Framed (1975)

A nasty little film, and the last from the great noir artist Phil Karlson (The Phenix City Story (1955), 99 River Street (1953)). A transparent bid to capitalize on the surprise success of Walking Tall two years previously, it's a bruising revenge story that finds the doughy strongman Joe Don Baker tossed into the swamp of state corruption. But he's not quite innocent. His fall is initiated in an animalistic brawl in his suburban garage, the dirty cop on his trail finding his end on a cement floor. Karlson's distanced framings capture every landed blow, allowing for a kind of meathead poetry in their stumbling, groping manuevering for dominance. Baker's character Ron, while set-up to take a fall, is solely responsible for the savagery of the killing, and Karlson never soft-pedals his unlikeability.

Arrested for murder, the film shifts to a prison site, where the tone lightens considerably. Safely ensconsced in jail with his fellow low-lifes, Ron is still tight-lipped, but considerably more at ease. He slides in with a jovial mafia don who secures his parole, and he's quickly back on the Tennessee streets, where the film gets ugly again, and where Ron's vengeance stains everyone near him.
Thanks to Dave Kehr for recommending this one.

****

Interviews to read:

Abel Ferrara at Filmmaker magazine:

"Filmmaker: What was your dream job as a kid?

Ferrara: Washing dishes in a hospital full of hot nurses."


Gilbert Arenas at SLAM magazine:

"Gil: I’ve got an invention. I’ll let your hear it, but if you make money you’ve gotta hit me off.

SLAM: I got you.

Gil: It’s called the Cool Aid (note: I couldn’t tell if he said Cool Aid or Cool Wave. Either way, copyright pending…) It’s like the microwave, but the Cool Aid. So for instance you can put a warm soda in the machine and boom, it’s cold. Most people, “Oh no, you call that the freezer”, but nah, the freezer takes two minutes. Just like you’ve got the oven and the microwave, you’ve got the freezer and the Cool Aid."

99 River Street (1953)

Today in the NY Times David Mamet says that "There is little more beautiful than a fighter’s face. Audrey Hepburn was the face of beauty, but if wisdom is knowledge perfected by suffering, the fighter’s is the face of wisdom." A bit romanticized, sure, and written to promote his (rather good) fight film Redbelt, but his phrase seems particularly apt after seeing John Payne's battered face in Phil Karlson's mournful 99 River Street (1953). Made a year after Karlson and Payne teamed up for Kansas City Confidential (where ex-con Payne is set up to take the fall for an armored car robbery), River Street is another story of failure and provisional redemption. In this version Payne is a washed up pug, his eye permanently damaged after a brutal beating that he re-watches ritualistically on TV, hoping for a catharsis that never comes. Repeatedly shown in oblique angle close-ups, his right eye twitches like a maggot in a slab of beef. His wife, played with icy disdain by Peggie Castle, is a cinched-up former showgirl who yearns for the high life and sees an out in the machinations of a slick conman (Brad Dexter).

The cuckolded Payne drives a cab and hangs out with another failure, an out-of-work actress played by Evelyn Keynes, whose whole life revolves around performance. Her overactive eyebrows eventually sucker Payne in to be an unwitting co-star in an elaborate audition of a murder scene. It's an incredible sequence that pivots on a long take, close-up monologue of Keynes re-enacting a murder which Karlson initially presents as factual. Then the curtain is raised, the hoax revealed, and Payne's subterranean rage bursts. Keynes, staring at the camera, was acting out a murder for the audience, which is then revealed to be an act. She spends the rest of the film trying to make amends for this betrayal. It's a far more sensitive handling of an audience's implication in screen violence than anything in Haneke's Funny Games.

As a tale of failure it is also a tale of redemption, so amid some gorgeously drawn matte shots Payne gains some shreds of wisdom in his life - he's not the self-abnegating sensei that Mamet celebrates, but a man in the process of mastering his rage. In the final showdown, when Payne is facing up to one of the men who has screwed up his life (although his wasted life is never less than attributed to Payne's own frailties), a voice-over intrudes for the first time in the film, as Payne, shot in the arm and fading, repeats the mantra, "I have to get him". It's a jarring device - and a rather beautiful one, giving us a peek into the interior world of a man made up of exteriors, whose whole life is built upon physicality. So he gains his modest slice of success - a filling station - but one wonders what he'll do if he catches his final fight on TV again.

***

There's an excellent piece by Jia Zhangke up at GOOD magazine. It's a very informative look into the development of his career as related to the state of Chinese politics.