for a noirish Labor Day: The Breaking Point (1950)

                                                                         header photo: Patricia Neal, John Garfield and Juano Hernandez

“if you believe I’m not workin’ hard all day,

Just step in my shoes and take my place …”         

“Just Got Paid,” ZZ Topp

Film noir is subversive in showing American war heroes returning home, only to be denied the rights and opportunities they’d supposedly been fighting for on far shores.  Meanwhile, they're tantalized by flush criminals and malign office-holders, often allied, one hand washing the other.    

In The Breaking Point (1950), John Garfield is Harry Morgan, hardworking captain of a rental boat, who descends to dealing with gangsters just to keep his business viable amid regulations and a sputtering local economy.  The moral compromises alienate his wife, played by Phyllis Thaxter, who tells him supporting his family is “the real war.”  Harry drifts back to his wartime identity, a man good with a gun, but ultimately must pick a side.   (Both this film and 1944’s To Have and Have Not, the first Bogart-Bacall teaming, are loosely based on Ernest Hemingway's The Breaking Point.)

Most criticism on the Red Scare dutifully avoids specific films, except the few explicitly mentioned in primary sources surrounding the Blacklist, but this is mere legalism.  Chronically divided, we’ve become obsessed with sticking to “proven facts,” as if all Americans work in a courtroom before retiring to home laboratories (or vice versa). 

The truth extends beyond proof, and any discussion that ignores this is timid and incomplete.  In my opinion, the Hollywood Blacklist was provoked specifically by film noir, an inherently, insistently socialist genre.  The alternative is to assume the U.S. Establishment could not tolerate the occasional advocacy film about farming (The Good Earth, The Grapes of Wrath, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, et al.)  

John Garfield had already made enemies with the leftist, classic noirs Body and Soul (1947) and Force of Evil (1948), about corruption in professional boxing and urban rackets, respectively (we could footnote the privation and adultery driving The Postman Always Rings Twice, Humoresque and Daisy Kenyon).  The former pair were produced by Garfield’s own Enterprise Pictures; for the studios, at least, acting as his own producer was salt-in-the-wound.  

Garfield’s collaborators were later blacklisted: Robert Rossen (Body and Soul) and Abraham Polonsky (both films).  Polonsky fled to Europe, but Rossen tried to save himself by naming names, only to die embittered in 1966, age 57.

As the winds changed, Garfield, a premier star of the 1940s, was subjected to withering pressure but refused to buckle.  When he died of a heart attack at 39, in 1952, friends blamed the anti-communist witchhunters.  As lawyers say, however, correlation is not causation: Garfield had a bout with rheumatic fever as a youth, which left heart damage. 

Younger viewers, especially, might be interested to note that Garfield, whose politics would be very liberal even today, felt no need to “play perfect.”  (Compare Ethan Hawke’s character in Brooklyn’s Finest, who punches out a fellow cop, as I recall, for making a racist comment — at a late-night poker game — in his filthy basement.) Garfield’s Harry is indecisive and morose, snaps at his wife and daughters, and ultimately, breaks his word (like virtually everyone in this film). 

And he disrespects other ethnicities, as when, after an abortive smuggling run, he implies Chinese immigrants smell bad.  (Garfield himself reportedly called Patricia Neal “whore” on-set, as character traits spilled over into real life.) 

I enjoyed looting the Criterion of The Breaking Point for the above details (and don't mean to ignore director Michael Curtiz, who so embodied the "well-made film" he seems anonymous), watching most of the elegant film twice to understand Harry’s too-simple motivation: he’s broke.  I’ve lived a middle-class existence, taking the financial safety-net for granted.  

Harry has a safety-net, too: friends and loved ones who’ll stand by him.  His way out is to realize he's not alone (an acquaintance of mine says, “If you don’t need help, you’re not trying hard enough.”).  There's no shame if his wife takes in piece-work, or if he can’t give his friend (Juano Hernandez) steady employment.  He’s a decorated veteran, dammit. 

Everyone has his battles (like the chronic fatigue that kept me from this blog for almost a year).  Not everyone enjoys loyal friends.  It may even be that war persists, in part, to give young men a bonding experience that stays with them for life, stiffening the spine.  

At other times, mutual sacrifice takes a (more) peaceful form, as in a labor union.  Even in a solitary era that claims a "gig economy," union membership can be as profound a bond as that between soldiers in war, or forged during years of marriage. 

In the case of an employee union, the consummation is spelled S-T-R-I-K-E. 

 

 

underseen for Halloween: Body Bags (1993)

If we presently feel an inward relief, give thanks to the season, the sole one to grant a certain license: we relinquish the pretense of opposition to a "culture of death."  

Light and life arrange and justify themselves; it is our vain struggle against dying that needs framing by phrase and fable.

Though immersed in an ambitious essay, which I hope to publish while Sol still burns and gravediggers dig soft earth, I pause for my yearly charge, and post for the dreadful day.  

Body Bags is an intriguing title, if only from the mystique of movies made-for-TV, so often elusive after the initial window.  This was a bid for an anthology series for John Carpenter, who'd hammered his way to horror’s 2nd-tier, thanks to the (still underseen) TV slasher Someone’s Watching Me!, cult faves like The Fog, and the franchise-furthering Halloween and The Thing. As Carpenter acolytes, we appreciated his horror populism -- forgiving an excess of published interviews -- and the way he came back swinging after creative failures (Village of the Damned, any Halloween with a number appended).

the pride of Kentucky, John Carpenter

As written by the horror duo Billy Brown and Dan Angel (they'd go to series with Night Visions, and with R.L. Stine-based Goosebumps and The Haunting Hour) Body Bags is “worth a look,” successful in the modest goal of a fun, E.C. Comics gross-out. Still, every subgenre demands a certain amount of sweat: production values and pacing are good, but the stories have structural flaws that should’ve been addressed. 

Anne digs in

The opening is the most cinematic, set at night at a modern gas station (picture a sprawling version of that in the opening of 1953's Crime Wave). The point-of-view belongs to the improbably attractive young woman in the plexiglass shelter ringing up customers. Director Carpenter provides high style, as new-hire Anne (Alex Datcher) fences with late-night customers, from the disarming (David Naughton of An American Werewolf in London) to repulsive (Wes Craven in a cameo as a drunk creeper). 

Datcher is black, Naughton's white, and “The Gas Station” raises hackles with interracial flirting, but the later violence may be unrelated: the bad-guy seems to kill based on opportunity no motive needed (the twenty-years-past trauma is a cliche, but it works).  Still, the villain's real-life lineage touches the origins of horror cinema, and he meets a satisfying end: even at this full-service shop, he'll be beyond repair.

From here, Body Bags turns to body parts, first “Hair,” with Stacy Keach.  Richard seems to have it all -- nice apartment, young girlfriend -- but thinks only of his thinning hair.  His solution provides the excuse for memorably grotesque special effects.

The real problem is the girlfriend, hot-Scot Sheena Easton (initially a singer, Easton was not-bad as an actor but couldn't hide the burrrrr).  Like George Costanza, Richard needs a pre-emptive breakup.  Instead he consults an expert, as the script weakly spoofs "the Hair Club for Men,” then a stand-up comedy staple.  After a blissful interlude (think Jack Nicholson in Wolf or Wendell Pierce in "Something With Bite"), experimental plugs are revealed as mere (scalp) cover, leading to a CGI freakshow, a pocket Starship Troopers. 

The hairmonger is David Warner as “Dr. Locke,” nudge. The filmmakers even revive the Cronenbergian casting-for-name (ever notice? it's Samantha Eggar having The Brood, Stephen Lack as the prodigal weirdo in Scanners).  Locke’s assistant, naturally, is Debbie Harry (the Blondie singer).  Body Bags' ender "Eye" is a chronicle of baseball decline; the presence of Britain’s erstwhile supermodel “Twiggy” may be another elbow-to-the-ribs. 

The connecting theme here is the decline of white-American men (if that’s not too much gravity for a TV-movie with a male Medusa). Descent continues with the ballplayer, played by Mark Hamill (better known as Luke Skywalker), another bright-horizons space-hero scapegoated into spoof and satire: there’s William Shatner, of course, but also Adam West, from Robinson Crusoe on Mars and The Outer Limits "The Invisible Enemy" to Batman; Martin Landau, from Space:1999 to Ed Wood; and the Naked Gun franchise's Leslie Nielsen (Forbidden Planet), Tim O'Connor (Buck Rogers in the 25th Century), Fred Ward (The Right Stuff) and (speaking of horror) O.J. Simpson (Capricorn One). 

have your doctor take a look 

Note the fantastic genres are rarely kind to baseball, a past relic in The Twilight Zone ("Extra Innings") and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; in The X-Files "The Unnatural," the midcentury game has been infiltrated by aliens.  Closer to Body Bags is the infamous E.C. story where human parts provide the diamond essentials (bases, etc.). 

This "Hands of Orlac" update gives Hamill's character the "Eye" of a dead serial killer, with flashbacks to the killer's abusive childhood.  Directed by Tobe Hooper, "Eye" may be the most "rounded" of the three stories, with a decent setup and payoff.  

The horror-anthology feature film became rare in the 1990s, perhaps because horror was more common on television.  In retrospect, the inception of horror series with continuing characters (Werewolf, Twin Peaks, Millennium) was a sign of our (ongoing) apocalypse.  Sustainable ratings remained elusive, so genre anthologies migrated to the thunderdome of cable-TV.  

A fantastic anthology is the most subversive TV format. In its hit-and-run episodes, anything can happen, to the destruction of the human race (a frequent indulgence of the 1990s Outer Limits).  It's a tempting crystal ball for creatives: George Romero produced Tales from the Darkside and Monsters; restoration would reveal the best as art-TV (my next post: rec's for Darkside).  Wes Craven served on the 1980s Twilight Zone, and stabbed at a semi-anthology with Nightmare Cafe; David Cronenberg directed an episode of another semi-anthology, Canada's millenarian Friday the 13th: The Series. 

Body Bags seems relatively unambitious, as if Carpenter's best hope for a series was to feint toward parodic crap, promising a Showtime equivalent to Tales from the Crypt.  Such a disguise may permit brilliant tragedy or social satire, and his proposed title may allude to the Nightmare on Elm Street/Twin Peaks motif "wrapped in plastic."  Like most attempts, though, Body Bags was discarded, to fill a single morgue-drawer of evidence.  

Island City (TV movie pilot, 1994) score: 2 of 4

In this post to Pop Matters, I reviewed Gene Roddenberry's Pax TV movies, in which a post-apocalyptic Earth is ministered to by Pax, a sort of post-U.N.  The viewer surrogate is Dylan Hunt who, like Buck Rogers, wakes up after centuries of suspension.  In a classic of network passive-aggression, three of these supposed pilots were commissioned, aired and rejected, 1973-5.  (Dylan Hunt's story did go to series, sort of: that's the name of the revived hero of Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, one of two posthumous series developed from Great Bird outlines.)

In the first PAX movie, 1973's Genesis II, Hunt is played by Alex Cord, with his usual pornstache. 

Dylan Hunt before his long sleep

More substantively, I wrote, the suspense is undercut by the name of an otherwise mysterious civilization, the "Tyranians."  Their subsequent villainy seems as inevitable as that of the Decepticons.  

Flash-forward to 2021: midway into a history doc, my ears reddened, when I learned of the Tyrrhenians, legendary precursors to the Etruscans (and the Mediterranean between mainland Italy and Sicily/Sardinia is known as the Tyrrhenian Sea).  d'ho.

At the risk of self-justification, I still think it doesn't work for Genesis II, in putting the average viewer ahead of the script, if only by an accident of phonetics (the movie never spells the word).  Granted, it's Roddenberryesque to veer to controversial theories of Etruscan origins: his was a restless intellect (he named Star Trek: TNG characters after Benjamin Whorf and Texas Guinan).  Still, the intriguing backstory would've been better developed for the pilot or saved for Season 1.   

back to the forbidden zone 

All of which came to mind because 1994's Island City is undone by a similar mistake. It's another TV-movie pilot, with another valiant, post-apocalyptic team sworn to restore civilization. The inventive twist: the catastrophe was neither martial nor ecologic, but side effect of an anti-aging serum, which makes millions into "Recessives," i.e. latter-day cavemen prone to violence. Why not test the wonder-drug more thoroughly? As Sherman Fraser charges in Cyborgs, Santa Claus and Satan, "even for TV sf, the science is awfully sloppy."

The utopian goal of greatly increased longevity is attained, but only for an elite, their lives complicated by a large, hostile underclass.  The dynamic varies Planet of the Apes, or The Twilight Zone "Eye of the  Beholder," with aging instead of looks.  

As a series, Island City would've focused on the "normals" who defend their eponymous outpost.  The pilot movie spreads itself thin, with action, soap, humor and the figurative commentary for which TV sci-fi is known.  It's unwieldy, but the humor is essential: as in the Geico commercials (and short-lived sitcom), modern-day cavemen = funny.

Even before getting to plotting, flaws: the fx are rather primitive for the '90s,  including the backlot-armored vehicles, which recall the Pax movies, or the disposable, Saturday a.m. likes of Ark II.  The patrol scenes resort to a disused quarry (or similar), like Blake's 7 and Star Trek: Deep Space 9.  One character has a teen son hooked on VR (a '90s buzz-concept), while staying within family-show rails. 

curate's egg

Like the Genesis II name-drop, Island City's bigotry parallel is intriguing in itself.  The team soon adds a sympathetic half-Recessive who, like Spock and Worf, struggles with identity.  All of which had become fairly standard (see also the soulful Diggers of Seaquest, the defensive androids of Tekwar), but there's further provocation, in that most of the elite still use the youth drug, necessitating mating-restrictions (compare the art-house Code 46).  

Unfortunately, the pilot merely sideswipes this moral tangle, dropping hints of terrorism, as some norms abstain from the drug on political grounds.  Granted, the filmmakers run out of time as they introduce the premise and a half-dozen regular characters.  Still, it's all set-up without payoff.  It didn't work in 1973, it wasn't going to work in the busy syndication market of 1994.  

before their big breaks

Island City's talented cast features an amusing Hollywood synchrony: Brenda Strong and Veanne Cox play long-lost sisters (tough officer and man-hungry refugee, respectively).  Each would soon make an impression on Seinfeld, Strong as "braless wonder" Sue Ellen Mischke, and Cox as Toby, the excitable editor.  Sitcom viewers will also recognize Gregg 23 (better than clones #1-22, but clumsy) as Eric McCormack of Will and Grace, and trooper Seall is Constance Marie, Angie on George Lopez.  One team member persevered in service: Kevin Conroy voiced the animated Batman.  

Cloned (1997 TV movie) score: 2.5 (of 4 stars)

** this review contains spoilers **

We all have the vices of our virtues, and medical doctors tend to objectify human beings.  Slowly, they may be making the world a de facto unpaid study. 

Skye Weston (Elizabeth Perkins) backtracks in the watchable 1997 TV-movie Cloned (dvd out-of-print but available).  She and husband Rick (Bradley Whitford) lost their son a year ago.  As they debate trying again, she glimpses her boy in a shopping district.  (The moment of uncanny echoes Duplicates, a 1992 TV-movie with Gregory Harrison and Kim Greist).  A smart professional, Skye sleuths, finding evidence of multiple women with identical sons.  She posts to the (primitive) Internet for help, and when she finds a slew of responses, it remains chilling, despite dial-up graphics.

Cloned was an NBC film but could pass for Lifetime.  As Cascades Gothic, its plot is less involved than a typical X-Files, which may alienate fans.  Still, the movie's frank with the horror of a woman betrayed when most vulnerable, as well as the difficulty in preventing (the return of) human commodification.  Cloned was made by veterans of TV-movies, not speculative fiction; perhaps they confused sci-fi with comic book storytelling.  If so, their muckraker lacks the scope and visual interest of the latter.  

Still, it's grounded by an impressive Perkins, a star of the era (Big, The Flintstones).  Her Skye is stuck in “Anger” stage, though she's not just a scorned mother: the rage issues, we feel, go back.  She snaps to See-the-manager mode, her comments more offensive than necessary, as Rick contains the damage.  She's actually refreshing, and the film's passive community doesn’t deserve better.  Cloned wasn't a pilot (going by Fraser Sherman's Cyborgs, Santa Claus and Satan), but this Skye may've supported another transit.

Not all's dire: Enrico Colantoni (Just Shoot Me, Veronica Mars) is amusing as security guard Rinker, the cheerfully-evil hired-muscle.  (Note the production felt compelled to also cast a good bald man, a federal agent.)  Roger Cross, following Ernie Hudson and Joe Morton as “black sci-fi guy," is another security guard, Tina Lifford a white-coated tech, and Scott Paulin the bottom-line shark.  

Cloned followed buzz about Dolly the cloned sheep, named for Dolly Parton, as modern priests appropriated celebrity to sell vexatious fertility.  Similarly, the villains in Cloned aren’t mad scientists but aggressive capitalists.  In a scene evoking the same year's Alien: Resurrection, it’s revealed cloning is practice for the real business, growing replacement organs (the alarm-cycle broadens to The Island of Dr. Moreau/1996, Dirty Pretty Things/2002, and Repo Men/2010).  When the sellout fertility expert, Dr. Kozak (Alan Rosenberg), claims ends justify means, Skye fires back his own words: “First, do no harm.” 

underseen for Halloween, 2020 (from behind the mask)

This year's encomiums include a pair of television-plays of 1973, but with no regard to proceedings lately before the eldership in America.    

As ever, the plays are mere hoarfrost amusements, or if the reader prefers, admonishments before "red hour," the tricks or treats.    

Dying Room Only (1973)

The late Richard Matheson was one of television's most reliable: he wrote for Twilight Zone and Night Gallery, created the underrated Circle of Fear, and supplied teleplays for various Dan Curtis productions, including both "Kolchak" features.  Like the Matheson-Spielberg Duel (1971), Dying Room Only is a desert-gothic and a precursor to The Hitcher, The Vanishing and Breakdown.  More modestly scaled, Dying Room Only has, in addition to Matheson's craft, striking desert photography, and a cast including two Oscar winners.

An “ordinary” couple is returning from a road-trip vacation.  Wife Cloris Leachman wants to drive 100 miles out-of-the-way to get photos of a native "wikiup" for a school project (the kid's back home).  Husband Dabney Coleman resists; their quarrel is horror's trigger-sin. 

In a culture dependent on racial identity, it’s not unusual for an American film to be about race even when all characters are white.  This spousal conflict, referencing Indians, evokes national anxiety.  Later, Cloris pokes into a dark storeroom, as if in the national unconscious.   

Handled correctly, such notes create an edge, especially for white viewers: for the conservative, the characters are endangered by their soft-minded disloyalty and condescension.  And regardless, they've been identified with genocide. 

When Coleman disappears, Leachman runs up against clannish locals Ned Beatty (just off the implicitly racial Deliverance) and Ross Martin.  Malignity is gradually exposed, in unnerving fashion.  The narrative is so hard on the female lead, some may object.  Early in 2nd-wave feminism, equality was dead serious -- she's on her own.

Frankenstein: The True Story (1973) 

This film is charged mislabeled, because not faithful to Mary Shelley’s novel.  Without researching the makers' intent, it's frustrating: if faithfulness were the claim, they could’ve billed it “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” (available, in 1973). 

Perhaps the subtitle is more in reference to metaphor cheek-by-jowl with reality.  Frankenstein: The True Story, originally a prestige miniseries, is very much costume horror.  Amid the shocks and trading for parts, we see 17^th century industry draw motley laborers from all points, to form new, roiling communities.  Historically, the communities became Frankenstein cultures, often appalling, disowned and self-loathing.  A cultured appreciation for history helps this version be a worthy cousin to Hammer's Frankenstein, then completing its impressive run.

The cast includes Michael Sarrazin as the Creature and David McCallum as Clerval; Jane Seymour is memorably erotic as Prima.  Top billing goes to James Mason, who'd already been 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and on a Journey to the Center of the Earth, and would groom The Boys from Brazil (these credits bely Charlton Heston as first science-fiction star).  

Mason plays Polidori, a new character (by teleplay writer Christopher Isherwood) named after a real friend of the Shelleys.  Although this senior scientist is more consequential than those in most Frankenstein films, Polidori does nothing to discourage Victor’s recklessness.  Perhaps the name was too good to waste: a professed love of all implies an actual love of no one.  This Polidori is an omnivore, waiting for one like Victor to dare the jealousy of God.

With these provocative threads, and the miniseries form still largely untested, a touch of self-sabotage should not surprise.  The first minutes shatter the fourth wall, as Mason hosts clips that give away too much of the plot (skip to 5:44 to avoid spoilers).  

Well, it’s not as if we're unfamiliar with the major beats.  Since at least James Whale in 1931, Shelley's novel has likely been on-the-boards somewhere on any given day.  Frankenstein is a modernist liturgy, a ritual of egomaniacal science transgressing and punished.  The universal refusal to marry Shelley has kept her narrative electric and viral.  And we need the catharsis, when the creature so rarely completes circuit back to his creator ... this side of the mirror.  

Extraordinary Tales (2013)

This is an impressive animated anthology of Edgar Allan Poe, evidently for all ages.  As such,  the Tales are among the most familiar, and will elicit varied responses.  The animation style is more like book illustrations than anything "cartoony," and reminded me of the classics The Selfish Giant and The Woods.  Voices heard include those of Bela Lugosi (reading "The Tell-Tale Heart") and Christopher Lee.  

Caveats: some screens are busy with CGI; the pace is too fast in the first two stories.  It's understandable to schedule for parents, with content more challenging as we go (kids-to-bed before "The Masque of the Red Death"), but the opener, "The Fall of the House of Usher," plays like "Rod Usher's Greatest Hits."  It's especially regrettable in that the medium seems ideal for multiple versions of a film.    

Still, it's an impressive set, especially the wry horror of "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," and the quietly terrifying "The Pit and the Pendulum."  These are reason to see Extraordinary Tales.  "Valdemar" may be the best English-language version; certainly, it's flights above George Romero's misbegotten Two Evil Eyes (1990).  While worthy Corman-Poe, Tales of Terror (1962) commercializes "Valdemar" with a romance.  (Reviews discourage consideration for The Mesmerist, a 2005 black comedy with Neil Patrick Harris.)

Extraordinary Tales is wrapped in an original frame: a Continental-accented Lady Death tries to seduce Poe (as a raven) from his attachment to life.  If their dialogue is "therapy-speak," it is, at least, perceptive: 

Lady Death: You have devoted so many pages to my name ...  All veiled love letters, addressed to me. You fear me.  And yet you are insatiably attracted. Come with me … it's time.

Poe: No -- it cannot be. I don't want to be forgotten. I was buried in a common grave. My writings were forgotten for years.

Lady Death: ... Come now, Poe. You love me! You've been a corpse walking amongst the living for a long time, Edgar. It must have been quite a strain ...  Look at your final acts: they all succumb to my prowess.  The poor, the weak, the rich, the powerful.  Everybody bows before me. 

There's nothing unusual in Poe being temporarily forgotten, it was the same with H.P. Lovecraft.  That which is most challenging to the culture triggers a quarter-century denial (where needed, the period is indefinite).  Similarly, the films we revisit from any era are almost never the hits.

If Edgar Allan Poe triumphed over death, it was from insight.  He knew the optimistic, utopian, forward-thinking society protests too much, its national poet should write "horror stories for boys" (critic Leslie Fiedler's phrase).  And so the obscurity pitched into a pauper's grave has 392 credits on the IMDb.  

Deep Red (1994 TV movie) score: 2 of 4

Haun as the first human to benefit from "Reds"

not that Deep Red

In a prologue that evokes Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and The Thing (1982), an alien ship disintegrates in Earth's atmosphere.  As tiny shards spray a park, one pierces a girl's face (as an adult, Lindsey Haun would have a recurring role on True Blood).  She not only recovers, her club foot is healed.

Duly impressed, scientist Newmeyer (John de Lancie) seizes the alien nanotech, dubbed "Reds," as a lucrative panacea/fountain of youth.  ("Deep Reds" are the upgrade, or something.)  He's opposed by the girl's mother (Lisa Collins), herself revivified, but also reeling from the murder of her husband (Newmeyer's erstwhile colleague), played by future-Jigsaw Tobin Bell.

the goodies: Collins, Pacula & Biehn

All of which might be too much premise for a mock-serious neo-noir with a dangling subplot about killer milkmen.  It might've worked as a self-spoof, but even the humor could've used Deep Reds (and milk).

As noted on Moria, Deep Red is confusing: we expect the aliens to show up (again) -- they never do -- while the indulgent character-morphing might force a rewind.  Script fixes would've been rather simple, raising questions of what happened, and, perhaps, the prospect of a redemptive remake.

Michael Biehn is well-cast as Joe Keyes, a dissolute P.I. hired by Collins.  Keyes has been down, ever since a colleague's wife was killed on his watch, which sounds like backstory for a series.  The cast also includes conspiracy vet Joanna Pacula, Steven Williams as a sketchy police contact, and John Kapelos, in basically his Forever Knight role.  Further "pilot" evidence: the nanotech isn't discredited by the end, as the new (very healthy) family drives to sundown.

Amusingly, as Deep Red begins, it seems everyone in this Dark City has a shingle, outside dirty office with desk and chair, like a comic variant of "Demon with a Glass Hand."  There are such glimmers, but like the pieces of the alien craft, they disperse. 

bats left (no, right), throws right (no, left)

My work is rarely to-the-minute, and I rarely consider when a piece will be read.  I started this post long before Covid-19 and the consequent postponing of the baseball season.  If it doesn't elevate, nor replace peanuts and Cracker Jack, it is, I hope, of interest.         

Over the winter, news of an actual MLB game to be played at the location for 1989's Field of Dreams (left) summoned one of the all-time film flubs: Shoeless Joe Jackson hitting right-handed.  Ray Liotta, playing Jackson, failed badly to hit left-handed despite pro coaches on set (per this New York Post interview).  Finally, Liotta was given permission to switch sides.  It doesn't explain why the filmmakers didn't prioritize accuracy from the start.

The 1919 White Sox added disgrace to poverty when they threw the World Series.  70 years on, the "Black Sox" were in the zeitgeist: 1988's Eight Men Out had D.B. Sweeney as Jackson.  According to MLB Radio's Ryan Spilborghs (in a special devoted to Bull Durham), the athletic motions in Eight Men Out are "terrible."  Even so, that Joe Jackson hit lefty, at least.  Filmmaking is tough, but faking a base hit is still easier than the real skill (hitting a round ball with a round bat).  Faking is Hollywood's job.

Shoeless Joe Jackson

It's not that Ray Liotta was perfect casting otherwise: he doesn't look or sound like Jackson, who was from South Carolina.  (Actually, Jackson looked more like top-billed Kevin Costner.)  The production makes matters worse in the field: Jackson threw right-handed, but Liotta's Jackson throws left-handed (again, the actor's preference).  Effectively, the switch draws the attention of anyone still oblivious.  (Field of Dreams also flips Moonlight Graham left to right as a batter, as the redemption-mad narrative grants a sympathetic washout his first big-league at-bat.)

Liotta as Jackson

Thus, we've had non-answers regarding Field of Dreams and its Bizarro World Joe Jackson.  As with Marco Rubio's awkward lunge (addressed here), the baseball flick's "epic fail" may be rooted in polarization trauma.

If so, the filmmakers added their own reason for anxiety.  Their message is memorably spoken by James Earl Jones (as author Terence Mann):

The one constant through all the years ... has been baseball.  America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers.  It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again.  But baseball -- has marked the time.  This field, this game ... (is) a reminder of all that's good, and could be again.  

Fans can only forgive the script's worst sabotage: the school-auditorium meeting.  All the parents arguing for exclusion of Mann's indecorous book (from the school library) fit the Hollywood-and-Left stereotype: they're ignorant, resentful, repressed.  As Annie Kinsella, Amy Madigan warns them not to be like "the Nazis."  Just as young Ray (Costner) insulted his father (who died before Ray could apologize), the film picks a side from which to decry division.

Even with this regrettable scene, Field of Dreams delivered a plea for unity.  It went unheeded, but we should have self-mercy.  Polarization, I've come to believe, is part of the normal operation of the United States.  The owner of a high performance car should expect road noise and greater maintenance; a nation based in diversity, democracy and ambition is comparable.  (Reading on 3/27, this is ~trite.  But who makes it so?)

If we get twitchy around moves left and right, we need the distraction.  The existential unknown may be displaced to a Jack Nicholson movie: "what if this is as good as it gets?"  How would we ever react, to the honest conviction all our American plans are good for a laugh.

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