THE LAST HARD MEN (1976)

 

 Paul Bartel’s Lust in the Dust aside, there aren’t too many “sleazy” westerns out there. The most cynical parodies retain a certain reverence for the genre and even attempts at revisionist or “de-mystified” westerns, ala McCabe and Mrs. Miller or Unforgiven avoid outright salaciousness. True, you’ll get a Hannie Calder now and then, but even that excuse for sagebrush T&A still cloaked itself in western thematic iconography (insert obvious simile regarding Raquel Welch nude-under-the-serape). For the first sixty-plus years of film history, the Western was the American genre. It was well to which all the studios went for both their epics and their programmers. Just as new directors cut their teeth on horror today, fledgling filmmakers had their mettle tested amidst the “horseshit and gunsmoke”. The western was the encompassing symbol of all things American: the hearty settlers carving life out of the wilderness, the taciturn men facing their problems head-on, the lonely gunfighter fruitlessly seeking redemption, and, of course, westward expansion—manifest destiny—the god-given right to the American government to seize the land before them.

Things began to change in the mid-60s for the Western, just as the entire film landscape was changing, for the usual reasons cited: the Viet-Nam War, the Peace Movement, the collapse of the studio system, the rise of filmmakers raised on film, influenced by European cinema (including the so-called “Spaghetti Westerns” coming out of Italy) that had been, in turn, revolutionized from within by American movies—art is often a snake eating its tail. Two films in particular marked the end of “classic” viewpoints: Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 and The Wild Bunch in 1969. These films did more to demystify the programmer genres of the crime story and the western. Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde drove home the idea that crime was a product of nature and nurture and that criminals often came to a more horrific end than a mere clutch of the chest and a face-plant to the pavement. Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch took the graphic depiction of violence even further, splashing blood atop the collapse of the American West. Bad men gunned each other down in the dust all too aware that their world had changed without their permission. The automobile had replaced the horse; the telegraph replaced the romantic (and historically short-lived) image of the Pony Express. With these revised themes came revised filmmaking presentations—slow-motion, fast-motion, special effects and characters whose allegiances weren’t boiled down to the color of their hats. Art reflects the world around it. With the world in turmoil, so, too, was Hollywood.

After the end of Viet-Nam, after Nixon had resigned in disgrace, Americans grit their teeth and either resisted the world as it was, or mourned what they thought they’d lost. Revisionism gave way to cynicism. And cynicism was reflected back at audiences from the movie screens.

Which brings us, finally, to The Last Hard Men. Based on Gun Down, a novel by the original sad tough guy Brian Garfield (whose everyman vigilante novel Death Wish had was adapted to the screen and became a box office success in 1974), The Last Hard Men took the revisionism of Peckinpah and Penn and infused it with the frustration of the ‘60s and heartbreak of the ‘70s, resulting in a movie whose only passion can be found in hatred.

Set in 1908, hardened criminal Zack Provo (James Coburn) kills two guards and escapes a Yuma chain gang along with a half-dozen other convicts. Enticing them with the promise of $30,000 worth of buried gold coins, Provo leads his new gang down a path towards his real destination: the destruction of Sam Burgade (Charlton Heston), the lawman who killed his wife and put him in prison in the first place. Burgade, now both tired and retired, is at odds with the changing landscape. His successor, Pima County Sheriff Noel Nye (Michael Parks), organizes car-driving posses and maintains the law over the phone, more concerned about trains running on time than such antiquated ideas of “outlaws”. Working with Nye, Burgade sets up a juicy bankroll arrival to trap Provo and his gang, but things backfire. Uninterested in a new score, Provo anticipates an ambush and, instead, goes to Burgade’s house and kidnaps his daughter, Susan (Barbara Hershey). Taking her to a Navajo reservation outside of Nye’s jurisdiction, Provo all but guarantees Burgade pursuing him on his own, ensuring the most personal of showdowns. Indeed, this is what happens, with Burgade’s only companion the “civilized” Hal Brickman (Christopher Mitchum), Susan’s fiancée.

Provo’s singular hatred of Burgade is the film’s driving force, and a good number of people caught between the men are hurt or killed, as is to be expected from this type of story. Near the end, to lure Burgade out of hiding, Provo “gives” Susan to his men. They give her a head start down the mountain, but eventually the two worst men of Provo’s gang catch her and make good on Provo’s earlier promise by gang raping her. As shocking as this scene is, what is astounding is that it is Brickman who holds Burgade back, very literally after an impatient Provo shouts—“Burgade! They’re fucking your daughter!” The tenderfoot dandy Brickman is forced to put the butt of his rifle to Burgade’s temple to keep the old man from rushing into the open and certain death.

Until this point in the movie, The Last Hard Men seems to almost revel in its unpleasantness, hence the interpretation of sleaze. The primary theme of modernization devouring all but the most non-receptive of the pioneers gets a bit lost during its time spent with the single-minded and thoroughly awful Provo who is only the worst of the bunch because he’s the leader. Little is revealed about the others in his gang, save that they’re all repellant and unrepentant murderers who turn on each other as quickly as they would on anyone else. Only the young Mike Shelby (CHiPS’  Officer Jon himself, Larry Wilcox), referred to as “the kid” by the other characters, seems out of place amidst the group, implying a less-wholesome prison relationship with Provo. But he too is serving life; unlikely the sentence was for nothing. That he shows tenderness towards Susan, where the others give only lustful brutality, doesn’t let him off the moral hook.

After the rape scene, however, the movie howls with righteous anger and an overdose of testosterone. Some critics have pointed out that, after this point, it’s no longer about Susan, but in truth it never was about her. The Last Hard Men is about two displaced alpha males out to kill each other as brutally as possible. Provo “wants to make it last”; Burgade wants to bring down someone who “beat me once”. Ego begets savagery.

The Last Hard Men is actually at odds with itself from beginning to end. Directed by Andrew V. McLaglen, a protégé of John Ford’s who worked second-unit on The Quiet Man and went on to helm straightforward westerns like Shenandoah and McLintock!, The Last Hard Men certainly looks like a traditional western (thanks to the gorgeous cinematography courtesy Duke Callahan (Jeremiah Johnson). Solid western character actors lead the cast: the usually bombastic Charlton Heston gives a surprisingly underplayed performance to help us believe that he’s old and tired; the nigh-impossible to dislike James Coburn does his best to be repugnant and embraces the only aspect of new technology Provo likes, namely an automatic Colt (which he uses to literally gun down a telephone early on in the film). It sounds like a traditional western, thanks to Jerry Goldsmith’s self-cannibalized score—or at least it does for the majority of the film. Then comes that horrific two-thirds mark. Suddenly the movie picks up a Peckinpah edge with the pursuit and rape occurring in agonizing slow motion and atonal assaults of music. Burgade’s rage becomes physical as he and Brickman set the mountainside on fire to smoke out Provo’s gang. At this point, the movie is meant to turn primal, but McLaglan’s heart doesn’t seem in it. The last act of the film is completely different in tone, as if the narrative was poisoned by the rape, that it seems to want to wrap as quickly as possible. Thus the final showdown, while bloody, lacks any kind of catharsis. The viewer is left feeling exhausted, drained and gritty.

Some of the blame can be placed on Guerdon Trueblood’s handling of Garfield’s tough-guy novel. Trueblood had directed the nihilistic The Candy Snatchers the previous year, so maybe some of that unpleasantness still tainted his blood. But the material, overall, seems wrong in McLaglan’s hands. The director, raised on a love for the material and the trappings of the American Western, fights his own movie from open to close, mirroring Burgade’s bemusement with the modern world, but likely sympathizing more with Provo’s disdain of the changing times. McLaglan himself is one of the “Last Hard Men” in this equation. It would seem that he would be much more comfortable with something more traditional, where the heroes wear white hats, the villains wear black, and shades of gray are relegated to the costumes of the extras. The bitter ‘70s, with its love of anti-heroes, held no more fascination for the director, it would seem, than the turn of the new century did for Burgade.

This suspicion is given weight by the fact that following The Last Hard Men, McLaglan returned to television and worked a good deal with The Wonderful World of Disney for the remainder of the ‘70s, returning to the “tough guy” genre only once more with The Wild Geese, which is morally and politically more straight-forward than The Last Hard Men. Upon its previews, the movie was met with derision and critical disgust, leading 20^th Century Fox to cut almost ten minutes from the running time prior to release and was loathe to release it to home video for years. It still has not received a domestic DVD release.

Modern audiences, when referring to the movie at all, lump it in with Spaghetti Westerns, citing similarities between its cold-hearted tone and that of Leone’s “Dollars” Trilogy. But where Leone was just playing in the Western sandbox without really understanding what a “western” really was—an argument for another time, but, in short, the Italians were viewing the genre with a detachment, rather than with a sense of history or, to be honest, a sense of homeland pride—McLaglan was a veteran of the Golden Era. The quintessential cowboy, John Wayne, long a symbol of steadfast Americanism (remaining one to this day), had no place in the ‘70s west (how else to explain Brannigan or McQ?). Wayne’s poignant comment on the Golden Era’s end was The Shootist, which let the West die with quiet dignity. McLaglan’s was The Last Hard Men—a death knell and a wail.

LOOKER (1981)

 

For members of my generation, Looker was a must-see on HBO due to the fact that Laurie Partridge (a.k.a. Susan Dey) had a full-frontal nude scene in a PG movie. The muddled plot and dull story went completely over our heads at the time in wake of the taboo. Granted, it’s all very clinical, just a scene of her standing nude, body scanned by lasers, but it was PG—we didn’t have to sneak out to watch it! And it would be several more years before Sheena brought a new level of PG nudity, to be banished forever by the PG-13. Still, for years, little else about the movie stuck in my pre-pubescent mind—just that scene and a teeth-grindingly infectious theme song.

There is a danger when revisiting older movies and finding surprising relevancy that you come away with the feeling that the movie is actually an unappreciated masterpiece. Michael Crichton’s Looker is a prime example of this danger. By the time the credits roll, you run the risk of being so impressed by its prescience that you’re convinced that it’s much better than it actually is. It’s not a misconception that can doom you, necessarily, or even make you appear particularly foolish at fancy parties. So perhaps it’s less “danger” and more “misfortune” because there is a good movie inside Looker begging to be let out.

Four television models have come to renowned plastic surgeon Dr. Larry Roberts (Albert Finney) in desperation for nearly undetectable cosmetic tweaking. One woman insists that her nose is .2 milimeters too narrow and her cheekbones .4 millimeters too high. The other women have similar complaints. Dr. Larry consents to these expensive adjustments only to discover much later that each woman has died, either via accidents or suicides. What’s worse, thanks to some conveniently-found evidence linking him to the victims, Dr. Larry is the chief suspect in what has rapidly become a murder investigation (for once, the police are not depicted as utter dolts).

Dr. Larry’s attempts to clear himself lead him to Digital Matrix, a computer-imaging company owned by the Reston Industries. Using groundbreaking technology, Digital Matrix takes full-body laser scans of models and creates a reusable, programmable virtual actor or actress. The human gets a paycheck-for-life in exchange for their image rights, thus effectively ending their professional career. This idea came about from intense marketing research and nearly-fanatical focus-testing. Previous live models used in commercials, four of them Dr. Larry’s clients, were found to be “nearly perfect” within a fraction of a percent among viewing audiences, but when the women moved, it distracted the viewer from the product being sold. With the computer-generated actors, the commercial programmer could more easily control the eye’s focus. Using a subliminal flash hidden in the CG-eyes, the viewer is also hypnotically compelled to not only want the product but need it. This tech also led to the development of a hypno gun utilizing a light flash, during which the “frozen” victim, completely hypnotized and unaware of the passage of time, can be manipulated, physically, to do anything.

That’s a lot of technobabble MacGuffin for one minor little science-fiction pot-boiler, which was the film’s primary detraction during its initial release, but it’s precisely what makes it seem so relevant today. Almost as if Crichton could see into the future, he took the notion of subliminal advertising (as explored in publications like Subliminal Seduction in the ‘70s) and combined it with the infancy of computer-aided entertainment and crafted a potentially-intriguing corporate mystery. Adding additional weight to it all is the casting of Albert Finney and James Coburn. The two actors are solid throughout, even when shooting at each other with the glorified flashlight guns (a pun on the title, which obviously refers to the perfect models but also L.O.O.K.E.R. (Light Ocular-Oriented Kinetic Emotive Responses)—i.e. the hypno-flashy-thingie and forebear of the Men in Black mind-erasing flashy-thingie).

While Crichton had played with the equation of technology+entertainment x greed=nogoodnicking a lot during his career (Westworld, Jurassic Park), his little Jules Verne moments in Looker are overshadowed by his optimism. A consumer-driven society manipulated by advertising corporations didn’t seem evil enough at the time, so he inserted a bit of political hoopla into the works, with the technology ultimately used for election fixing, completely undercutting the satire of the first two-thirds of the film. Which is, unfortunately, what keeps Looker from being anything more than a surprising little oddity given worthwhile relevance over time. Because the really intriguing notions are not the hypnotism and manipulation but the “moving props” created by computers.

To wit: a few years back, an actress friend of mine announced proudly that she was going to be in The Dark Knight. Further explanation revealed that she—just as Susan Dey’s character in Looker—was paid to visit a CGI house to receive a full-body scan. Her image was then saved in a hard drive to be inserted into crowd scenes whenever she was needed. Because she was paid a flat fee, her image could also be used for other movies that house worked on, present or future. In a sense, she had sold her rights to be a live extra, eliminating not only work for her but for Second Assistant Directors, Extras Casting, Background Actor Houses and large-scale Craft Services. 2010, meet 1981 (by way of 1984).

In Looker, these digital actors can be plunked into pre-shot scenes or even “keyed” into live commercials, as evidenced by the climactic shootout during a tech press conference. Most insidious, however, is the “need” for these CG actors arising from “real” women and men failing to meet the industry standard of “perfection”. No matter how beautiful or thin a woman is she is still a few millimeters off of 99.9%. Impossibly high standards for beauty are measured against cold scientific statistics, all in the name of selling perfume or cereal. The flashy-thingie time-stopping gun is fun for the visuals, the political scam gives a sense of urgency, but the artificial models borne out of dissatisfaction with genuine beauty is the genuine chiller of the story.

Encapsulating all of this thick theme and thin plot is a confusing story and lackluster direction. Prior to its release, Warner Brothers chopped Looker into bits in an attempt to hide the fact that the story isn’t very interesting. In fact, the entire motivation for Reston killing the models wound up on the cutting room floor, relegated to the television cut, taking the place of the required removal of copious amounts of clinical nudity to suit the FCC. As Coburn’s character explains in a lengthy deleted scene, the women themselves were the “templates” for the CG models—basically the blueprints. So to keep them out of the hands of the competition, “the forms were shredded”. This scene has been removed from all commercial VHS and DVD prints without even gracing a Special Features menu. Just this little addition could have kept Looker in satire and allowed a modern viewer to feel a little better about wasting his or her time watching it. Instead, substance was sliced away in favor of style—surgically, mirroring the theme that what’s inside isn’t important.

HARRY IN YOUR POCKET (1973)

Every now and then I stumble across a movie that everyone seems to have heard of but me. Which is at the same time delightful and annoying. As it turns out, Harry in Your Pocket is one of those well-known obscure movies that I managed to catch on TCM. There’s no DVD for it, the VHS is out of print but you can watch it on Amazon’s Video on Demand service, and I highly recommend you do so, because this one’s a winner.

Though it starts off with a loser: Ray is an amiable schlemiel we first meet in a bus station trying unsuccessfully to lift wallets from a variety of passengers (including one man who mistakes Ray’s clumsy thievery as a come on and gives him a come-hither smile in return). All of this comes as great entertainment to Sandy who has been passing her time watching. When Ray steals her watch, she rolls her eyes in disbelief and chases him outside, only to have her purse and suitcase stolen by a much more successful thief. Feeling equally guilty and turned-on, Ray offers to pay her back for her loss. He turns to a fence who tells him about a “wire mob” looking to recruit pick-pockets. That’s when Ray and Sandy meet Casey and Harry, a pair of seasoned crooks who take the couple under their wing. From there on, the partners give Ray, Sandy and the audience a crash course in the art of pick-pocketing. A wire mob consists of a “steerer” (Casey, who chooses the “marks” and signals to the others where the “poke” (wallet) is kept), a “stall” who distracts the mark long enough for the “cannon” to make the “lift”, and then “pass” so that the steerer can “skim” of the cash and dispose of the evidence, all without attracting the attention of “Mr. Law”, or violating the first of “Harry’s Laws”: “Harry Never Holds.”

The middle of the movie is filled with delightful little ballets of theft as the quartet lift dozens of pokes from marks who never even suspect they’ve been robbed—until much later and with usually very funny results. Harry is tough and demanding, Casey is elegant and an expert in steering; Ray is eager to be his own cannon, however, particularly because Sandy, used to the best effect as an eye-candy stall in short skirts and shorts, is drawn to Harry. Ray wants Harry’s respect but he wants to keep Sandy. As Casey explains, “We all have our little weaknesses.”

Set to an upbeat jazz score that puts one in mind of The Thomas Crown Affair, Harry in Your Pocket breezes along with such effortless charm, you almost don’t want it to end, even though a savvy viewer knows exactly what’s going to happen. While the plot may be thin, the chemistry between the quartet keeps you watching all the way through. While James Coburn, as Harry, is James Coburn and never less, giving you exactly what you expect, his co-stars are equally charismatic. Michael Sarrazin is likable as the easy-going Ray, but his character is light-weight compared to the marvelous Walter Pidgeon as Casey. Pidgeon effortlessly steals the movie, only you see the magic happen (unlike his marks). And Mrs. George C. Scott, Trish Van Devere not only holds her own amidst the cast but gives Sandy such a smart, sexy spark that it’s easy to see why the men are drawn to her. When we reach the midway point and Ray tells Harry that he’s leaving and taking Sandy with her, Harry replies, “Maybe you should ask the lady.” Sandy retorts, “Somebody better ask her something!” She’s an equal partner in this film—not a damsel, not a love-interest and only along for this ride because she’s amused and fascinated. She made the decision to join the mob; nobody made it for her.

So entertaining are these four that when the film reaches it’s second-act twist, where the conflict ramps up and it looks like the band is breaking up, you may catch yourself hoping the movie just ends there, right before the inevitable bad stuff happens, because you want these crooks to win. You want the family to stay together.