was the last time a Star Trek script was good?
- Little Miss Sunshine directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris are negotiating to direct Little Children and Election novelist Tom Perrotta’s forthcoming novel The Abstinence Teacher, for Warner Independent Pictures. The book “is set in small-town middle America, where a divorced sex-education teacher and mother of two is forced to contend with the town's more conservative groups. While fighting to keep her freedom to teach students about sex, she finds herself falling for her daughter's born-again soccer coach.”
- Richard Kelly has announced that he has finally locked picture on the re-cut of his post-apocalyptic sci-fi extravaganza Southland Tales, reporting that the current runtime “now stands at 137 mins, a full 27 minutes shorter than the ‘work-in-progress’ version shown to much derision at this year's Cannes Film Festival.” No word yet on when the Donnie Darko director’s new film will actually be released, though.
- Nicolas Cage has done enough acting for a while, he says, and “plans to take time off from acting to concentrate on interests, including developing independent film-making.”
- The New York Times reports on the charmed making of Sundance contender Grace Is Gone, an Iraq drama in which John Cusack plays “a man whose wife is killed in battle, and who then has to break the news to their two young daughters.”
- In their everlasting quest to make films about the stupefyingly obvious, the Broken Lizard boys are now reportedly thinking about making “an animated R-rated film that could very well be a pseudo-sequel to Beerfest, titled Potfest.” Apparently this will be the “ultimate stoner film.” Because God knows we don’t have enough of those.
- Rolf De Heer’s Ten Canoes, which premiered at Cannes and is “Australia's first Aboriginal language movie,” has won six Australian Film Institute awards, including best film, best direction, and best screenplay. (There will be more awards news, this time from films you’ve actually heard of, in a forthcoming post today.)
- Bing Crosby is to have the theatre where he performed as a youth renamed in his honour.
The Met Theater in downtown Spokane, Washington, where the young Bing Crosby performed while a youth, is being renamed the Bing Crosby Theater.
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