Aug. 15, 2010

That guy looking all bad-ass with the baseball up there is the New York Mets’ multi-million dollar all-star closing pitcher, Francisco Rodriguez. The big sports story in New York right now is that Rodriguez, who’s displayed a tendency toward flying off the handle in the past, recently punched and pounded his girlfriend’s father, Carlos Pena, when Pops boldly suggested that fragile young Francisco should “man-up” after yet another Mets loss. And, just because he’s extra classy, Rodriguez pulled this little maneuver in the "family lounge," in front of the other Mets players’ wives and children.

Go team go!

No one knows exactly what triggered the incident at this point - Pena may have also said something shitty about Rodriguez’s mom, as if that makes any difference - but whatever happened, it led to the relatively unique sight of a 28 year-old major league baseball player literally banging a 53 year-old man’s head against a wall. The Mets are stinking up Citi Field once again this year, but, even with lowered standards, this is not the kind of season highlight that looks good on the Jumbotron.

The Mets’ front office was appalled when one of the team’s best players lost his cool to the point that he had to be handcuffed and charged with third-degree assault and second-degree harassment. Here’s a funny picture of that happening.

So the team suspended Rodriguez without pay for two whole days, which adds up to over $125,000 down the toilet for the young righty. (I can remember, by the way, when the Braves paid Hank Aaron $200,000 for an entire season of Hall of Fame-level work back in the 1970s, and people just about popped a blood vessel over the Caligula of it all. Now, guys you’ve barely heard of make that much while they wait for the clubhouse boy to re-charge their iPod and bring them another custom-fitted jockstrap.)

Rodriguez’s live-in girlfriend, with whom Rodriguez has sired 11-month old twins, kicked the very mature baby daddy out of his own house this past Saturday. Here’s another funny picture of movers lugging his possessions to a van.

Don’t worry about Rodriguez, though. His court case is still pending, but if you think this sorry-ass will do one minute of time behind bars simply for beating up a much poorer man who’s nearly twice his age, you obviously haven’t been paying attention to how this thing called America now works. The judge will undoubtedly make boogey-man noises at Rodriguez, then send him on his merry way to eventually punch somebody’s know-it-all grandma in the throat because she was, like, gettin’ all up in his face.

                                                ***

So that’s the story. But, truth be told, major league baseball has long been deficient when it comes to punishing violent offenders. In fact, the single most brutal thing that’s ever happened on a professional baseball diamond led to nothing more than an 8 game suspension and a tarnished legacy for one of the sport’s premiere pitchers.

This is San Francisco Giants great Juan Marichal, and he really did throw like that. Marichal’s windup made him look like a flamingo with inner-ear trouble; you constantly thought he was about to fall on his face. But he had great control and could bring the heat in a big way. In fact, outside of Sandy Koufax, Marichal was probably the best hurler in baseball during the 1960s.

Just how great was Juan Marichal? Well, he won over 20 games in a season 6 different times during his 15-year career, posting records of 25-8 in 1963, 25-6 in 1966, and 26-9 in 1968. If he were pitching today, Marichal would be making something close to Columbian drug lord money, and would sign with a different, bigger market team every three years. He might even have his own logo.

Still, I’m sorry to say, when I hear the name Juan Marichal, the first thing I think of is his aggressive way with a bat.

Here’s why: The Giants were playing their arch-enemies, the Los Angeles Dodgers, on Sunday, August 22, 1965, at Candlestick Park. This was in the middle of a tight pennant race, and tension between the two teams was even higher than usual. None other than Koufax himself was on the mound for the Dodgers that day, when Marichal, who had earlier thrown a little chin music at Dodgers Maury Wills and Ron Fairly, stepped up to hit. Behind the plate was catcher John Roseboro, a dependable if remarkably unexciting player whose name now would be synonymous with “John who?” were it not for what happened during this particular at-bat.

Koufax opened with a strike on Marichal, then threw his next pitch high and inside. A message of caution was obviously being sent to Marichal, which seemed fair enough. However, when Roseboro threw the ball back to Koufax, he shifted behind Marichal and rifled it right next to Marichal’s head. Marichal later said he felt the ball clip the top of his ear, and immediately realized Roseboro was more interested in intimidating him than he was in returning the ball to Koufax.

Marichal, was pissed - batters are seldom brushed back by the catcher, for heaven’s sake - so he turned around and said to Roseboro, “Why’d you do that?” Whatever his intention at this point, the hulking Roseboro said, “Fuck you,” then took a step toward Marichal. Marichal stuck his hand out and knocked Roseboro’s mask and helmet to the ground. Then Marichal did this:

That’s right, cats and kiddies— he clubbed Roseboro in the head with his bat! And not lightheartedly. The umpire, Shag Crawford, managed to wrestle Marichal to the ground, and Marichal’s teammate, Willie Mays, ran out to comfort the bleeding Roseboro…who was Mays’ best friend in all of baseball.

Marichal was finally dragged to the edge of the Giants’ dugout, and Roseboro had to be restrained by several teammates, even though he had what the Dodgers’ trainer, Bill Buhler, later called, “a knot in the middle of his skull it would take your whole hand to cover.” Blood was spurting from a 2-inch gash on Roseboro’s scalp that would require 14 stitches to close. It was not a pretty sight.

Roseboro didn’t go brain dead or anything, although it appeared that Marichal had, without even receiving a blow. The wounded catcher was on the team’s flight that evening, and told reporters he was so pilled-up he couldn’t possibly feel any pain. But think about what happened here, and imagine it occurring on a city street. Could anybody get away with taking a baseball bat to the top of another person’s head because there was a two sentence argument and the other guy was looking sort of intimidating?

Marichal released a statement the day after the assault, in which he apologized for all the commotion, but maybe not completely for whacking Roseboro into submission. Basically, he said the Dodgers’ pitchers had been hitting Giants batters all season, and nobody seemed to care about that. It’s one thing, though, to get hit by a pitched baseball and another thing altogether to get cold-cocked with a 38-inch Louisville Slugger.

But so what? Marichal was fined - get this - $1,700 by National League President Warren Giles, and was suspended for 8 playing dates, which meant he missed only 2 starts…for non-competitive activity that could have literally killed an opponent. Marichal and Roseboro would also agree to an out-of-court settlement in 1970 that didn’t exactly make Roseboro a rich man. He got a cool 17 grand, although we tend to forget that was probably about half what he was being paid for a season of baseball back in 1965.

                                                ***

Incredibly, this story has a happy ending. The two players were fairly cold toward one another for many years following the incident, as you might expect, but, by the early 1980s, Roseboro was saying all was forgiven, and that he knew he played a role in the whole thing by whipping the ball so near Marichal’s head. He was also concerned that Marichal’s spontaneous assault was keeping a fully-deserving pitcher out of Cooperstown.

“There were no hard feelings on my part, and I thought if that was made public, people would believe that this was really over with,” Roseboro said. “So I saw him at a Dodger old-timers’ game and we posed for pictures together and I actually visited him in the Dominican. The next year, he was in the Hall of Fame.”

You’re a better man than me, John Roseboro.

Paul Tatara

August 9, 2010

People are always a bit astounded when I tell them I grew up in a town of less than 7,000 people in northern Alabama known as Arab (pronounced “A-rab.”) For one thing, you can detect only the slightest tinge of a southern accent when I talk, although, as a stunt, I can really lay on the drawl-n-slang. For instance, “that guy over there” becomes “that ol’ boy over yonder,” and “I went to the mall with my mother and father” becomes “Ah wint tuh duh-mall with muh mumma an’ muh diddy.”

I’ve also taught myself to have, shall we say, a wider grasp of the spectacle of modern life than many people who surrounded me down south ever bothered to display in my presence, and I gave them more than enough opportunity to branch out while I stood there gape-jawed.

So does that mean everybody in my hometown was a simpleton? Absolutely not. No. But I’ve developed a theory over the years that 60% of the people on earth, regardless of where they’ve parked their asses while they consume copious fats and “think” in a fine, proudly unwavering line, are tunnel vision-embracing numskulls, and the rest of the population tries the best it can to move forward in spite of them. Now, imagine how easy it is to stumble across the same gaggle of numskulls saying the exact same numskull things that all the other numskulls are saying, day-in and day-out, in a town that has only 7,000 residents.

Exactly.

I had to leave when I had to leave, then. Some people train themselves to deal with it and stick around. I couldn’t. But I was pondering my adolescence the other day, and realized that there was some pretty entertaining, supposedly spooky southern gothic stuff available in the greater Arab area back when I was growing up, provided you knew what you’re looking for and you were gullible enough to believe it. I had a close friend who was a hardcore local and knew the out-of-the-way roads like the back of his hand. So all I had to do was sit in his Plymouth and drink an IBC root beer while he quite recklessly drove us to the Creepiness.

It’s all old news to me, of course. But to the uninitiated, this stuff can read like something out of the director’s cut of “Twin Peaks.” Here, then, is the merest taste of the supernatural exoticism that was part of my 18-year, weeping willow tenure in the Heart of Dixie, Huntsville-Decatur Division.

                                                ***

The Three Witches

“Out around Grassy” (a nearby hamlet that was viewed by Arabians as even more concealed from the rest of the world than Arab was) there was a decrepit wooden house where “the Three Witches” lived. According to the lore - which is to say, the horse shit that kids said to each other when they didn’t have anything better to do, and, outside of playing baseball, basketball, and football, there was rarely anything better to do - you could sneak up and peek in the window of the Three Witches’ house, and see them doing things like levitating and making fire come out of their fingertips.

I remember one kid in my 9th grade class who swore up and down that he saw the Witches float from their front door to the old steps that stood about 10 feet away from their house. The porch had caved in years before, but this didn’t bother the Three Witches, who apparently had little need for a series of wooden planks nailed together by mere mortal construction workers.

This all sounded a little…um…suspect to me. First of all, if you were a witch, don’t you think you could think of something better to do with your unearthly powers than to float around the living room in front of other witches? I mean, to what end would they be doing this? Trying to get the most out of that carpeting?

Admittedly, the fire on the fingertips thing is pretty cool. But again, wouldn’t the other witches get sick of it after a while? You know— “Stop with the fingers already and clean the bathroom!” And if the Witches could float across the empty expanse of what used to be their front porch, why would they even bother with the steps? Wouldn’t they just float down to the ground and go get the mail?

During my senior year, I inadvertently learned for certain that the witch stuff was a load of crap, because my friend, Delene Leak (the same guy who used to drive us in his Plymouth, actually), explained that the “Witches” were in fact his great aunts, three sisters who had finally gotten too old to take care of themselves, and now lived in a trailer that Delene’s parents parked next to their house. That way, help would be available if the sisters needed anything.

Not surprisingly, the women had also grown sick of idiots running up and trying to look in their window to see if they were floating, or lighting stogies with their freakishly flaming phalanges.

What they should have done was introduce a random intruder to the magic of a sawed off shotgun. That would have immediately transformed them from “witches” to pillars of second amendment righteousness in the eyes of their neighbors, provided of course it wasn’t some rich guy’s kid who got cut in half by their Freedom.

                                                ***

Cry Baby Hollow (aka Cry Baby Holler)

Cry Baby Holler - I opt for the less formal variation, as it sounds, rather amusingly, like someone ridiculing a bawling infant - is probably the best-known supernatural location around Arab. You actually have to drive a little bit out of town, all the way to the outskirts of Hartselle, to see it. But, believe me, once you’ve made the trek and have gone through the motions of trying to be frightened by an old bridge, you’re not particularly inclined to do it again.

The above picture was grabbed off the Internet, so enough people know about this place that it gets a little bit of coverage. The idea, and I never really heard the back story that supposedly caused this theoretically hellish situation to generate, was that you put a Baby Ruth candy bar on the bridge in the middle of the night, then pulled just far enough away that you couldn’t see the bridge anymore. Then you listened closely, and eventually heard…a baby crying!! Once the crying stopped, you drove back to the bridge to discover the candy bar missing, and no baby in sight.

Holy shit!! Except that, as far as I know, no one ever heard a baby crying at Cry Baby Holler, and, once you got irritated and returned to the bridge, what you actually found was a Baby Ruth Candy bar with your fingerprints on it, unless some squirrel or raccoon that was wise to the situation was hanging around waiting for another rube to pony up some treats. It should also be noted that even living babies don't eat candy bars.

Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole Cry Baby Holler myth was introduced as a hillbilly meme by a bunch of wily forest critters. Regardless, as Friday night activities go, it was about as productive as jumping on the hose and listening to the bell ring over at the San-Ann station.

                                                ***

The Devil Grave

Not to be confused with The Baby Graves, which were literally so far out in the woods, I couldn’t have found them by myself if I had to, the Devil Grave was right out in the open. During the day, it was just a partially shattered tombstone situated on the corner of a small graveyard. At night, however - or so the story went - when your car’s headlights swept across the tombstone, there was a split second where you could see the very face of Beelzebub staring back at you, with his eyes glowing red!! Once again— holy shit!!

Yeah, well. I drove past the Devil Grave at least 15 times in the middle of the night and basically saw a partially shattered tombstone. I had people with me once or twice who shrieked wildly at the sight, but I also knew people who shrieked wildly over Styx albums when they could have been listening to Springsteen. Even in 1981, a shriek wasn’t quite what it used to be. My friends and I, however, did manage to wrangle a first-class practical joke out of the Devil Grave, and it nearly gave a girl we knew a heart attack. Ha-ha!

Our friend, Pam Brown, scared easily - I remember her literally crawling over strangers to get out of the theater when Nicholson busted out the ax in “The Shining” - and one night my buddy Llane conspired with a guy we knew named Jeff Johnson to freak Pam’s shit out.

Here’s what happened. Understand that many a Friday or Saturday night was spent simply tooling around the area in a packed car, blasting cassettes. So a bunch of us were cruising, with Pam sitting on the passenger side in the front seat, when it was decided we’d drive past the Devil Grave to see what we could see. Pam, of course, wanted no part of this, but she was eventually mocked into submission (this task undoubtedly fell to me) and complied. Unbeknownst to Pam, however, Johnson was hanging out in the graveyard waiting for us to pull by.

This was long before cell phones, so I’m not exactly sure how it was all timed, but it worked perfectly. Johnson came running out beside the grave at the exact point our headlights hit it— while wearing a sheet, and, in what I thought was a brilliantly surreal touch, waving a wooden crutch in the air!

Cue Pam’s shit being freaked out. There was, of course, an absolutely blood-curdling scream, coupled with Pam turning quickly to her right, which may or may not have been an attempt to…well…I don’t know what she was trying to do. But she swung her head so violently to get away from the encroaching ghoul, she smacked her face on the passenger side window and left a big streak of grease on it. If I were directing this scene in a movie, I would linger on the streak in the final shot while everybody howls with laughter in the background.

Okay. So it’s not Yoknapatawpha County. What have you got?

Paul Tatara

August 3, 2010

Back when I was trapped reviewing mainly crap movies for CNN, I was sometimes asked by interested readers (incredibly enough, there were a few out there) if paying close attention to such “minutiae” as cinematography, music, and editing while watching a picture impinged on my overall enjoyment of the narrative. My answer was a somewhat exasperated “no,” because I viewed movies at least semi-analytically long before I started reviewing them, without ever imagining that that made me any different than most of my fellow audience members.

If you really care about motion pictures as a popular art form, I don’t see how you can’t be taken with the technique involved in pulling off a great sequence, whether it consists of a crop duster dive-bombing Cary Grant or Al Pacino noticing his hands don’t shake when he should be rattled as hell in “The Godfather.”

The trick, if you want to call it that, is to allow your mind to receive what you’re watching on two simultaneous levels— just because I’m noticing a particularly graceful camera move, or a brilliantly framed shot, it doesn’t mean I’ve taken my head out of the narrative, any more than appreciating the craft of a sharply devised paragraph removes me from the joy of reading a great novel.

Effective, inventive, elegant use of film grammar is part of why I want to sit down to watch a movie in the first place, although my taste in what does and doesn’t work has shifted considerably over the years. As I’ve gotten older, I seem to have dialed down my predilection for directors who don’t know when to quit.

                                                ***

Far be it for me to badmouth pre-1980 Martin Scorsese. “Mean Streets,” "Taxi Driver", and “Raging Bull” remain three of my favorite movies, and that won’t change before I die. But, please— mix yourself a drink and pull up a chair while I badmouth post-1990 Martin Scorsese.

If you’re familiar enough with the three pictures I listed - they’re in the order that they were released - it’s easy to see a transformation in Scorsese’s guiding perspective as a film stylist. Whereas “Mean Streets” (probably my favorite of the three these days) is shot almost cinema vérité, with a wacky nod here and there to the French New Wave, “Taxi Driver” is often presented as a despairing, oddly sensual sidewalk hallucination. But with “Raging Bull,” Scorsese amps things up until what you’re watching is part static John Cassavetes argument clinic and part Luis Bunuel dream sequence. The movie either just sits there or flows like magma, depending on the desired effect.

Perhaps Scorsese’s greatest accomplishment with “Raging Bull,” and nobody ever seems to mention it, is that he makes two completely oppositional approaches to visual storytelling work with one another. It’s quite a trick, and the sign of somebody who is deeply connected to his own artistic impulses.

Scorsese’s pre-1980s pictures are so terrific because he pulled emotion and spiritual depth out their screenplays through audacious yet sensibly applied visual styles. The unearthliness of those fight scenes in “Raging Bull” makes complete sense, although Scorsese’s personal worldview is the only thing that could have dictated their being filmed that way. That’s why he’ll go down as one of the genuine visionaries of commercial cinema.

However, outside of “Goodfellas,” which is a tad superficial compared to those other iconic works while still being a blast to watch, Scorsese now seems to have lost his perspective on what really serves a scene, opting instead for a series of trademark visual tics and music cues that simply make people notice Martin Scorsese is directing another movie.

Scorsese mostly plays to the cheap seats nowadays, and when he doesn’t, with lush Oscar-bait pictures like “The Age of Innocence” and “Kundun,” he moves so far in the other direction he practically dehydrates his pulp impulses and makes you feel like you’re watching a homework assignment.

Not everything has been a travesty since “Goodfellas,” of course, but much of it has been— in my book, “Cape Fear”’s shrieking and Bible-thumping scrapes the bottom, with “Bringing Out the Dead”’s phony Upper West Side apocalypse running a close second. By now, Scorsese seems to move his camera and edit his sequences to keep himself from getting bored, and that’s not the same thing as doing what’s needed to serve the text.

Tracking shots for the sake of tracking shots and titled camera angles that reveal absolutely nothing except that the camera has been tilted are a damn sight removed from the fight scenes in “Raging Bull,” and I’ll be stunned if Scorsese ever pulls himself back from the brink. Even his so-called “gritty” pictures now appear to be vacuum sealed, lest they get corrupted by something resembling real artistic passion.

Thank God for film preservation.

                                                ***

I’m glad I finally got around to mentioning tracking shots, because the power of choreographed long takes is one of the things I planned to focus on when I started writing this article. Whereas, when I was younger, I was enamored of directors who zoom and zip and jump and cut, nowadays something about my middle-aged psychology responds far more positively to extended takes that allow a scene to unfold unbroken by a needlessly tinkering filmmaker.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again— I’d just as soon watch two characters argue in a kitchen than have a character turn a slow-motion back flip and shoot a lightning bolt out of his ass. You don’t have to get very fancy to shoot a kitchen argument, but you still have to have a sense of rhythm and an idea where to place a camera to expose the heart of the scene.

I want to ponder the highs and lows of human experience when I view a motion picture, and I want to feel a connection with the people on the screen. It’s what I hope to get out of a movie, but there aren’t all that many these days that concern themselves with such things. Still, that doesn’t mean I’m completely averse to fluid, imaginative camera movement. I’ll accept a great extended take any day of the week, if it contains legitimate reason for being.

Woody Allen has long been a master of letting scenes play out almost as if they’re taking place onstage, with the significant caveat that he moves characters into medium shots and close-ups while the actors wander around the room, which allows the frame to evolve and elevate emotional impact when needed.

Note that Allen will often let actors walk out of the frame altogether, knowing that, sooner or later, they’ll show up again to deliver the most important bits of dialogue. That way, he gives the performers the opportunity to really experience a scene rather than forcing them to feed it out over and over again to a variety of camera set-ups.

Say what you want to about Allen’s truly mind-boggling collapse as a screenwriter, even his shitty movies – and there are too many to name at this point - regularly contain solid performances. I think his use of long takes is one of the reasons for that.

                                                ***

Easily the most famous and most discussed long take in movie history is the opening shot of Orson Welles’ 1958 film noir exercise, "Touch of Evil". Welles introduces key characters as well as the sleazy border town they inhabit in one massive camera sweep that was initially pissed on by the producers, who chose, against Welles’ wishes, to insert the credits as well as Henry Mancini-penned rhumba music over it.

The shot you’re about to watch, however, is from the re-configured version of the picture that was released long after Welles’ death. Note how the music changes, rises, and falls as the audience passes various nightclubs and bar jukeboxes. Note also how utterly idiotic Charlton Heston looks while attempting to play a suave Mexican.

Do you see what I mean? If you’re not the type of viewer who takes the time to notice how a sequence is constructed, you’re not throwing a wrench into your viewing experience by trying to do so. That’s one goddamned creative piece of filmmaking, and there’s a certain exhilaration in recognizing that fact while it unfolds.

                                                ***

I received literally hundreds of letters from CNN readers accusing me of thinking too much about movies, rather than simply “enjoying” them, which is so stupid a concept I rarely bothered to reply. However, since I probably haven’t convinced everyone reading this that you can draw real excitement out of noticing something like an extended single take with no cutaways to other shots, I’m closing with the following short film by the French director, Claude Lelouch— “C'était un Rendezvous” (English translation, “It’s a Date.”)

A lot of rumors still exist about how Lelouch managed to do this without killing anybody, and Lelouch isn’t talking. But we’re not worried about that right now. Just buckle up and enjoy an early morning, hair-raising ride through the streets of 1970s Paris. And play it LOUD, if at all possible. Since we’re discussing which filmmaking elements give a scene its impact, you should note that the shifting gears and roaring engine are at least half the fun in “C'était un Rendezvous.”

C'était un Rendez-vous de Claude Lelouch from Grandes cortos on Vimeo.

Again, let me stress that no escargot venders were harmed in the completion of this shot.

Paul Tatara

July 27, 2010

Movies can be funny, even when they’re not funny movies. Sometimes we selectively remember certain films; a few scattered images and bits of dialogue here and there is all we really retain from them, but our minds like to tell us we have the whole enchilada lodged somewhere in our noggins.

This doesn’t hold true for all movies, of course, especially for someone like me. I was so immersed in watching and reading about great motion pictures during my young adult years I very nearly forgot to have a life. So I have films impacted in my brain the way many people have wisdom teeth impacted in their gums. That’s just how I’ve ended up, and a handful of my closest friends are just as bad as I am, at least on that count.

I could start typing right now and list scenes from movies like “The Godfather,” “The French Connection,” “Badlands,” and “The Last Detail,” to name just four, and construct about 80% of the narrative, with pivotal verbal exchanges thrown in for good measure. But even I can convince myself I’m familiar with a particular picture, only to re-watch it years later and discover I hardly recall anything about it.

This tends to happen with comedies more than dramas, for some reason. I think it’s because I find something almost mystical about comedy. I’m endlessly amazed that watching certain things happen, or hearing people say things in a certain way, can make you yelp out loud and bring tears to your eyes. What does that even mean? John Belushi crams an entire sandwich in his mouth while standing in line in the Faber College cafeteria, and I double over and shout, “Ha, ha, ha!” Really? Does that make any sense at all?

Once I’ve yelped hard enough, though, the mystical experience can stick with me and become something bigger than it was when I first experienced it.

                                                ***

Two 1980s pictures that I long felt were unrecognized pop masterpieces of sorts are the Steve Martin film noir parody, “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” and a Bob Zemeckis satire on all-American consumerism and lust for political pull called “Used Cars.” If you haven’t seen these pictures before, don’t worry. I’m going to show them to you right now…or, at least, I’m going to show you scenes from each movie that struck me as so hilarious when I first saw them, I eventually started telling myself the films were total screams from beginning to end. Which, I finally discovered upon re-watching years later, they really aren’t.

But please don’t think I’m telling you not to watch “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” and “Used Cars.” In fact, I hope the clips I’m providing will convince you to do just that some rainy weekend. They’re both entertaining as hell, and you’re bound to shout “Ha, ha, ha!” several times before they’re over.

But they’re just solid comedies that each feature one absolute hit-it-out-of-the-park scene. In fact, they contain two of the funniest scenes I can think of, out of the hundreds that have staked out territory in that otherwise barren landscape known as Paul Tatara’s Subconscious.

“Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” which was released when I was one year out of high school, back in 1982, was Martin’s second picture, after his initial world-famous comedian filmic cash-in, “The Jerk.” Given the utter genius of Martin’s stand-up, I was somewhat disappointed by “The Jerk”’s bouts of extended face-making. But “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” even today, strikes me as Martin and his co-conspirator, director Carl Reiner, consciously reaching for a classic. Along with “Pennies from Heaven,” it’s certainly the most ambitious film Martin has ever starred in, and its construction is certifiably brilliant.

As I’ve already noted, “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” is a film noir parody, but Martin and Reiner, along with cinematographer Michael Chapman (he also shot “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” so he’s…um…pretty good) upped the comic ante by combining clips from old 1940s pictures starring such legends as Ava Gardner, Humphrey Bogart, and James Cagney with newly-shot black & white footage of Martin as a cynical private detective named Rigby Reardon.

The story, which is full of McGuffins, dead ends, and red herrings, is intentionally pointless. The real draw is seeing Martin interact with now-deceased actors in their prime. Reardon’s Chandler-esque voiceover also contains a handful of legitimate gut-busters, but the idea, once you’ve gotten used to it, eventually just runs out of steam. You find yourself, during the final half hour, focusing more on the enormous technical achievement than you do the comedy.

And then there’s this scene. After discovering a note that leads him to the mysterious “Swede Anderson,” Reardon - who’s recently been shot in his upper left arm - makes a dramatic visit to a flophouse where Martin gets to interact with none other the young Burt Lancaster.

Every time I open up a new bag of coffee, I think of this dazzlingly idiotic gag and chuckle quietly, and that’s one more lifelong chuckle than I would have had otherwise. So, for one scene, anyway, maybe Reiner and Martin made a classic after all.

                                                ***

1980’s “Used Cars,” unlike “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” is anything but ambitious. In fact, the key reason I inflated its accomplishment over the years is that I feel it’s the only raunchy comedy to be released in the wake of “Animal House” that managed to also include “Animal House”’s often overlooked warmth and sweetness. The characters in “Used Cars,” even though they're stupid and self-serving, also care about each other, and their concern is the engine that drives portions of the plot, such as it is.

Kurt Russell is terrific as Rudy Russo, a slick, fast-talking used car salesman who has his eye on the "higher" calling of the U.S. Senate. He and his co-horts at the dealership, including Jack Warden - who plays two characters in the picture, one of whom delivers streams of hilariously profane dialogue – will do absolutely anything to sell cars and to get Rudy into the halls of power.

There’s a handful of truly warped one-liners in "Used Cars," pointless nudity, one amazing sight gag that takes place during a fight scene in a trailer, an hilarious supporting performance by character actor Frank McRae, and a memorably shrieking, eye-rolling turn from Gerrit Graham, who I never saw again after this movie (his IMDB resume shows that he’s kicked around on TV for years.) But the movie falls apart completely in the last half hour or so, to an even greater extent than “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid."

Once again, though, there’s this scene, in which Graham utilizes the gang’s mascot, a deadpan beagle named Toby, to sell a ratty station wagon to an unsuspecting customer and his horrendous family. Prepare yourself for this one, animal lovers.

I actually say, “All he wanted was for you to be happy in this car,” at random moments throughout the year, even when the situation doesn't really call for it. As long as the line is parked in the car port of my brain, I figure I might as well take it out for a drive once in a while.

Toby, unfortunately, was not nominated for the Oscar he so fully deserved.

Paul Tatara