2010: The year we make...manimals?

TCM is about to air 2010 (1984) in a few minutes. It's the 2001 sequel that imagines the birth of a second sun...but somehow couldn't foresee the end of the Cold War, which is in full chill as the movie opens but as we know pretty much came to a halt with the fall of the Berlin Wall five years later.

Once you've made that obvious stop this New Year's Day, maybe hit a few more flicks set this year. There's 1988's The New Gladiators, where armed gangs roam a post-nuke Los Angeles. Or 2004's District B13, where armed gangs skilled in the art of parkour crawl the walls and pop through walls in pursuit of a neutron bomb aimed at the slums on the outskirts of Paris. The armed--and legged, and furred, and toothed--gangs in 1996's The Island of Dr. Moreau are made up of Marlon Brando's menagerie of manimals, which back when a man from Hope was in the Oval Office and everything seemed possible we all figured would be commonplace by now. Maybe Lady Gaga is one.

There's 364 days left and the last laugh may be on me, but I suspect that by 2011 we'll still have one sun and be bereft of manimals. (The nukes and neutron bombs I'm not so sure about.) And I'm OK with that, so long as the events prophesied in 2012 don't come to pass.

Warmth in Autumn

If 4 for Texas touches bottom for director Robert Aldrich, then 1956's Autumn Leaves is an unsung highlight of his career. Aldrich's idea of a "woman's picture" was not at all dainty: Physically and mentally, the likes of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968) play rough. Coming at a time when Aldrich was making punishing pictures like Kiss Me Deadly, Attack!, and The Big Knife, Autumn Leaves is (as you can tell by the title) an unusually sensitive change-of-pace, not without cruelty but never unkind.

Its May-September success hinges on two thoroughly credible performances. In his second major screen role, after Picnic, Cliff Robertson gives a believably off-center performance as Burt, scion of a wealthy family. He strikes up an unlikely romance with Milly, a lonely middle-aged typist who sacrificed her youth caring for her ailing father, despite his protestations. Milly is played by Joan Crawford, in one of her finest performances. Her career was on the slippery slope toward camp at this time, in films like the Southern-fried family Gothic Queen Bee and the must-be-seen-to-be-believed musical Torch Song, and by Baby Jane? it had pretty much arrived. But Autumn Leaves and the cult WesternJohnny Guitar are high-water marks, and I don't think she was ever more vulnerable, and less guarded, than here.* Milly has two problems: Societal scorn for her romance, as in the more highly regarded Douglas Sirk picture All That Heaven Allows that same year, and Burt's creeping neurosis, whose root cause she goes through much trauma herself to uncover. Just when you've forgotten that you're watching an Aldrich picture, what with all the aborning romance and the lovely Nat King Cole title tune on the soundtrack, there is a horrific episode involving Milly's typewriter, a deal-breaker for most women trying to tough out an impossible relationship. But Milly carries on. Love hurts, Aldrich says.

Turner Classic Movies has a nice letterboxed transfer of Autumn Leaves in its library, which it will air Tuesday, May 27, at 8:45am EST, as part of a day-long salute to Robertson. Charles Lang's wistful, noir-inflected black-and-white cinematography, uncovering interesting facets of period twilight L.A., is well-preserved. It really should be on DVD but as the studios prepare to resell their biggest contemporary hits again and again on Blu-Ray I wouldn't hold my breath waiting. Aldrich fans, note that on Wed., May 28 at 7am EST TCM is airing 1957's The Garment Jungle, which the director was fired from, with two weeks to go in the shooting. [His replacement was old Crawford hand Vincent Sherman.]

*The script was co-written by the husband-and-wife team of Jean Rouverol and Hugo Butler, and has a nice give-and-take in the dialogue between the couple that could only come from lived-in observation. The two were blacklisted at the time, and the film co-credited to a front, comedy writer Jack Jevne. Butler died in 1968, the year they completed the screenplay for Lylah Clare. The 91-year-old Rouverol, a former actress who co-starred in the W.C. Fields classic It's a Gift (1934), appears as herself in the play adaptation Trumbo, which is being released this summer.

Rat Pack rewind

Last week, as part of its month-long Frank Sinatra tribute, Turner Classic Movies broadcast all four movies featuring the fabled Rat Pack, or, as they preferred to call themselves, "the Clan." Sinatra's brood, Frank Jr. (diffident, but straight-ahead), Nancy (out-of-it, but I like her anyway) and Tina (poised, attractive, but I wouldn't want to tangle with her), co-hosted the pix with Robert Osborne. I skipped the first, and most successful, Ocean's 11 (1960)--I find it a chore to sit through, with the mechanics of the big heist both lazy and hazy, and the boys clearly weren't trying too hard as they squeezed in the filming between their Vegas engagements. I'm not all that keen on the new ones but they're breezier and more efficient, yet also more knowing. It's easy to see why the original was a hit--through the prism of a too-loose narrative it seemed to give insight into the ring-a-ding lives of its performers. It lets you in on their 24/7 world, just as the current pictures put an ironic distance between us and them.

[As it happens, I stayed at Sinatra's stomping ground, the Sands, in 1996, the year it was demolished and made over into a convention center. The maids were changing the sheets but that was about it in its final hours. Somewhere, in the faded carpets and cheap, cigarette-burned furniture, I thought I could see the ghosts of its joie de vivre past.]

The second, 1962's comic Western Sergeants 3, is much better. It's also, technically, the last: the expendable Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop were cut loose after this one, for various internecine reasons, and the vital Sammy Davis, Jr. missed the next (lucky him) and returned for the last. In between the classics The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, director John Sturges rode herd on the principals, in a remake of 1939's Gunga Din shot, in glorious widescreen, in Utah. I love Gunga Din but this one has the same structural weakness, for impatient contemporary viewers especially--after a rip-roaring opening it settles into semi-improvisational romantic and interpersonal hijinx before starting up again as the pack takes on a Native American cult in the post-Civil War West. [By virtue of being better-written and more structurally solid the original gets away with all the tomfoolery, though Martin's double takes are sly.] Still, the action scenes (particularly the ones set in the mountainside Injun lair and a perilous rope-bridge crossing that might have inspired a similar scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), are well-staged, the score by frequent Sinatra collaborator Billy May rousing, and Davis touching in the Sam Jaffe part, even if the all-in-good-fun spirit denies him the tragic character arc that gives Gunga Din its heart.

Sinatra (who except for Ocean's 11 produced all these pictures) said they were meant to be nothing more than entertainment, but that is tested by 4 for Texas (1963). It didn't help that the film was carelessly cropped after the opening titles; still, I doubt there was anything missing from the frame that might have helped. I'm a fan of director Robert Aldrich and have read (and written) spirited defenses of his less-regarded work. Never a one on this picture, however, and I doubt anyone will pick up the banner. Aldrich and Sinatra, a good match on paper for a more dramatic movie, reportedly clashed during the filming of this sludgy riverboat gamblers farce, and even with Charles Bronson, Victor Buono, and the lusciously blank Anita Ekberg and Ursula Andress in the cast it just sits there, uncomfortably docked. Most painful is a feeble, final reel appearance by the last incarnation of The Three Stooges, though they at least are more in their element. I imagine it's preferable to some of the comic pictures Sinatra and Martin made. I am not, however, planning to check.

1964's Robin and the 7 Hoods is more like it. It's a cheerful, if dawdling, picture, despite the disruptions of JFK's assassination and the kidnapping of Sinatra's son during shooting. The only (sort-of) musical in the bunch, introducing the standard "My Kind of Town" in the opening credits and in performance by Sinatra toward the close, it has a pleasant Roaring Twenties atmosphere in ganster-ridden old Chicago and with the welcome Peter Falk (as the bad guy) and Bing Crosby (as a fop) in the cast a new pack is complete. Barbara Rush also has more to do in the distaff part, an afterthought in these boys' club movies. [Edward G. Robinson also shows up in an opening sequence cameo.] Sinatra's role in these pictures was pretty much to hold them steady, which he does; this one's stolen by Sammy, whose song-and-dance routine "Bang!," atop a speakeasy card table, is the highlight. [This is one of those films that must look like absolute hell minus letterboxing.] With a revamped book and more musical numbers--they are sparsely apportioned, as if no one really wanted to commit to the genre--this might work as a Broadway show. Gordon Douglas, an old Sinatra hand, directs anonymously but functionally, and I wonder what path these shows might have taken had there been more of them. The gig was concluded, however, save for an appearance by Martin, Davis, Jr., Rat Packette Shirley MacLaine, and the Chairman of the Board in 1984's The Cannonball Run II, one of Burt Reynolds' good-ol-boy vehicles, and a picture to make 4 for Texas look like vintage Preston Sturges.

Speaking of Sinatra, the last of the four, thus far terrific TV specials TCM is broadcasting, 1973's Ol' Blue Eyes is Back, airs tomorrow. This one pairs him with his MGM buddy, Gene Kelly. I'll be tuning in.

Memo to TCM, FMC: Richard Widmark

Richard Widmark died yesterday, and I missed it. I noted that he had died, at age 93, just before leaving for the day and the web wouldn't wait for me to eulogizehim. The usual sources have run the usual obits and now there's the departure of Kojak creator Abby Mann, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Judgment at Nuremberg (featuring the actor), to consider. The 24/7 online news cycle is tough.

But surely something has to be said about one of my favorite film presences. Screenwise, Widmark is what happens when a bad guy goes respectable and never really fits in. (In person, he wore the white hat, as a respectable liberal when that wasn't a dirty word and a true-blue family man who took pride in his long and happy marriage and fulfilling family life.) And bad guys don't get much badder than the giggly sadist Tommy Udo in his debut picture, Kiss of Death. It's a testament to his versatility and fortitude that his career ever survived the Oscar nomination that came from pushing wheelchair-bound Mildred Dunnock down the stairs, whooping it up all the way. A lesser, or less fortunate or determined, actor would have stuck to playing Udo clones.

But Widmark moved on, freeing himself from typecasting and becoming his own, quintessentially modern, man. The brawny, good guy heroics of his contemporaries, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, were not for him. Nor was he as reflective as Henry Fonda, or as aw-shucks charming as James Stewart. Widmark always tapped into a part of Udo, a strain of anxiety and neuroticism that never entirely went away as he aged into military parts, ranchers, and the like. Cast as a pillar of society, he was skeptical of the pedestal and looked askance at the society, and tried to improve it--eventually. That was what I responded to in Widmark; for his characters, respectability was a giant pain in the ass, but responsibility--to his own personal code, for the group, for a nation beset by the Cold War or killer bees--dictated that he had to make the goddamned effort. Even if it killed him, as it so often did.

I ask, if Widmark was so often willing to lay it on the line for us, why can't our movie channels respond in kind? Turner Classic Movies' Apr. 4 tribute is inadequate at best. 1966's Alvarez Kelly is an indifferent oater, which he and William Holden, who walked some of the same cinematic ground, plod through as the Old West began its retreat from movie screens. 1953's Take the High Ground!, a boot camp story, doesn't sound like much. And 1960's The Tunnel of Love, which I have seen, is hardly a love fest: co-star Doris Day, equally ignored by Oscar (there's still time), disliked it, and as her husband in a paternity mix-up scenario Widmark looks stricken, as if nursing a peptic ulcer. That familiar choleric look, a semi-scowl that occasionally erupts into harsh laughter, was suited to front the weight of the world and not light comic shenanigans.

No, it won't do. But it's more than the less ambitious Fox Movie Channel will muster. There's not even a note appended to its home page to mark the passing of one of 20th Century Fox's homegrown stars, just an ad for Horton Hears a (Goddamned) Who. Such a festival it could have: Kiss of Death; the interesting followup noir Road House, with Ida Lupino, and the noir-ish Western Yellow Sky with Gregory Peck; No Way Out, where Widmark helped ensure Sidney Poitier's big break; the great Night and the City (pictured), with Widmark really sweating it out; and my favorite of his credits, Sam Fuller's outstanding Pickup on South Street (1953). He gives his most seductive performance here, as a pickpocket putting the moves on the lush Jean Peters while tangling with New York cops and commies, and trading bitter life-in-the-gutter wisecracks with the great Thelma Ritter. I reviewed the Criterion DVD for Cineaste four years ago. Movies really don't get much better. But as it's old and black-and-white don't look for it on FMC, which is more likely to show the inferior 1995 remake of Kiss of Death, with a vapid Nicolas Cage in the Udo part.

But TCM and FMC can rally. To help mend the error of their ways, I suggest TCM showcase more of a variety of his parts: the doctor in Vincente Minnelli's The Cobweb, say, or his aggravated Jim Bowie in The Alamo alongside John Wayne and the oily Laurence Harvey, who deserved Widmark's spleen. The weakling dauphin in Otto Preminger's Saint Joan (1957) was a flop but a nervier try at a comical part, Shavian this time. Why not one of his best old bastard parts, conniving against the plucky Genevieve Bujold in 1978's Coma? Or, what the hell, that same year's The Swarm, where Widmark seems to be slyly sending up the kinds of spit-and-polish brass he played so effectively, as in Robert Aldrich's Twilight's Last Gleaming the year before. 1984's Against All Odds, where he and noir soulmate Jane Greer are well and truly "out of the past" in a glossy and indifferent remake? And surely Don Siegel's Madigan (1968), where he and Henry Fonda are contrasting studies in leadership in the winter of what remained of the studio system that brought them up the ranks.

The one other essential credit that FMC should showcase is 1972's When the Legends Die, an apt title for a full day of programming. Widmark's portrayal of a broken-down rodeo star and his relationship with an out-of-time Native American played by Frederic Forrest in his first key credit was one of his favorites, or so he told an audience that gathered at Lincoln Center for a 2001 retrospective of his work. This was almost a decade after his own last credit, and I was there to enjoy his candid remarks. What a great thrill it was to be so near a person whose onscreen persona, as much as we may hate to admit it, was so near to own national personality in the anxious times he drew on for his art.

On TCM: Three for Tuesday

I hate it when Daylight Savings Time begins and ends. Exactly enough time elapses for me to forget how to reset those clocks in the house that don't make the change automatically, so I spend a few fretful minutes trying to figure things out.

But at least the calendar stays the same, and I can report that there are a few noteworthy films on Turner Classic Movies in the next day or two. There's always something good on TCM (which is where I leave our dial, though the wife inevitably switches over to one of those home and hearth channels at some point of the day) but there's a clutch of good programming on Monday-Wednesday, and all the better for me not having seen that much of it. Discoveries await.

Monday night brings a night of Shakespeare, including Orson Welles' curious 1948 Macbeth (8pm EST), which I'll take another stab at. More fitfully bizarre than fully realized, I'll tune in, the Broadway-bound Patrick Stewart version having stoked my interest. (Roman Polanski's 1971 film still leads the pack.) Lora's all-time favorite movie, 1968's Romeo and Juliet, is on the bill, but that's already on our shelf. I'm looking forward to catching Peter Brook's King Lear (1971), starring that man for all seasons, Paul Scofield (3:30am Mon/Tues).

I can enthusiastically recommend Tuesday morning's airing (11am) of Jean Negulesco's Three Strangers (1946), the best of the six Warner Bros. films to pair Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. (There were ten, actually, but the first, The Maltese Falcon, is in a class by itself, they had no scenes together in the second, Casablanca, and two others, In This Our Life and Hollywood Canteen, were cameos.) Co-adapter John Huston based the script on his own short story, from his own misadventure with a Burmese statue; in the film, the fates, financial and otherwise, of Greenstreet, Lorre, and Geraldine Fitzgerald (pictured) are bound up with the likeness of a Chinese god in London. The off-center scenario and one of Fitzgerald's best, witchy parts as a most desperate housewife complement the peerless teaming of the two great character actors. I don't think of any of their noir-ish mysteries are available on DVD; a smashing idea for WB's box set unit, along with a retrospective documentary, I think.

Two other journeys into the unknown are up next, in late night Tues/Wed slots as part of a night on the analyst's couch. Robert Rossen's Lilith (1964) ended the career of the filmmaker behind All the King's Men and The Hustler on a strange, symbolist note; a flop, it was star Jean Seberg's favorite film, and surely the most interesting credit for Warren Beatty between Splendor in the Grass and All Fall Down and his career-changing headlining of Bonnie and Clyde three years later. Peter Fonda and Gene Hackman have early roles besides. It airs 12:30am.

1963's Maniac (4:15am) is that rare Hammer horror I haven't seen. Its late star, movie Sinbad Kerwin Matthews, is said to do the twist. As SCTV 's Count Floyd would say, "Ooh, scary, kids."

Wednesday night (6pm) brings Samuel Fuller's typically hard-hitting Underworld U.S.A., with Cliff Robertson throwing the punches. And, bringing us back to Broadway at 10pm, is the 1965 farce Boeing Boeing, with Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis. It's being revived this spring with England's Mark Rylance, clearly stretching. Thank goodness the programming grid on my cable setup does all the time-shift figuring for me, though I noticed that the TCM schedule failed to "spring ahead" today. So I wasn't the only one...

Catch the Blues

As "Guest Programmer Month" continues on Turner Classic, Simpsons creator Matt Groening has reeled in a live one for tomorrow night (Nov. 14) at 8pm EST--Anatole Litvak's delightful genre mash-up Blues in the Night (1941), which I don't think the channel has aired since I first saw it three or four years ago. Like Litvak's prior James Cagney boxing/musical melodrama City for Conquest (1940) but more unhinged it packs a whole bunch of stuff--gangsters, musicians, noir elements, "women's pictures"--into 88 breathless minutes. (Be sure, however, to record it for 100 or 105 minutes, not 90, in case the intro segment runs long).

Stay tuned for a fine cast of second-stringers (including Jack Carson, Priscilla Lane, and the pictured Lloyd Nolan as a mobster and Betty Field as the bad girl), the great, Oscar-nominated Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer title tune (played every two scenes or so), and jaw-dropping montages directed by Don Siegel, later of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Dirty Harry fame. In his autobiography motormouthed co-star Elia Kazan, an actor before he went behind the camera, warns "if Blues in the Night ever turns up on the late-late show I'd advise you to skip it," but don't; it's not on DVD or VHS that I know of and is a real find. I understand it's a favorite of Martin Scorsese, whose New York, New York is like a posher, molasses-slow version of its combustible predecessor.

TCM's guest stars

Before I go, it would be remiss of me not to mention Turner Classic Movies's prime-time guest programmer event all next month, where various luminaries will be screening some of their favorite films. If you've never seen The Battle of Algiers, why not watch with Danny DeVito as your guide on 11/10?

Some promising pairings, by the day:

Whoopi Goldberg with A Face in the Crowd (11/1);
Alfred Molina shooting up on the original Get Carter (11/2);
Donald Trump, inevitably, with Citizen Kane (11/3);
cinephile Gore Vidal on That Hamilton Woman with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh (11/4);
siren Rose McGowan with the noir Out of the Past (11/5);
Cabin Boy Chris Elliott on Captains Courageous (11/6);
tough-talking playwright Neil LaBute on Ace in the Hole (11/7);
Charles Busch on the tough-as-nails Ida Lupino drama The Hard Way (11/8); Jerry Stiller on A Night at the Opera (11/9);
foodie Alton Brown, showing good taste with Closely Watched Trains, one of the few foreign films selected (11/11);
Jack Klugman, one of the few (along with Charles Grodin) who had the chutzpah to show one of his own movies, 12 Angry Men (11/12);
jazzy James Ellroy on a crime spree with The Lineup (11/13);
Matt Groening on the crazy, must-see Blues in the Night (11/14);
Cybill Shepherd on His Girl Friday (11/15);
Paul Mazursky on a quintessential New York story, King Kong (11/16);
Tracy Ullman on a roll, beginning with Ken Loach's Kes (11/17);
Graydon Carter on The Philadelphia Story (11/18);
diva Renee Fleming on a classical evening, including the operetta Maytime (11/19);
the sharp-witted Alec Baldwin on The Bad and the Beautiful (11/20);
Kermit the Frog, why not, on 1950's Cyrano de Bergerac (11/21);
a competition winner who quite nicely selected the silent classic The Crowd for Thanksgiving (11/22);
Joe Pantoliano on the soon-to-be-theatrically-revived Stalag 17 (11/23);
Grodin on the much-better-than-his-own-movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind(11/24);
editor Thelma Schoonmaker in a touching three-film tribute to her husband Michael Powell, including his 1969 Age of Consent, an early credit for Helen Mirren (11/25);
Harvey Fierstein on A Catered Affair, which he has adapted into a musical (11/26);
hyphenate talent and former Miss Teen USA Maria Menounos on a popular choice among programmers, A Place in the Sun (myself, I would have obliged them to pick all different movies) (11/27);
tough-guy Brian Dennehy on Odd Man Out (11/28);
Mark Mothersbaugh, from conservative (Inherit the Wind) to far out (Hot Rods to Hell), on 11/29
and, closing out the month, Martha Stewart, decorating with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.

And now that I've done this, hey, Robert Osborne, how about another airing of Dark of the Sun sometime soon? I'll be your guest co-host...

Sleuth=Stinko

You don't have to be a detective to figure out who killed the useless remake of Sleuth with the candlestick at the boxoffice. Beset by dreadful reviews ("Pinter hasn't gotten out much lately," opined The New Yorker of the playwright's attempts to update and improve upon a show he has never seen), it opened very weakly in New York and Los Angeles, and with the questionable star power of the pathologically slumming Michael Caine (can a remake of Beyond the Poseidon Adventure be far behind?) and the over-and-out, so-boring-even-the-tabloids have-lost-interest Jude Law behind it, it's unlikely to travel much further except to DVD.

How bad is the new Sleuth supposed to be? So bad I'm not even tempted to sample it. My friend John Calhoun, who acted as my canary down the coal shaft, called it "ridiculous" and "preposterous," and he doesn't even like the original film. I do, at least once, and you can give it a try on Turner Classic Movies tonight at 8pm EST. Memo to Caine: In your senior years, find somewhere less hazardous to stroll then memory lane.

Point blank

Turner Classic Movies' ever-entertaining MovieMorlocks blog has called a Lee Marvin Blog-A-Thon for today, the 20th anniversary of the actor's passing. I wouldn't dream of letting Morlock member Richard Harland Smith down on this occasion; we used to hang out at the Viand coffeeshop on E. 86th St. in Manhattan before he went Hollywood. (And no film writer should turn down an opportunity to write about Marvin, who was "central to the role of violence in the American cinema," wrote David Thomson.) But I can only half-fulfill one of his specific requests for this blog day.

Richard wanted to know more about two Marvin obscurities, the French film Canicule (Dog Day, released in 1984) and Richard Fleischer's The Spikes Gang (1974). I saw Dog Day, from crime film specialist Yves Boisset, on VHS many a dog day ago. An Internet Movie Database commentator calls it "weird French surrealism," which jibes with my recollection, as Marvin, on the lam with millions, plays cat-and-Miou Miou games with his co-star and a kid at a farmhouse. It's that rare film where the actor looks ill-at-ease, as if no one on set spoke English and could explain the storyline and its nuances to him. (Or maybe they chose not to say anything, to unsettle him.) That discomfort alone will make it worth a viewing for some, but I also recall it being a hard sit. (It went unreleased Stateside, but appears to be on DVD from a no-name label.)


Marvin was a large-and-in-charge kind of personality, and I prefer him that way, even when his characters are unmasked as buffoons or frauds. He was not ideally cast as Hickey in 1973's American Film Theatre production of The Iceman Cometh, but it is still a great Marvin performance, where he pulls out all the stops with little artifice. As patient Marvin fans know--and we are a forgiving lot--he could uplift a turkey by his mere presence. 1979's trouble-plagued Avalanche Express, which lost both director Mark Robson and co-star Robert Shaw during the production process, is worth sitting through simply to watch the actor strut his stuff in a ham-fisted spy vs. spy scenario (the avalanche, concocted by special effects ace John Dykstra, is also pretty good, and if you can't wait for it, it occurs 50 minutes in, for about seven minutes). But there is a difference between watching Marvin overcome miscasting or indifferent scripting, and seeing him belittled and cut down to size.

He is on terra firma in The Spikes Gang, and so am I. The United Artists release came and went in 1974, despite plum co-starring roles for Ron Howard and Charles Martin Smith, fresh from George Lucas' smash American Graffiti, and Gary Grimes, who as the virginal Hermie got it on with Jennifer O'Neill in the equally successful loss-of-innocence tale Summer of 42 (1972) and its lower-libido 1974 sequel, Class of 44. Grimes had also saddled up for Dick Richards' unsung 1972 film The Culpepper Cattle Co., which, like The Spikes Gang, is a blood-soaked revisionist Western. Ignored in their day, both movies roam freely about cable stations, with the Fleischer film in active rotation on the Showtime channels.

I blogged a bit about Spikes on the Mobius Home Video Forum, as part of a long-running thread on cult movies. Here's a reprint of my entry (with redundancies removed):

"This Spain-shot Western, directed by the late Richard Fleischer, has no cult that I'm aware of, but based on a viewing earlier today maybe it should. It starts off as a somewhat larkish coming-of-age story, with Gary Grimes (whatever happened to?), and Ron Howard and Charles Martin Smith as bored would-be cowboys who treat an injured outlaw (Lee Marvin, in a colorful, unsung portrayal). Encouraged by his bad example they up and leave their border homes for a life of banditry, eventually joined by Marvin when the cowchips hit the fan--but the life lessons they learn from him come at a lethal price. Screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., penned several anti-mythologizing Westerns (Hud, Hombre, and The Cowboys) but this adaptation of a Giles Tippette novel is by far their darkest, even more grim in the windup than The Culpepper Cattle Co. Fleischer doesn't quite bring out every contour but he keeps the blood pumping, and the final hotel room showdown between two of the characters is harrowing. Veteran Arthur Hunnicutt steals a scene and Noah Beery, Jr. turns up toward the very end. Leonard Maltin gives it *1/2 stars and comments "old-hat storyline has humor, and not much else" but why do I think he and/or his capsule writers have never actually seen it?"

If they had, they would see it for the quality piece it is. The Spikes Gang seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle with the other revisionist Westerns in release during the Vietnam Era, a genre worth disinterring in our own war-torn times. As I wrote, it's not top-tier; the prolific, underrated Fleischer, who was really cranking them out at this time in his career, was keeping his eye on the ball but the movie lacks that extra finesse that might really have put it over. Surprisingly, given how much they both worked on genre pictures, The Spikes Gang was only the second matchup for the director and Marvin, and the actor gives a seething, unpredictable performance as the untrustworthy Harry Spikes. You can see why a trio of farmhands, well-played by his co-stars, would want to emulate him; you can also see why they come to resist the lethal charm of his coercion.

But hell hath no fury like Lee Marvin. The Spikes Gang, worthy of reappraisal and a DVD release, would not be the same without him. Cinema itself is not the same without him.