Ever since Eddie Pedak (Alain Delon) got out of prison six years ago, he’s been straight as an arrow. He’s married to Kristine (Ann Margret) and has a cute-as-a-button little girl. He’s got a good job. He’s happy.
Except for Detective Mike Vido (Van Heflin). He got shot trying to catch a thief several years back, and he’s certain it was Eddie who did it. But the culprit was wearing a mas and Mike only saw his eyes, so the courts let Eddie go. Ever since, Mike has had it out for Eddie and is constantly trying to prove that he’s committed various crimes.
When a store robbery goes bad and a woman is killed, Mike thinks he’s got Eddie dead to rights. A witness description matches Eddie, and he was seen in the exact type of coat Eddie wears, and he drove away in the same model car. Mike takes him in, but his witness says it wasn’t Eddie who did it.
Meanwhile, Eddie gets a visit from his brother Walter (Jack Palance), a man who has definitely not given up the gangster life. He says he’s got a job for Eddie, something that pays big for just a day’s work. Eddie says, “No.” He doesn’t do that work anymore.
But then Eddie gets fired from his job. Mike told his boss about his past. This has happened before. Eddie has trouble finding a new job. Kristine has to take a job as a waitress. She tells Eddie she’s slinging hamburgers, but really she’s a cocktail waitress at some nightclub. She has to wear a skimpy thing.
This drives Eddie crazy. He is supposed to be the breadwinner. He’s not supposed to wash the dishes and make sure the kid is in bed on time. I always find these things fascinating. I guess I’m what you’d call a modern man. My wife and I take turns cooking. I wash dishes. I fold laundry. For a few years, I was a house husband while my wife worked. I was a stay-at-home dad for the first three years of our daughter’s life. I liked it. I don’t really understand these forced issues of masculinity.
But I do understand that it is a thing. It was a much bigger thing in the 1960s, and people like Eddie felt emasculated when they couldn’t work. But it doesn’t exactly make me feel for Eddie. It doesn’t put me on his side. It is fun to watch Delon in this role. I’m so used to him as the icy cool guy from his French films; to see him so hot with emotion here is interesting. He also has a tender side, too. He dotes on the girl, and he is tender with his wife. His character is also Italian, which is just weird.
You can probably tell where this story is going. The film does a nice job with it. Heflin is good as the cop. He’s obsessed with Eddie, but he’s also got a detective’s instincts and knows when he’s made a mistake. Palance is menacing. John Davis Chandler is the dark, kinky sidekick that always seems to be in this type of film. He’s terrifying.
Ann Margret is a little too weepy and screachy for my tastes. But the rest of the film more than makes up for it.
I have become a pretty big fan of what is sometimes called Nordic Noir. These are crime dramas set in Scandinavia that usually have a bleak vibe and a noirish feel. I’ve read several of the books and watched a few of the cinematic and television adaptations.
Kurt Wallander is a character created by Swedish author Henning Mankell. His stories have been adapted numerous times, most notably as a Swedish TV series and a British one starring Kenneth Branagh.
I think I’ve seen the first episode of both series. I think I liked them, but not well enough to keep up with them. I’m always getting distracted.
A while back, I was in Gardner’s, my favorite Tulsa bookshop, and I came across some of the Wallander books. They didn’t have the first one in the series, so I more or less grabbed this one at random. Probably because it has a cool cover featuring an X-ray of a pistol.
I liked The White Lioness, but I didn’t love it.
Wallander is your fairly typical noir detective. He’s good at his job, but not a Poirot or a Sherlock Holmes with an almost supernatural mental ability. He’s dogged about it; once he locks into a case, he drops everything else in his life to solve it. So he doesn’t have much of a personal life, and what he does has is in shambles. He tends to do things his own way, not by the book. This causes him some trouble at the office. But he solves his cases, so he’s mostly left to it.
This story begins with a missing person. An elderly, very religious woman has disappeared. She was a realtor, and before she went missing, she was supposed to be checking out a potential house to sell. It is located way out in the boonies, and as Wallander is looking for it, a nearby house explodes. They discover some odd radio equipment inside and the severed finger of a black man in the yard.
Sweden apparently doesn’t have a large African population, so this seems very strange. Especially since they do not find the rest of the body, and the finger was clearly severed with a blade and didn’t come off from the explosion.
Finding the missing woman, figuring out why someone would blow up a house out in the middle of nowhere, and what happened to the rest of that man are all good mysteries. Figuring out if they are at all connected could make for a great story.
But then the book more or less solves the mysteries within the next few chapters. It switches from Wallander’s perspective to several South Africans. The book was written not long after Nelson Mandela was released from prison, during some massive political changes in the country.
In this story, several white supremacists don’t like those changes and work on a conspiracy to assassinate a prominent person, which will throw the country into chaos. The finger belongs to a potential assassin who was sent to Sweden to be trained by a former Russian KGB agent.
For the rest of the book, we’ll switch back and forth between Wallander trying to solve the mystery we already know the answer to and what’s going on with the assassin and the people who have hired him. And then once Wallander figures out what’s going on, it becomes a race to stop the assassination from happening.
I find I’m not a big fan of mysteries that solve the crime early. I don’t usually want to see things from the killer’s perspective and know what they did and how they did it before the final chapters. That destroys the mystery. Turning it from a whodunnit into a will our hero catch them before it’s too late isn’t nearly as interesting.
Usually. There are lots of exceptions to that rule. A well-done story can still make me enjoy it even if I know who the killer is from the get-go.
I think part of my problem here is that while this is the third Wallander book to be written, it is my first to read. I’m still getting to know the character, so every time it switched away from him, I was annoyed.
But I also just didn’t find the South African stuff that interesting. I wonder if some of that might be that Mankell is a white Swedish man writing about South African apartheid and that just doesn’t feel right. You can tell he’s done his research, and he’s trying to do the story justice, but it never quite connected.
But I do really like the Wallander character, and I’ll definitely be checking out more of his stories.
I’ve been doing quite a bit of writing over on my Substack. Big reviews like this I’ll crosspost, but I’m doing lots of other stuff that I won’t be posting here. So I’d love for you to check it out and subscribe.
My uncle Landy died this past weekend. He was 81 years old and in ill health, so this wasn’t unexpected, but it is still tough. He was a good guy. He never married and never had kids, so us nieces and nephews became his children. As a kid, he used to call me up and ask if I wanted to go to the zoo or a Tulsa Drillers game, or sometimes he’d invite me to drive two hours up to Coffeyville, Kansas, just to see where the Dalton Gang took their last stand. Those are good memories, and I cherish them.
I don’t want this to turn into an In Memoriam to a man none of you all knew. I mention it to also say that this loss will undoubtedly affect my thoughts on this disc. Normally, when I listen to a show, various thoughts come to my head when something cool or interesting is played. While listening to this, I could still enjoy the music, but it felt distant. Like it was playing somewhere else, far away. I did make some notes which I will share now, but they maybe aren’t up to my usual standards.
Dick’s Picks Volume 4 is a three-disc set culled from two nights of the Dead’s legendary run at the Fillmore East from February 11-14, 1970 (they did not play on the 12th). The Allman Brothers and Love were both on the bill as well. I believe the bands played two shows each day. The Dead did three sets each. They opened with a short electric set followed by an acoustic set and then did their usual big, long electric set.
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I’m always fascinated by what songs Dick chose to include and what he decided to leave out. Here, his focus is on the third set of these two nights. He completely ignores the acoustic sets and mostly skips the first sets. It is also curious to me that, as far as I can tell, the Dead have never released anything officially from the February 12 show. But bits of these two nights have made it onto at least three other official releases. The Allman Brothers released a live compilation of all three nights entitled Fillmore East, February 1970.
These shows are legendary. Some call this the best run of music the Grateful Dead ever performed. I think that’s partially because the music is that good, but also because these were some of the earliest soundboard recordings to make it into tape-trading circles. Much like how the Cornell show from 1977 is so beloved because that was one of the few soundboard recordings that circulated for a long while.
These shows are so legendary, I feel a little bit nervous talking about them. I don’t know that I’ll have anything to say that hasn’t already been said. The Grateful Dead Taping Compendium has a couple of really good articles on these shows. Unfortunately, the books are long out of print (fortunately, I have them, and I’ve scanned the relevant pages, which I’ll share below for subscribers.
Let’s get to it.
New York DJ John Zacherle gives us an introduction to the “Grateful Goddamn Dead.” Apparently, he was supposed to have been pulled out in some kind of coffin, but it broke. There is a picture of the thing in that Taping Compendium.
They begin by launching into an incredible “Casey Jones.” The energy on this is fierce. That’s one of the things you notice about this entire thing – The Grateful Dead were on fire these nights. Absolutely firing on all cylinders like they had something to prove.
They say that around this time the boys spent some time with Crosby, Stills, and Nash trying to improve their vocals. 1970 would see the release of two classic Dead albums, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, both of which demonstrated the band’s country roots and their improved songwriting. The Primal Dead days were starting to slip away, and something different was taking its place. Something that put at least a little more focus on the vocals.
That training pays off in “Dancing in the Street,” which features some Martha and the Vandellas’ style backup vocals. It isn’t so good they’d ever be mistaken for Motown, but for the Grateful Dead it’s pretty darn great. After a few minutes of that, they drop the doo-wop and launch into a nice jam. Screw Martha, they seem to say; we’re the Grateful goddamn Dead.
“China Cat Sunflower>I Know You Rider” keeps up the ecstatic energy. I’m a huge nerd for the transitions between songs. I love it when you have to listen closely to figure out exactly when one song transforms into another. This one’s pretty easy. They actually slow “China Cat” down, then rev back up for “Rider.” But it doesn’t matter; both songs are played fantastically.
“High Time” and “Dire Wolf” follow, and they are perfectly fine, if not all that memorable.
Then we come to “Dark Star.” It is a beast. Clocking in at around 30 minutes, it just goes and goes and goes. This is where I remind you, dear readers, that I listened to this while mourning. It is also where I state yet again that I’m not the biggest fan of those times when the Grateful Dead dive into the deepest, darkest outer space. I don’t love the big noodle jams. “Dark Star” was often a launching pad for grand exploration.
This one doesn’t actually get that far out. In their big jams, the Dead often seem to be searching for a sound, looking for a song. Sometimes they lose track of it and wander off into the ether. Here, they mostly seem to have jams in mind and are just enjoying them. At one point, they slip into the “Feeling Groovy” jam – so named due to its similarity to the “59th Bridge Street Song” by Paul Simon. Apparently, that was something Bob Weir came up with in some recording session. My guess is that a lot of the jams in this “Dark Star” had been at least partially developed before this night, and they were just mucking about with them.
That’s just a guess. Maybe they did invent most of it in the moment. The Dead were capable of such things. But I don’t hear the kind of erratic noise in this version that I so often do during these things.
But really, I was in no mental state to really enjoy it. My mind tends to wander during big jams, and I kept thinking about Landy, or work, or the fact that my daughter just got her driver’s permit (!). They could have done all sorts of things in this jam, and I might not have noticed. What I did notice is a wonderfully rowdy groove they land on about halfway through. Really dug that part.
“Dark Star” slips into “That’s It For The Other One” nicely. So nice, in fact, that on this disc the first lines of “Cryptical Envelopment” begin at the end of the “Dark Star” track. It slips into drums, ho hum, and I’m ready for a bathroom break, but then they freakig fly into “The Other One” section, and holy moly, the band is on fire. That high energy I was talking about earlier is blowing into high octane.
Then they slip back into a very mellow “Cryptical Envelopment.” Jerry does this thing where he repeats “He had to die” over and over. Has he done that before? I don’t ever recall such a version. Then they got through another rave-up before the song finally ended.
“Turn On Your Lovelight” is quite good, though Pigpen doesn’t get too crazy with it. There are no major raps. He and Bob Weir do this fun little vocal exchange at the end, with Bob going high and Pig just growling.
“Alligator” goes into a proper “Drums” which turns into “Me and My Uncle.” “Alligator” is one of those songs I more or less enjoy, but it isn’t a favorite. “Me and My Uncle” is said to be the song the Dead played more than any other. It is a good song, but not really worth that title.
That transitions into a fiery “Not Fade Away.” Here is the big energy again. If the Grateful Dead often turned songs into a search for something new, these jams are more like riding the wave. It ebbs and flows. Rises and falls. But the tune is always there. They are just toying with it. Eventually, they do their regular ending jam, and just as you think the song is about over, they launch into another jam. Then they do it again. They just don’t seem to be done with the song for a while.
I don’t really listen to this period of The Grateful Dead all that often. I like a good Primal Dead show from 1969, when I’m in the mood for it. And I love me some 1972 Dead. But 1970 always feels a bit ragged to me. It was a transitional year, one where they were moving from those epic, primal jams into more songs, better songs. But they aren’t quite there yet. They are still figuring it out.
“Mason’s Children” wasn’t played that often, and they’d only play it a couple more times after this date. Which is to say that it is one of those songs I don’t know all that well, and I can’t say it has ever made me want to listen to it more.
The disc ends with just over eight minutes of “Feedback,” which I listened to once just for this review and I’ll never listen to again, and a lovely rendition of “We Bid You Goodnight.” I love it when they end a show like that.
This is a great package. I do need to listen to it all again when I’m in a better headspace. I need to listen to this entire run again. It will be interesting to suss out what Dick picked and what he should have.
Four volumes in and I’m loving this series. I’d listened to lots of these before, but it’s so much more interesting to listen in order.
Steven Spielberg has now made five films about aliens. Four of them are actually really good (the less we talk about Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, the better). He’s clearly fascinated by extraterrestrial life. Disclosure Day isn’t as good as I wanted it to be, but it is an interesting film, and definitely demonstrates that Spielberg remains an incredible craftsman. Anyway, you can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
George Franju made Eyes Without a Face and Spotlight on a Murderer, two very good French films (which I have reviewed for Cinema Sentries, but apparently haven’t ever posted here). This was his very first narrative film.
It isn’t great. Franju is too good of a director for this to be bad, but it definitely feels like a first film. Radiance has done their usual outstanding job of making it worth your money, and if you are a fan of the director, then this is definitely worth getting. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
Jinsei was written, directed, scored, and animated by first-time filmmaker Ryuya Suzuki. That’s an impressive feat, and this is an impressive film. But also a very confusing one. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. I’m still not sure. I’ve sat here for quite a while trying to figure out what to say for this little blurb. It isn’t a bad film; in fact, it is quite interesting. I’m definitely glad I watched it, but I can’t say I have any interest in watching it again. So, yeah, anyway, come read my review.
I’ve writtena bout a bunch of these noir sets from Kino Lorber. I love them because they bring us some underseen and rarely heard-of low-budget film noirs. The three in this set are all from Poverty Row studio Republic Pictures. Two of them are quite good, and the other has Raymond Burr. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
The Double is an Italian movie that begins with a man getting shot in a parking lot. The rest of the film consists of flashbacks from the dying man’s life, trying to piece together how he got there. That’s an interesting idea. This is not a great movie. You can read all my thoughts over at Cinema Sentries.
It is hot here in Oklahoma. Too darn hot. It has been over 100 degrees every day for the past week or two. That completely zaps all my energy. Today it didn’t help that I did a bunch of cleanup at a house we are building. Which meant blowing out a bunch of cabinets that filled the house with dust. Covered my face with dust and filled my lungs is more like it.
I am knackered. I’ve been staring at this screen for ten minutes, trying to think of something clever to say about MacArthur. I got nothing. But I didn’t write the review today; I wrote it yesterday (or was it the day before.) Whenever it was, I was pretty tired then, too. I’m always tired, it seems.
It’s just too darn hot.
Anyway, you can read my review over at Cinema Sentries (spoiler: I didn’t like the film very much.)
The Island is so close to being a good movie. Or at least an interesting one. Michael Caine stars as a reporter investigating some disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle, only to be captured by a gang of pirates. It is as silly as that sounds, but not quite as silly as it should have been. Or fun. There are several things they could have done to push it into “good” territory, but they never quite get there. It is worth a watch if you are bored, but there are plenty of other Michael Caine films that are more worth your time. You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.
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