This consisted of gentle prods, ridicule so faint and unfocused that it always could be given a flattering turn if necessary. [sic] Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, loc 894
One of the most heuristic of my viewing pleasures was experiencing Peter Falk in Wings of Desire, even if his cameo does indeed feel like a post production interjection in a beautifully romantic and aspirant enterprise. One of his shortest appearances, also his sharpest, radiant with benevolence. It takes such darkness torturing a muzzled poet's spirit to see such light, light we no longer have with the death of presence.
Johnny Cash was doing what any celebrity does in his appearance on the Columbo episode "Swan Song," cashing it the chips. In many ways, this script is one of the more annoying ones, a bit cockamamie, the evidence against the gospel singer pretty much snatching a kid's hand out of the cookie jar, because there was no other way to do it other than through turning the screws on Cash's dark side, whatever items at the site of the plane crash didn't add up. Had the celebrity as nemesis kept his composure, and his broken leg, on a cushion, the forerunners of progressive guilt conscious television would have had a more difficult resolution. This is a reluctant way of admitting Jerry's aesthetic insights into pop culture trump my own, because The Rockford Files remains fresher, more telling on contemporary American angst, than Levinson's morality play, ferreting out the egotism, or giving Johnny Cash his redemption for bilking Ida Lupino's astringent.
To deescalate a little further, as stupid as Kojak is in its hyperbolic urban anxiety, it most aptly captures what the 70's were, if you ignore the plots, and simply breathe its urban exposition. Combine all three shows into an overlaying collage gives an accurate portrait of what haunts my generation: the loss of giants in whom we had moral guides. Of course Cash (and even Falk) had a certain systemic shallowness, the capped teeth, the megalomania, to a degree, but they were touchstones: Falk, Cash, Savalas, with very long genomes behind them. Gardner a little less, because maverick was about as far as his range could go. To transplant myself from this to the black brotherhood was fatal, whether or not my skimming, silent viewers comprehend.
Even if I'm lenient to looks. One of the guards, Anthony, talked to me the week of 5/10/16, perhaps because he felt bad witnessing another brother trash me, and asked me if I was still writing. For once in my life, I was unmoved, as starved for human interaction as I remain. I'll get over Vinnie's death, horrible as it was for me to be forced to use animal control, but something has broken, not to be captured through any blatant expose of a hobbled gimp, trying to outrun his own demons of indulgence.
Casting James Garner was tacky perhaps, but since everyone loved The Rockford Files that was capital to bank on in the past, and Maureen Stapleton bypasses her near mutilating death experience without a hitch, and if Biehn is an empty cypher, the fault may not lie solely with Bianchi. I caught the similarities and antecedents with All About Eve on my own. Garner is a likable personality, but outside of a stock western cowboy with trigger wounds, the man never inhabits a character. Like Bea Arthur, Garner always plays himself, and by the time this feckled infusion finds its way to Chicago Hope, it becomes stultifying. Yet The Fan is more than a hybrid tongue in cheek slasher film; it is also a bridge between old industry glamour and our modern hyper classification, the end result being it has shaky footing in both worlds. Bacall's fragility is stunning, and even more beautiful in the median between youth and withered old age, such as is apparent in both her role and off screen tiff with Kidman in Birth.
Catherine Zeta Jones and Stephen Fry want to help all Caucasians who go whacked by the age of 45. *Her* trigger was Michael's throat cancer, aren't we so lucky to be educated thus? And Fry perhaps created tri-sexuality, fucking men, women, and the Monty Python legacy altogether, why not end his life if he cannot become god like Charlie Chaplin? I went hunting, and indulged my usage looking for an early bit of Bogart sentimentality I was going to utilize, but I cannot find the film title. Fans would know it; he tumbles to his death after being emoted by the girl with the game leg, before he made the big time, smoking himself to the end just like Christopher Hitchens with his palpable extrusions. I cannot remember why The Rockford Files were enlivening. Perhaps it reassembled the last frontier self-reliance, with James taking his lumps because the noir code says this is what the good guy has to do until he gets old enough to get a Supreme Court series cancellation.
I have little sympathy for Fry. Only his affluence leaves him once removed from the clients I dealt with daily, and suffering is tyrannical, selfish. Those of us with victimization and life long indigence may have commiserate excuses, but not Fry, even if he only remains second tier. It is much the same as a Syrian refugee casting an eye on my lifelong threats of eviction by landlord because of my lack of willingness to passively comply. I can still take a shit, watch a flat screen television, do not live in terror of Islamic schisms, so who am I to live in pain at the bottom of the American barrel? I am old enough to see this sarin usage as a repeat of Saddam Hussein slaughtering his own in the war with Iran.
