Washington Examiner 12/27/09

(Click on photo for larger image)

Ocean Grove, morning light 12/24/09

Kirkus' last gasp

As most of you know, the venerable Kirkus Reviews, part of Nielsen Business Media, is shutting down for good this month after 76 years in the business (also folding is its sister pub., Editor and Publisher, after 108 years). However, Kirkus did manage to sneak a review of GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER into its final issue.

GONE ’TIL NOVEMBER
Wallace Stroby
(Starred review)


As if it weren’t nerve-wracking enough to be a deputy and a mom, suddenly she’s a target.

Privacy’s a joke in tiny Hopedale, Fla. So when Deputy Sara Cross and Deputy Billy Flynn become lovers, everybody knows it almost before they do. Nor does it stay news long when two years later they break up. Sara’s coming to her senses, conventional wisdom maintains, since everybody also knows that for all his charm and good looks, Billy lacks substance, whereas all you have to do is watch Sara mothering her ailing six-year-old son to know that she’s a rock. But rock or no, Sara is one of those women who all too often lets her heart rule her head, and on the night of a fatal shooting, part of her senses that it’s a mistake to accept Billy’s version of how it all went down. Yes, the explanation is plausible; yes, there are weapons stashed away in the young black man’s car; and yes, when Billy fired it might well have been by the book. But soon enough strangers arrive in Hopedale—hard, big-city, dangerous men following stolen money, who are after Billy because they’re sure he knows where it is. And after Sara, certain she does, too.

A strong cast and energetic storytelling. But it’s Sara, so human and so beset, who makes this another standout for Stroby.

Happy Holidays

Spam, spam, spam, spam ....

... so I'm going to turn Comment Moderation on until this storm of Asian spam and escort service links blows over.

Quick updates, Pt. 2

+ My piece on the 1973 film THE OUTFIT, based on Donald E. Westlake's third "Richard Stark" novel, is up over at Steve-O's Noir of the Week blog (that's the film's Italian poster above). Some great stuff there, including a pair of excellent essays by Megan Abbott on CLASH BY NIGHT and PRIVATE HELL 36.


+ The tour is shaping up like this (some details tentative, more to come):

JAN. 29 - Book People, Austin, Texas, 7 pm.

JAN. 30 - Murder by the Book, Houston, Texas, 5 p.m., with James W. Hall and Bob Morris.

FEB. 5 - Mysterious Bookshop, N.Y.C., 6:30 p.m.
APRIL 13 - New York Public Library, Fifth Ave. and 40th, 6:30-8:30. Panel discussion on "Crime Scenes: From Cities to the Back of Beyond; Why and How Mystery Writers Choose Their Settings," with Lorenzo Carcaterra, Peggy Ehrhart, Henry Chang, Julia Pomeroy and Laura Joh Rowland.
OCT. 14-17 - BoucherCon, San Francisco, Calif.
NOV. 4-7 - NoirCon, Philadelphia, Pa.

Quick updates

A little stopgap news as we head toward the end of the year and into 2010:

- Tantor Media will release an unabridged audio version of GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER in January, read by actress Karen White.

- Thorndike Press will publish a Large Print edition of GTN in 2010 as well (might be needing that one soon myself).

- I'm now on Facebook!

- I'll have a poem, titled "Independence Day, 1976," in the next edition of THE LINEUP: POEMS ON CRIME, due out in April. That issue will also include works by James W. Hall, James Sallis, Reed Farrel Coleman and Patti Abbott, among others.

- On Dec. 14, I'll be guesting on Steve Eifert's great Noir of the Week blog, with a piece on 1973's THE OUTFIT, the Robert Duvall film based on the Donald E. Westlake/Richard Stark novel of the same name. All I have to do now is finish writing it.

- There's a little bit of a tour taking shape, bit by bit, more info soon.

- Speaking of noir, this week I finally caught up with Peter Yates' THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE (also released in 1973, a good year for noir and films in general - SERPICO, BADLANDS, CHARLEY VARRICK, DILLINGER, EMPEROR OF THE NORTH, THE LONG GOODBYE, MEAN STREETS and THE SEVEN-UPS all came out that year). I'd seen bits and pieces of it on television, but never the film in its entirety. Criterion just put out a DVD version a few months back, with a restored print and a commentary by Yates (he also directed BULLITT, the Brit noir ROBBERY and Westlake's THE HOT ROCK, and was developing the Stark novel DEADLY EDGE before the project fell through).

COYLE is the antidote to most gangster films - it's low-key and downbeat, as chilly as its late-November Boston locales. But it's quite brilliant too, and steadfastly faithful to the George V. Higgins novel. It does for the underworld what REQUIEM FOR A DREAM does for heroin addiction - it makes you very happy not to be part of it.

NORTH BY NORTHWEST revisited

On an impulse last week, I picked up the new 50th anniversary edition of Alfred Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST. Hadn't seen it in decades, and then only on commercial television, so the restored 2-disc DVD set gave me an excuse to take my first look at it in years.

It's a great movie. Or maybe that should be, it's a great movie.

That's because, watching it, it occurs to me it's as close to pure cinema as most films get. It's a confection that works only as a movie. As a novel, it would make no sense. As a television series, it would seem redundant and silly (though shows like CHUCK and BURN NOTICE owe a debt to it). On radio, it would be absurd. But as a film, it's an almost perfect merger of images and sound, expertly used to evoke emotions. It's funny, it's suspenseful, it's beautiful to look at and, despite its two-hour-plus length, it moves like lightning.

On the face of it, Hitchcock's tale of an advertising executive (Cary Grant) mistaken for a spy and chased cross-country by enemy agents, police and his own government, bears no resemblance to reality. In the first place, it's Cary Grant, not exactly the American Everyman. Secondly, the plot mechanisms that launch the chase are outlandish bordering on ludicrous. An assassination in the U.N. lobby is nearly a parody in itself, and fifteen minutes into the film, when the villains have poured a bottle of bourbon into Grant and set him behind the wheel of a sports car careening along a cliffside Long Island road, one wonders why he doesn't just pull over to the shoulder. But they're both great sequences, rich with color and detail and enhanced by Bernard Herrman's iconic score (for an earlier variation on it, check out his orchestration for Nicholas Ray's 1952 noir ON DANGEROUS GROUND).

The same applies to the film's most famous sequence, in which a crop-dusting plane chases Grant's Roger Thornhill along an empty Indiana road. It's one of the great scenes in cinema, despite the fact it makes little sense. Why lure a man out into the middle of nowhere and then try to kill him with a plane, of all things? (Not to mention, if the plane had actually hit him, it would likely have crashed). Certainly a bullet in the head and a quick drop in Lake Michigan would have been a more efficient - and cost-effective - solution. And what does "North by Northwest" mean anyway? The chase takes Thornhill south before it takes him north, though it does end, memorably, at Mount Rushmore (actually a cleverly painted studio backdrop) in South Dakota.

But in the end, none of this matters. You could say NXNW is greater than the sum of its parts, except those parts are all pretty great on their own. Eva Marie Saint is luminous as Eve Kendall, Thornhill's love interest/nemesis, delivering some pretty risque (for 1959) sexual innuendo without ever breaking eye contact. James Mason is smooth and charming as the chief villain, Martin Landau subtly menacing as his henchman, and Ernest Lehman's script is full of sparkling dialogue ("That wasn't very sporting," Mason's character deadpans at the finale. "Using real bullets.").

Few films utilized the VistaVision/Technicolor process as well as it was used here, and this restored/remastered print is a sheer pleasure to look at, with its vibrant colors and perfectly framed shots, whether they be wide masters (the many action scenes) or detail inserts (Landau's eerily blue eyes). The art direction and wardrobe are practically characters themselves - check out Eva Marie Saint's black and red dress in the Chicago auction house scene. And when was the last time you saw bright green used so well in a title sequence?

The special features on the set are excellent as well, including lengthy documentaries about Grant (a frank and forthright one), Hitchcock and the making of the film. Also included is a feature-length commentary by screenwriter Lehman retained from an earlier release (he died in 2005 at age 89). Newark, N.J., native Eva Marie Saint appears prominently in all the features and is still going strong at age 85 (she gave an interview to the San Francisco Chronicle about the film on Friday, and there's another recent one on Kim Morgan's Sunset Gun blog.).

In some ways, NXNW marked the end of Hitchcock's "Old Hollywood" period. It was his final film (of four) with Grant, and though he would continue to use soon-to-be-major stars (Paul Newman, Sean Connery) in his remaining seven films, it's the last gasp of the man who made TO CATCH A THIEF, REAR WINDOW and other thrillers steeped in Hollywood glamor. The next year, he would get down and dirty with PSYCHO.

BLOOD'S A ROVER

I don't write many book reviews these days. I use to do quite a few during my newspaper years, but now I only dabble with the occasional freelance piece, usually for nonfiction works, such as the recent biography of actor Warren Oates. I shy away from reviewing fiction now, especially since I've had my own books published and reviewed. Part of that is karmic fear (what goes around comes around) and part is that I now realize how much work it is to actually write a book. As a result, I'm more reluctant to be critical of someone else's work (plus, the odds are greater now that I might actually bump into the author at some point).

However, while on the road the last two weeks, I read James Ellroy's new novel BLOOD'S A ROVER, the conclusion of his "Underworld U.SA." trilogy, and feel inclined to say a few things about it (coincidentally, one of my first reviews for The Star-Ledger was of Ellroy's memoir MY DARK PLACES).

First off: BLOOD'S A ROVER is long - that's looonnnnggg - topping out at 640 pages. THE COLD SIX THOUSAND, the previous book in the trilogy, published in 2001, was a little longer, but seemed to read tighter. Ellroy's writing style in BAR is probably more accessible than it was in CST - there are fewer three-and-four-word sentences filled with punchy alliteration ("The Deuce was dead. The dealers yawned. The barman yawned. Stray dogs meandered through. They beat the heat."). But Ellroy's headlong pace lags several times in BAR, and I sometimes felt myself stopping to take a breather before gathering the energy to read on.

It also feels slightly padded. Ellroy often halts the narrative to insert diary entries from his main characters. However, a lot of those entries seem to be written in the same voice, despite the fact they come from characters with varied backgrounds. At least three of them use variations on the phrase "I ride the zeitgeist" at one point or another. That is to say they speak like no one else in the world - except James Ellroy.

BAR is also a direct follow-up to CST, and if you're not familiar with the previous book, you may find yourself a little lost, even though Ellroy helpfully drops in several pages of backstory early on. BAR opens in the aftermath of the MLK/RFK assassinations, which were orchestrated by some of the major players in the trilogy, a few of whom are now seeking redemption. Others, like the French/Corsican mercenary Jean-Philippe Mesplede, who took out JFK with a shot from the grassy knoll, have moved on to other evil business, including illegal commando raids and scalping expeditions on Castro's Cuba. Rogue FBI agent Dwight "The Enforcer" Holley (a nickname recycled from Ellroy's 1992 novel WHITE JAZZ, whose main character was rogue L.A. cop Dave "The Enforcer" Klein) is regretting his career as a "right-wing thug," yet planning another assassination and setting up a likely fall guy to take the rap - and a bullet. Ex-Las Vegas cop Wayne Tedrow, son of a white supremacist hatemonger, is racked with guilt over his own role in the killing of MLK. And young "peeper" Don Crutchfield (a name Ellroy borrowed from a real L.A. private detective) is learning at the feet of them all. And like them, he's soon obsessed with the mysterious Joan Rosen Klein, the left-wing radical at the center of all the mysteries, who men kill and die for without ever really understanding.

Throw in Haitian voodoo, the mob, Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, Dominican Republic casinos, anti-Castro extremists, black revolutionaries, various psychedelic drugs and a 1964 armored car robbery that somehow sparks the whole plot and you have an idea of why it took took Ellroy 640 pages to get it all in, in a way that makes sense. Well, sort of makes sense.

Still, BAR is a James Ellroy novel, and there's only one writer in the world who can pull that off. For scope, complexity and breadth of ambition, no one else comes close. He doesn't always succeed in his efforts, but the arrogance and energy of them can be invigorating in itself. BAR would work better if it were tighter - 100 pages could have been easily chopped - but it's still unlike anything else out there.

Some other quick notes:

- The title comes from an A.E. Houseman verse ("Clay lies still/But blood's a rover"). That's also the long-announced title of Harlan Ellison's yet-to-be completed novel about the adventures of Vic and Blood, the post-apocalyptic duo from his award-winning novella "A Boy and His Dog."

- Dwight Holley is haunted by the death of George Diskant, a Nyack, N.Y., man whom Holley killed in a drunken driving accident. George Diskant is also the name of a celebrated cinematographer who shot some of greatest films noir of the 1940 and 50s, including THEY LIVE BY NIGHT, THE NARROW MARGIN, ON DANGEROUS GROUND and KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL.

- Ellroy isn't always so good with technical details. He repeatedly has his characters use "silencered" Magnum revolvers. Silencers/suppressors don't work on revolvers (what law-enforcement types call "wheel guns"), much less with high-powered Magnum rounds. Any noise abatement at the silenced muzzle is more than canceled out by the blowback through the open cylinder.

Still, like him or not, if you're attempting to write serious crime fiction these days, you have to read Ellroy. His slow output and occasional stumbles aside, the Demon Dog still leads the pack.

First reviews

Publishers' Weekly, Nov. 2, 2009
(Starred review) Gone 'til November
Wallace Stroby.
Minotaur, $24.99 (304p)
ISBN 978-0-312-56024-9

Tormented lives brutally intersect in Stroby's powerful thriller, the possible first in a new series to feature Sara Cross, the lone woman sheriff's deputy in Florida's St. Charles County. One night, Cross, a single mother who's coping with her son's leukemia and the remnants of a two-years-gone postdivorce fling with fellow deputy Billy Flynn, arrives on the edge of a cypress swamp where Flynn has just shot a 22-year-old black man from New Jersey allegedly fleeing a traffic stop. Sara tries to smother her still-simmering lust for no-good Billy, but her cop instincts drive her toward a dismaying truth that hurtles her into a violent showdown with an aging New Jersey contract killer stricken with a rare cancer. While relentlessly probing the eternal mystery of why bright and capable women fall for dangerous losers, Stroby (The Heartbreak Lounge) explores moral choices that leave his devastatingly real characters torn between doing nothing and risking everything. (Jan.)


Booklist, Dec. 1, 2009 issue
"GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER is rock-solid crime fiction that melds compelling characters, crisp writing, and a finely rendered portrait of Old Florida, the state's thinly populated, less-storied interior. Sara and Morgan, an aging career criminal who has just been diagnosed with cancer, are Stroby's best creations. Morgan is ruthless and resourceful, but he also has a quite dignity and a streak of humanity that may have readers picturing actor Morgan Freeman."

Final cover and early words

Here's the final, slightly tweaked, cover for GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER (due out from St. Martin's/Minotaur Jan. 19), along with some very generous early responses from a trio of terrific writers:

"In GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER, Wallace Stroby’s mastery of character and dialogue is mated to a hellacious narrative engine. His heroine, Sara Cross, is a wonderful creation.”
- George Pelecanos, author of THE WAY HOME and producer/co-writer of THE PACIFIC and THE WIRE

"Just when you think that you can't be surprised anymore, a writer like Wallace Stroby ups the ante, finds a way to use familiar elements in new and surprising ways. This is a first-rate novel, with characters who live on in the reader's mind long after the book is finished. I always expect great things from Stroby, and GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER is a significant addition to an already impressive body of work."
- Laura Lippman, author of WHAT THE DEAD KNOW and ANOTHER THING TO FALL


“In these days of mega formulaic blockbusters, it seems almost impossible to find a novel that not only has depth of characterization, but a compelling plot. GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER achieves both and seamlessly. The novel takes off like a freight train... the writing is a joy, full of beautiful asides, an almost weary compassion and some passages that literally break your heart. Sara Cross is a wondrous character. This novel sings, darkly and irresistibly.”
– Ken Bruen, author of LONDON BOULEVARD and THE GUARDS

Random Readings, Vol. 8

This uplifting installment of Random Readings comes from Don Carpenter's brilliant 1966 novel HARD RAIN FALLING, recently reprinted by New York Review Books. In this passage, a down-on-his-luck ex-boxer named Jack Leavitt - who's gone from orphanage to reform school to penitentiary in short order - contemplates the ironies of lust late one night on his bunk in San Quentin. HARD RAIN is only peripherally a crime novel, but this passage is a noir as it gets:

"It struck him with horrible force. His parents, whoever they were, had probably made love out of just such an itch. For fun, for this momentary satisfaction, they had conceived him, and because he was obviously inconvenient, dumped him in the orphanage; because he, the life they had created while they were being careless and thoughtless, was not part of the fun of it all; he was just a harmful side effect of the scratching of the itch; he was the snot in the handkerchief after the nose had been blown, just something disgusting to be gotten rid of in secret and forgotten. Cold rage filled him, rage at his unknown parents, rage at the life he had been given ....
Fifteen or twenty minutes on a forgotten bed between two probable strangers had given him twenty-four years of misery, pain, and suffering, and promised, unless he were to die soon, to go on giving him misery for another forty or fifty years, locked up in one small room or another without hope of freedom, love, life, truth or understanding. A penis squirts, and I am doomed to a life of death. It has got to be insanity; there has got to be a God, because only an insane God could have created such a universe."

Black Lizard Lounge #5: THE KILLING

The fifth installment of my ongoing occasional look back at some vintage Black Lizard paperback reprints from the late 1980s and early '90s (for the others, just click on "Black Lizard Books" in the labels at bottom).

THE KILLING by Lionel White

BLACK LIZARD EDITION: 1988

ORIGINAL PUBLICATION: Dutton, 1955

THE STORY: A group of criminals band together to pull off a $2 million racetrack robbery.

THE BOTTOM LINE: A seminal heist novel from one of its greatest practitioners.

"That's why this thing is going to work. We don't want a lot of hoodlums in on it. ... It's what I've been telling you guys since the beginning. We aren't a bunch of dumb stick-up artists. We aren't tough guys. We're supposed to have brains."

So says ex-con Johnny Clay to the crew he's put together for a racetrack robbery in Lionel White's 1955 novel THE KILLING. And he's right, his co-conspirators are pretty much a bunch of Average Joes in need of money, albeit with unique skills and special access. One is a track cashier, trying to support a high-living wife. Another is an aging bartender plagued with gambling debts. A third is an otherwise good cop in deep with a loanshark. Bringing them all together is veteran criminal Johnny Clay, fresh from a four-year stint in prison and now imbued with "a sort of grim purposefulness which he had always lacked."

Johnny's purpose is to rob the racetrack during the "Canarsie Stakes," gaining entrance to the money room while a sharpshooter picks off one of the horses to create a diversion. It's an operation that should work like clockwork - and does until that trouble-making wife entices her petty criminal boyfriend into robbing the robbers.

THE KILLING is probably best remembered for its 1956 film adaptation, written and directed by then-neophyte Stanley Kubrick, with additional dialogue by novelist (and Black Lizard favorite) Jim Thompson. It was originally published under the title CLEAN BREAK, as part of Dutton's "Guilt-Edged Mystery" line, though all of the post-1956 editions - and there were many - retitled it as per Kubrick's film. For the prolific White, a former crime reporter, it was the first of his novels to make it to the screen, though others would follow, notably Jean-Luc Goddard's 1965 PIERROT LE FOU, based on White's 1962 book OBSESSION. Aside from the ending, the film of THE KILLING is amazingly faithful to the book, with much of White's dialogue intact.

As the novel begins, the planning of the robbery is already under way, with an address scrawled on the back of a winning ticket leading to a late-night meeting in a furnished room on New York's East 31st Street (in the film, the racetrack is located in California, in the novel it's on Long Island). It's not until Chapter Two that we meet Johnny, just out of jail and reunited with his faithful - and patient - girlfriend, Fay. In some ways, the characters are archetypes, but they're sharply drawn. White has only to sketch them quickly and, for the purposes of the plot, they're good to go. All the backstory is conveyed through dialogue, or brief interior thoughts.

THE KILLING is a lightning-fast read, only 155 pages in the Black Lizard edition, and as lean and mean as they come. One can see the influence it had on Donald E. Westlake's "Richard Stark" novels, which were to begin seven years later. Reading it in 2009, it doesn't seem dated at all.

The book's manipulation of time - with multiple versions of the same events told from different viewpoints - is retained in the film, though its best-known homage would come almost forty years later, in the fractured chronologies of Quentin Tarantino's RESERVOIR DOGS and PULP FICTION. The novel is crafted as carefully and painstakingly as the robbery itself - though much more successfully, of course. It seems effortless, the work of a total pro, and it ends, as does the movie, with a nerve-wracking near getaway at an airport (LaGuardia in the book), though the finale lacks the ironic twist - and classic last line - of Kubrick's film.

Even more than W.R. Burnett's THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, THE KILLING is the granddaddy of modern heist stories, and the blueprint for dozens of novels and films that came after it. Fifty-four years after its publication, it remains a cornerstone of American crime fiction.

Thought for the day ...

"To buy books would be a good thing, if we also could buy the time to read them."
- Arthur Schopenhauer 1788-1860

Summer (and fall) in Asbury

And if you didn't take my word that the Asbury Park Boardwalk came back in a big way this summer (and continues to this fall), here's another Shore native to give it his endorsement. That's the Wonder Bar behind him. No word if he stopped in for a cold one.

Also, to update the availability issue, signed first editions of both THE BARBED-WIRE KISS and THE HEARTBREAK LOUNGE are now available at the Asbury Galleria, inside the Grand Arcade between Convention Hall and The Paramount Theatre.

The Galleria also has an ongoing Morro Castle exhibit, in honor of the 75th anniversary of the fire that claimed 137 lives on the passenger liner. The smoking hulk beached just outside Convention Hall on Sept. 8, 1934 and remained there for six months until it was hauled away and cut up for scrap metal. A monument to the disaster was unveiled on the boardwalk last month, along with some rare home movie footage (below) shot from the beach after the ship came to rest.

Home movie footage of the luxury liner Morro Castle disaster

Marlowe and more

I've been on a campaign recently - not always a successful one - to stop bringing more books into the living quarters, at least until I've created additional shelf space. Things are already out of control, and though I've been gradually selling books off on eBay, it doesn't seem to have made much of a dent in the overall situation. So why did I go to this year's NYC Collectible Paperback and Pulp Fiction Expo this weekend? Just to look, I told myself, walk around a little, enjoy an Indian Summer day in the city.

Of course, it didn't quite work out that way. Instead, I walked out with the above. No regrets though, especially since, as the expo wound down, the dealers were eager to strike bargains before packing up. It was tough to turn away from these, all vintage Fawcett Gold Medals with McGinnis covers, from two of the hardest of the hard-boiled writers.

They are:

THE BLACK ICE SCORE By Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake). (1968). First printing of the 11th Parker novel. The third after Westlake/Stark moved over to Fawcett from Pocket Books.

OPERATION FIREBALL By Dan J. Marlowe. (1969). The third in the "Earl Drake" series, after THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH and ONE ENDLESS HOUR. With FIREBALL, Drake began his transformation from professional criminal to government agent.

FLASHPOINT By Dan J. Marlowe. (1970). The fourth Drake book, and the winner of that year's Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original.

I'd read the Stark before, in another edition, but neither of the two Marlowes. This time, unfortunately, neither of them were autographed.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (or however it's spelled)

My Quentin Tarantino jones is fading.

Late to the party as always, but I finally got around to seeing INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS this week (I'm still not sure what the deal is with the wonky spelling). Despite the mostly glowing reviews, I'd shied away at first, worried it would follow the trend of recent QT films, ie. non-stop homages to other movies and directors and lots of "cool" flashy violence, none of which seemed to involve characters recognizable as actual human beings.

I thought RESERVOIR DOGS was brilliant when I first saw it (though I watched it again recently and didn't feel it aged well, perhaps a consequence of it having been imitated so often). I thought PULP FICTION was one of the best films of 1994 - and one of the best dark comedies ever. I loved JACKIE BROWN, in which it looked like QT was moving in a new and exciting direction, marrying his hotwired idiosyncratic direction and dialogue to a story about real people. Samuel Jackson's Ordell Robbie is funny and profane through much of the film, but by the end, he's scary and dangerous - as he should be (that's the film Jackson should have won an Oscar for. It's a beautifully nuanced and textured performance). Sure, there were references to other films (including borrowing the title song from 1972's ACROSS 110TH STREET), but they never got in the way of the story.

I found the two KILL BILL films diverting but empty. My friend, film critic Matt Zoller Seitz, perfectly summed them up when he said it was like having Tarantino show you scenes from his DVD collection at random. Look, there's a reference to Brian DePalma! Hey, it's got the old Shaw Bros. logo! Isn't that the theme song from LADY SNOWBLOOD? Wow, he's using Ennio Morricone's NAVAJO JOE score here!

Like the cliche about Chinese food, KILL BILL 1&2 mostly left me wanting to see a real movie an hour later. Or just watch LADY SNOWBLOOD again.

Then came DEATH PROOF, QT's half of GRINDHOUSE, which, despite some great car stunts and authentic '70s ambiance, seemed endlessly dull and talky, filled with dialogue no one would ever speak except in a Tarantino film (when was the last time you heard a sweet 20-something make a ZATOICHI reference in casual conversation?).

So I approached INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS with some trepidation. Well earned, as it turned out. I thought parts of it were brilliant in a meta sort of way, especially the idea of cinema as a metaphor for war ("Film is a battleground," director and WWII vet Sam Fuller used to say). The performances were almost uniformly excellent, especially Christoph Waltz (right) as Col. Hans Landa, "The Jew Hunter," who all but steals the film. That opening scene in a French farmhouse is a brilliant model of quiet suspense punctuated with humor. If it feels a little familiar, it's probably because it seems to be patterned after an early scene from Sergio Leone's THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY, in which Lee Van Cleef quietly menaces a Mexican family on their sleepy farm. Tarantino even layers some Morricone on the soundtrack to cement the connection.

A scene in a basement tavern midway through the film is another terrific set piece, building the tension as a clever German officer become suspicious of a soldier at a nearby table whose accent is just a little off. It's a great scene, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense (why would a double agent plan a secret meeting with undercover Allied commandos in a rathskeller that just might be full of German soldiers at the time?)

Not that I expected the film to be much concerned with verisimilitude. It begins with the title card "Once upon a time in Occupied France ...." so we know right away what we're getting into. Certainly, 64 years later, there's no reason not to make a fairy tale about WWII, or, more accurately, about WWII movies (though the nod is to Leone as well). The film never really overtly references the Holocaust though, and wisely so. The whole ridiculous souffle would collapse in the context of that reality. Instead, we have a troop of mostly Jewish-American commandos killing, scalping and mutilating German soldiers as revenge for the generic crime of "killing Jews."

Despite the title, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS doesn't really spend much time with the commandos themselves. And what we see is pretty thin. They're essentially ciphers led by a caricature, Brad Pitt as "Lt. Aldo Raine." The only one we see much of is Sgt. "Donny" Donowitz, played by HOSTEL director Eli Roth (in fact, we see too much of him, while real actors like Til Schweiger are mostly wasted in minor roles). In an early scene, Roth's character graphically beats a helpless German soldier to death with a baseball bat, and then cheers as if it were a home run at Yankee Stadium. All that's missing is a 1940's-era high-five with his fellow GIs. Are we supposed to laugh at this? Cheer him on? Should we be equally amused when Pitt uses a bowie knife to carve a swastika into the forehead of a pleading prisoner who's already given them the information they want? (I'm curious how the film plays in Germany). Is that sort of cruelty on the part of the film's ostensible heroes meant to be entertaining? Invigorating? Instead, it reeked to me of the phony fanboy violence so many of Tarantino's imitators have indulged in for the last 15 years.

It's obvious Tarantino is aware of these ironies. He gives the doomed soldier some moments of silent bravery before the bat connects with his skull, and a later scene has a German audience cheering and laughing at a propaganda film depicting American soldiers being gunned down by a German sniper. But is INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS "morally complicated," as QT maintains in interviews? Or just "morally bankrupt," as my former colleague Stephen Whitty would have it? I'm leaning toward the latter.

Almost a book

Also, I'll be dusting off and updating the site over the next couple months. If you have any suggestions for something you'd like to see more (or less) of there, or have ideas for possible additional features, drop me a note either here or there (I'll be turning comment moderation back on for this one. I'm no fool).

Jim Carroll 1949-2009

Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

– Jim Carroll, "People Who Died"

Who would have thought a punk song reciting a litany of tragic deaths could be so macabre and touching at the same time?

"People Who Died" was the best-known song from Jim Carroll's 1980 album "Catholic Boy," and sadly it's the one that springs to mind after hearing of his death from a heart attack Sept. 11 at age 60. A privileged prep school kid and star athlete who fell into heroin addiction and gay hustling before resurrecting himself as a poet and punk rocker, Carroll wrote songs about surviving. There's nothing ironic about "People Who Died." All the names belong to real people, and the song is Carroll's tribute to them. He lived the same lives they did. He just lived long enough to tell about it.

Most people know Carroll - if at all - from the 1995 film THE BASKETBALL DIARIES, based on his 1978 autobiography of the same name (Leonardo Di Caprio played him in the film). In addition to two memoirs, Carroll published six books of poetry. And although he made a half dozen albums, his first, "Catholic Boy," is the rawest expression of his talent. The playing isn't always inspired (it sometime sounds a little too much generic bar band proto-punk), but the lyrics snap and tear. I haven't listened to the album in years (I only have it on vinyl), but complete verses are still lodged in my memory.

For example, from the title song:

"I make angels dance and drop to their knees
When I enter a church the feet of statues bleed
I understand the fate of all my enemies
Just like Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane ....
I was a Catholic Boy
Redeemed through pain, not through joy."

Why Abel Ferrara didn't work this into the soundtrack of BAD LIEUTENANT will always be a mystery to me.

Carroll's history and past lives are well documented. He hung out with Andy Warhol, partied with Lou Reed and was close friends with Patti Smith, who encouraged his music. Allegedly, it's Carroll's voice that can be heard during between-song chatter on The Velvet Underground's classic "Live at Max's Kansas City" album from 1970, inquiring after some Tuinals and a double Pernod. Though he'd kicked heroin in 1973 after nearly 10 years (he'd started at age 13), Carroll was always gaunt and pale, and had become even more skeletal and haunted in recent years. If anyone had been casting a film about the last years of noir writer Cornell Woolrich, they would have needed to look no further.

But what I'll always remember Carroll best for is a poetry reading he gave at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., in 1983. The buzz over his first two albums had died out and he was still in the studio recording the third, so he'd faded from public view. The reading was held in a tiny room in the old College Avenue Student Center, about 30 chairs in all, only half of which were occupied when he took the small stage. To everyone's surprise, he brought along Lenny Kaye, guitarist with the Patti Smith Group (and a Rutgers grad), who'd been working with him in the studio that afternoon.

After reading several poems (the one I remember best was titled "Your Clitoris," the final lines being "Your clitoris/Is a monument/To my boredom"), Carroll brought Kaye on stage. He plugged his electric guitar into a small amp and they proceeded to premiere songs from the still-in-progress album, "I Write Your Name." This to a room of 15 people, Carroll gripping the mike and prowling the stage, Kaye playing scorching guitar behind him through a single tiny amp. When the power outlet to the stage blew out with the overload, Carroll continued to sing a cappella, moving out into the audience, snarling his lyrics, any dividing line between poet and rocker long shattered. It was one of the seven top music moments of my life.

**** Above, Patti Smith, left, and Jim Carroll in 1969. Photo by Wren D'Antonio.

Just an American Boy

It's a brief scene, barely four minutes long, but it's one of the most memorable in American film.

A slowly unraveling New York City cab driver (Robert De Niro) meets a sleazy, motor-mouthed gun dealer in a cheap hotel room. The dealer reels off the attributes of his various armaments (".380 Walther ... isn't that a little honey?") while the camera lovingly lingers on all that gleaming steel and wood. De Niro's character buys four guns and accoutrements, to the tune of $900. But even while the dealer's packing them up in a handy gym bag, he continues a steady stream of pitches for other contraband ("Crystal meth? I can get you crystal meth. Nitrous oxide, how about that?").

The movie of course, is Martin Scorsese's 1976 classic TAXI DRIVER, and the scene offers one of the few laughs in the film. The dealer - referred to as "Easy Andy, the Traveling Salesman" - is played by Scorsese's friend and collaborator Steven Prince, a non-actor whom the director brought in for a cameo, and in doing so immortalized in film history. But Scorsese wasn't done with him. The following year he made Prince the subject of a documentary, AMERICAN BOY, filmed over the course of a single evening at the L.A. home of actor and Scorsese regular George Memmoli.

Shot handheld by cinematographer Michael Chapman (who also lensed TAXI DRIVER), the documentary is essentially 55 minutes of unfiltered Prince, interspersed with home movies and photos from his childhood. He talks about being a 21-year-old road manager for Neil Diamond, a nightclub and concert promoter and all-around show business jack-of-all-trades. He speaks equally candidly about his years as a heroin addict, recounting an incident where a woman overdosed at a shooting gallery and he revived her with an adrenaline shot to the heart, a story Quentin Tarantino borrowed in its entirety for a scene in PULP FICTION. Most harrowingly, Prince recalls shooting a man to death at a Barstow, Calif., gas station, where he worked during an Easter vacation from college.

For many years, AMERICAN BOY has been Scorsese's lost film. It didn't get a theatrical release and, outside of poor-quality bootlegs, hasn't been available on home video since the days of laserdisc. Plenty of filmmakers have seen it though. In addition to Tarantino's lift, director Richard Linklater got Prince to repeat the gas station story verbatim for his 2001 digitally rotoscoped film WAKING LIFE.

For the last year, AMERICAN BOY has been available in its entirety on YouTube, divided into six parts. It's compulsive - and compelling - viewing, especially for its behind-the-scenes look at Scorsese and company (in addition to Memmoli and Chapman, also visible on screen is MEAN STREETS and RAGING BULL co-writer Mardik Martin). It's of a piece with Scorsese's 1974 doc ITALIANAMERICAN, and was often paired with it at film festivals.

Thirty years later comes director Tommy Pallotta's follow-up, AMERICAN PRINCE. A sometime Linklater collaborator, Pallotta stumbled upon Prince by accident in Austin, Texas, a couple years back. Pallotta befriended Prince - who now works as a general contractor and manages a medical marijuana shop - and eventually convinced him to sit for another filmed storytelling session.

As opposed to the rail-thin, hollow-eyed Prince of 1977, the 2009 version is amazingly healthy-looking and youthful (he's 61). His nasal New York whine has softened somewhat, but he's as animated as ever when it comes to talking about his eventful life, his friendship with Scorsese and Band frontman Robbie Robertson (at one point all three shared a house on Los Angeles' Mulholland Drive) and his own responses to the 1978 documentary. He also dishes some less-than-flattering stories, especially one about star Liza Minnelli having affairs with both Scorsese and De Niro while shooting 1977's NEW YORK, NEW YORK, a film Prince appeared in and crewed on.

Without a distributor or theatrical release (or rights clearances), Pallotta's film has been kicking around on the web, and is on-and-off YouTube (currently on, you can see it here).

The two films are excellent companion pieces. Both are light on biographical details, aside from the brief unconnected anecdotes Prince relates about his childhood and parents, but the stories speak for themselves (watch BOY first though, as Pallotta's film contains spoilers for stories in the original documentary). Seen back-to-back, they're amazing time capsules as well as oral histories. And for anyone interested in Scorsese or Hollywood in the 1970s, they're required viewing.