Ken Tucker’s Pop Culture

I’ve been on a Don Carpenter kick lately. It started with the Jan. 8 DVD release of Payday, the remarkable 1973 film Carpenter wrote and co-produced starring a goatishly braying Rip Torn as Maury Dann, a second-rate country singer with plenty of smarts and few morals. The movie is even better than I remembered it from seeing it during its brief initial release. Carpenter and his producing partner Ralph J. Gleason, the great San Francisco music journalist, conjured a vivid world of grimy honky-tonks, greased palms, and failed ambitions. (It was directed by Daryl Duke, who made one other first-rate cult film, 1978’s The Silent Partner, a witty thriller starring Elliott Gould as a wily bank teller.) And as far as depicting the joy and anguish of country music goes, Payday is far superior to Robert Altman’s overrated, condescending Nashville, released to far more acclaim two years later.

Being reminded of Carpenter in this way, I finally got around to reading the dented paperback I’d picked up years ago of his debut novel, Hard Rain Falling, to see if it held up to the raves it received upon its 1966 publication and subsequent status as a cult favorite.

Boy, does it ever. It’s the tale of Jack Levitt, an orphan who grows up to be a drifter who does a lot of bad things, yet who never fails to move a reader with his musings, thoughts that leave behind any hard-boiled sentimentality and refuse to let himself off the hook: “He was buried inside his skin, bones, and nerves, and he would have to get out of there if he was to understand his pain. If it was pain. He knew people suffered agony, and he wondered if what he felt was agony. It did not seem like the dsescriptions of agony. He wondered if it wasn’t just self-pity again.”

Devouring Hard Rain Falling has now started me on a reading of as much of Carpenter’s work as I can get hold of. I recently polished off A Couple of Comedians (1979), probably Carpenter’s most well-reviewed novel, complete with a blurb from Norman Mailer that it is “the best novel I’ve ever read about contemporary show biz.”

Now, the late Mailer knew much about many things, especially the sort of existential crisis Carpenter limned so vividly in Hard Rain Falling. But I never turned to him for great insight into celebrity (his paycheck photo-book

Marilyn has a lot of terrific prose about the psychic pain of fame, but he could as well have been writing as much about his own at that point as he was of Monroe’s). In any case, I found A Couple of Comedians—a thinly-veiled portrait of a Martin-and-Lewis sort of comedy-music team—to be disappointingly superficial, very much a product of its time in trying to be daringly realistic about the gap between public image and private-life sordidness, but the author doesn’t do much to convey the talent of his subjects (crucial in having us believe we’re reading about a superstar act) and, read now in the age of OK!, InTouch, and US magazines, his depiction of celeb sordidness seems almost genteel.

Nonetheless, Carpenter—a San Francisco-based writer who counted among his closest friends Richard “Trout Fishing In America” Brautigan—always seems to be at that bubbling-under stage of rediscovery. Some fans have put together a useful website, that includes a good bibliography and a rare interview with Carpenter, who (like his pal Brautigan) committed suicide, at age 64 in 1995. Writers such as Jonathan Lethem and Barry Gifford have sung small praises to him. Maybe when I get through reading all of Carpenter, I’ll attempt my own overview of his career. In the meantime, put Payday in your Netflix queue, and troll the internet for a used copy of Hard Rain Falling—for the moment, at least, they come cheap. Carpenter deserves better.

I cannot recommend more highly Martin Scorsese Presents Val Lewton: Man in the Shadows, a documentary airing Jan. 14 on TMC and to be released on DVD Jan. 29 on Warner Home Video. Lewton produced such low-budget, high-eerie-quotient, 1940s beauties as Cat People, the heebee-jeebee-inducing I Walked With A Zombie, The Body Snatcher, and the gorgeous chiller about the imaginative-life of a child, Curse of The Cat People.
Lewton is portrayed in Man In The Shadows as a quiet but stubborn fellow, one of Hollywood’s business-artists, with a head for the bottom-line and the soul of a poet. He helped the careers of directors such as Jacques Tourneur and Robert Wise; Lewton seems an exemplary collaborator-artist, a rare pinstripe-suited beast indeed.
It’s nice that the Scorsese name will probably coax a few more viewers toward this film, but its true auteur is writer-director Kent Jones, the first-rate film critic for, among other journals, Film Comment. Jones dispenses with the usual he-was-born-the-son-of-ambitious-immigrants sort of bio-doc cliches and builds his own series of suspenseful scenes, as Lewton’s various collaborators and Jones’ chosen commentator-experts (Scorsese among them) describe the air of dream-like dread or ecstasy that characterized many of Lewton’s productions, and then we’re shown just the right clip to illustrate the point.
This is film criticism as movie-making, about a moviemaker whose work often pleased mass audiences and occasionally even transcended critical analysis to achieve a shimmering lyricism. Watch Man in the Shadows, and then watch a few of the movies Val Lewton shaped so vividly.

Here’s a small challenge for you:

Connect Phil Spector to Brian De Palma’s Scarface.

It’s been ages since I’ve blogged; I have to figure out the right tone for it.

In the meantime, here’s a link to a New York Times book review I wrote that I am pleased to have written.

Lots of publications, including The New York Times and my own EW, have placed David Milch’s mysterioso surf-delve John From Cincinnati on their year-end “worst” lists. I understand the impulse. In the post-Sopranos era, HBO is facing competition—if not in viewer-numbers at least in media coverage—from Showtime, where shows like Dexter and Weeds and The Tudors and Californication and Brotherhood have all attracted the sort of glossy-classy attention that used to attend the slightest HBO offering. (For the record, I think the woefully under-watched Brotherhood is by far the best of that lot.)
Because HBO has long been the king of (as they themselves so ceaselessly promote their shows as being) “ground-breaking,” I detect a bit of take-that-you-smuggies satisfaction in slapping around Cincinnati. Indeed, I also share the feeling that HBO had become pretty complacent about its position in the firmament of Heavenly TV, trying to pass off dross such as Lucky Louie and Carnivale, not to mention the ridiculous six-year run of Arliss on innocent subscribers.
But I come to defend John From Cincinnati as it receives it end-of-year ass-kicking. The tale of the Yost surfing dynasty, headed up by the never-less-then-excellently-hardboiled Bruce Greenwood as levitatin’ Mitch, was characterized by Milch’s penchant for dialogue whose intricate syntax must have made the actors run screaming for aspirin and a thesaurus upon receiving every episode’s (late-arriving?) script. Yet for those of us who didn’t try to plumb the probably-impenetrable matrix of metaphysical arguments being hashed out over Milch’s floatation off terra firma and the blissed-out aphorisms of Austin Nichols’ John, the series stood up as a low-down, grungy look at surf culture at its most working-class level.
As an admirer of the novels of Kem Nunn, the writer who originated the series with Milch, I certainly wished numerous times that the show would pare away some of the sententious philosophizing to which Milch was (literally?) prone and utilize some of the eloquent thriller conventions Nunn deploys at his best. But overall, this John was an admirably acted, often surprisingly moving piece of work. I’m not one to praise a show purely for its ambition when that ambition isn’t fulfilled, but, week-in and week-out, John From Cincinnati always provided at least a few scenes of stark drama that put it sea-leagues above most cable or network TV shows.
No, I didn’t put it on my own ten-best list—its unevenness didn’t permit it to make the cut—but it doesn’t deserve the contempt it’s receiving now, either.