MEAN JOHNNY BARROWS

d. Fred Williamson (1976)

Towards the end of this intermittently action packed film, Johnny Barrows (Fred Williamson) faces off against a an old enemy: a wiry, greasy, long haired polo neck wearing assassin. They make Kung Fu noises and a pantomimic and clunky fight ensues. The bad guy puts Johnny down and looks around for something to finish him, eventually spying a small rock, which he lifts with both hands as if it weighs a tonne, raising it above his head with enormous difficulty. Johnny reaches under his sweater and dispatches his opponent with a concealed throwing star. It was at that precise moment, about thirty years ago, that my brother and I decided this was one of our favourite films of all time.  

Full of incident and guest stars, spare of plot and sense, Mean Johnny Barrows is essentially a shaggy dog story about a principled action man and highly trained ex-soldier who retains his personal integrity despite homelessness and poverty before eventually accepting a job as a Mafia hit man and taking out the members of a rival syndicate who are selling drugs to black communities. Make no mistake, it’s jarring to see Fred Williamson cleaning a toilet and eating things out of bins but it clarifies why, when he is offered the money and land he needs to make a fresh start, he reluctantly takes it. Williamson is an extraordinary figure in cinema – an actor, writer and director who isn’t very good at any of those things but has had a long career based around his supreme self-confidence and the fact that it is pretty much impossible to dislike him, no matter (or perhaps because of) how ridiculous and puffed up he appears to be. Williamson who, like a number of black male stars of the era*, made his name on the American Football field, is at his daftest in fight scenes, which he either refuses to take seriously or takes too seriously, resulting in  much comedy gurning, silly noises and over-expressive hand gestures.

Along with Stuart Whitman, R.G Armstrong, ex-Tarzan Mike Henry and Elliot Gould(!), there’s the wonderful Roddy McDowall, one of my favourite actors, here playing a weaselly mobster / florist with great humour and his usual piercing intelligence / total bemusement. Post Planet of the Apes, the already expressive Roddy became even more animated, his nose crinkling and forehead furrowing compulsively, as if trying to be seen under heavy make up, whether he's wearing it or not. It makes me like him even more, and I already like him a lot.

I give this film my highest critical and analytical rating: it’s a hoot, and you'll be glad you watched it from the first seconds to the caption on the final frame -

'Dedicated to the veteran who traded his place on the front line for a place on the unemployment line. Peace is hell'.

 *Jim Brown; Rosie Grier; Bernie Casey; O.J Simpson...

VELVET SMOOTH

d. Michael L. Fink (1976)

Blaxploitation essentially presents an Afrocentric world where super hip, super smart, super fly black people easily swat away Whitey's conventions and rewrite injustices for themselves. It's a macho, often unconscionably sexist place, but there is also room for distaff John Shafts: beautiful, intelligent, strong women who can kick arse just as well as their male counterparts. Sometimes, as with the Pam Grier characters Coffy and Foxy Brown, our heroines are driven to action by revenge or necessity; sometimes, like Cleopatra Jones and the wonderfully and even more improbably named Velvet Smooth they're just preternaturally cool and in charge from the get go. 

Velvet (Johnnie Hill, who gives a slightly stilted but appealing performance and only ever appeared on screen in this one film) is a sassy and switched on private eye investigating a hostile and violent takeover of her ex-boyfriends crime syndicate. That's the story, a fluid ounce in a quart pot. Velvet is calm and collected and sleeps with whoever she damn pleases. She has two girlfriends who help her out, and they're a formidable team, so much so that they solve the mystery in about fifteen minutes and then have to hang around for the rest of the movie.

The crime lord is a surprisingly nice guy, who spends his spare time having pillow fights and has a very distracting braided pig tail hanging out of the back of his afro. He's played by a gentleman called Owen Wat-Son, a surname I'm familiar with but have never seen spelled in quite that way before. Wat-Son was also a martial arts instructor, and was responsible for the interminable fight scenes here, where the same dozen guys get beaten up again and again, one after the other*, really, really slowly. Rather cheekily, Wat-Son has a featured fight of his own, which is notable for having most of the action sped up to make him look shit hot, but nevertheless remains more Benny Hill than Bruce Lee.

Clearly filmed on the fly on the streets and in hastily reconfigured and re-purposed borrowed rooms (you can see the light patches where pictures were recently hanging), Velvet Smooth fails to live up to the sophisticated promise of its title in almost every way but has an endearing earnestness about it, as well as a Kojak gag that must have been out of date by the time the film crept into selected cinemas.

* Why do villains never attack en masse? If you greatly outnumber your opponent, it's moronic to give them the advantage of being able to knock you off individually. Pile in!

THE BURGLAR

d. Paul Wendkos (1957)

'We, the dead, welcome you'.
 

Nat Harbin (Dan Duryea, weary as hell) is a career criminal, a break in expert. He has never been caught, never been photographed, never been finger printed. Neither has he ever been particularly successful, living in a series of crummy rooms in slummy streets, eking out a living for himself and his adopted sister, Gladden (Jayne Mansfield!). They are in love with each other, but something always gets in the way: life, usually, and Nat’s higher sense of obligation and morality to the girl he has looked after since she was a kid. Maybe if things were different they could be happy, live a different life. Maybe. Nat is like a sleepwalker, locked into himself, indifferent to almost everything apart from the instinct to put one foot in front of the other. Even love is a burden. 

Nat decides that he needs a big score, so forms an ‘organisation’: him, Gladden, a whining weakling called Baylock and a sleazy psychopath called Dohmer. Together they steal a sapphire necklace from a shifty spiritualist called Sister Phoebe. It’s worth a cool $150,000, and they think they can get $80,000 for it. What they actually get is death, hunted down by a crooked cop who wants the necklace for himself.

As you might expect from a film noir based, like Nightfall, on a book by arch fatalist David Goodis, The Burglar is dark, inky black in places. The characters are lost causes, stuck on predetermined routes to sordid ends. They all need someone to talk to, someone to listen. They will end up unsung, unremembered, unburied, left in crumpled heaps or in hastily dug holes by the side of the road. The drama is played out in huge sudden close ups and in flashing action cuts, all to the blaring of an occasionally intrusive brass and vibes score. Everything about this grim little story is played big, as if it mattered, as if any of it mattered.

At the climax, in the bustling amusement arcades and tourist attractions of Atlantic City (‘the playground of the world’) the characters play out their last scenes in sudden isolation, as if they are the only people on the planet. In the end, Nat finally gets what he wanted all along: he is put of his misery. Gladden survives, the only one young enough and innocent enough to still have a shot at something else, at someone else. What happens to the necklace? Who cares?

NIGHTFALL

d. Jacques Tourneur (1957)

'That's your whole trouble, you know that? The top of your head never closed up when you were a kid. Neither did your mouth.'

Film Noir often hinges on coincidence or, perhaps more in keeping with the idiom, dumb luck. Nightfall contains a plot that is so convoluted it can scarcely be believed - but it works, it just works, and it makes for the most under-rated film I know.

I'm not going to summarise the story, other than to say it comes from the typewriter of arch pulp writer David Goodis and involves $350,000 of stolen money, a murder, two ruthless villains, a beautiful girl and an innocent man trying to clear his name, played by that most believable of fall guys, Aldo Ray*. Most of the action plays out in Wyoming, a stunning looking state of deep snow, tall mountains and great swathes of beautiful wilderness. It's not quite breathless, but it is relentless, a film of great verve and energy and momentum that is greatly aided by superb performances from just about everyone in the cast.   

I'm pretty sure that the Coen brothers watched this film before they wrote Fargo. It's by no means a rip off, but there are too many recurring elements for it to be a coincidence: a man running across a snow covered field; money buried, waiting for a thaw; a double act of killers who hate and mistrust each other, one voluble, almost reasonable, the other a psychopath; bloody death by machinery (a snow plough here, not a wood chipper). It's not a problem, it's just interesting. The Coen's clearly know their stuff, or, at least, they did: they've ploughed a very arid furrow indeed since The Big Lebowski.  

* Aldo Ray is great. Tall, heavy set, tough, but with a broken, raspy voice and blue eyes that seem permanently on the verge of tears. When he smiles, he looks about six years old. 

THE LAST AMERICAN HERO

d. Lamont Johnson (1973) 

Jeff Bridges will appear in pretty much anything these days, but there was a time when he had a very specific appeal, a lot of it based around his youthful, open faced appearance and total insouciance. That lack of concern was always difficult to read: was he smart or stupid; self-assured or disconnected; natural or wooden: was he even really there at all?

Here, he plays Elroy ‘Junior’ Jackson, a 'wild assed mountain boy' who is a prodigiously gifted driver and local enigma. Starting out by running moonshine (sticking it to the man is a vital element in these hicksploitation films), he needs to become  a breadwinner when his Pa is imprisoned for bootlegging liquor, so takes his fast wheels to market, starting off in demolition derbies before progressing to stock car racing and, ultimately, the most pointless of all American sports, NASCAR. Junior is just about the best there’s ever been at driving quickly around in circles for hours on end, and the film ends with him holding aloft his first championship trophy.

Loosely based on 50s and 60s NASCAR legend, Junior Johnson, the script was derived from an Esquire magazine piece by Tom Wolfe. The original prose was kinetic and hyperbolic, full of colour and energy, a gleaming sports car with a tank full of pop art and rocket fuel. Sadly, the film is a rather clunky hybrid, powered by red diesel.  At best, it’s rowdy and rambunctious, but is mainly light and inconsequential, largely down to Bridges under-written character and non-committal performance: Junior never really seems bothered, so why should we be?