Here's To The Ladies Who Lunge Part One: I’ll See You In Hell, Darling!
It’s been a circuitous route back to the project I’d planned to launch here last July. I’m still crazy happy within the Dollars and Sense trippy trip we’ve been on lately. So, I guess this is as good a time as any to return to my ride with the gaga flow and do some zen surfing down that trashy rabbit hole leading to Char-Len’s 2021 short film project. I’m a firm believer that trash—most especially the cliched kind—plays with our being attracted to our darkest truths.
The best of some of my favorite film directors have succeeded in macerating American culture in wonderful melodramas. The musk of the pulp that’ floats in the wake of the stories they chose to tell, emanates a very recognizable, odd perfume. It’s a private and personal thing that we usually will only indulge in from behind closed doors, and, it’s rarely if ever admitted to. No one really wants to own up to the dark side of their imagination. It’s easier to watch it or read it—and then admit to it—from a safe distance.
Let me return now for just a minute or two to the heat of that Boardwalk Empire afternoon I posted about here just a couple of weeks ago. At the end of that heady day of background acting work, I returned to the apartment I was temporarily staying in and turned on something thick and unrecognizable on good old Turner Classic Movies. I was watching two actors standing in relief on a rooftop against a sky full of city smog. A weirdly desperate and poignant oasis had been constructed on this rooftop by one of the film’s three leading characters. A grotesque and oddly lyrical visual composition made for my immediate melancholic response. I was hooked. I had no idea what I was watching. But, the scent of something off quickly drew me in.
I’d come across something that I’ve grown to love every dingy minute of— over the many times I’ve watched and shared it with my friends. I’m talking about the giddy and wild William Conrad masterpiece, An American Dream. It ranks—pun intended—as one helluva an inelegant class act. The film is radically entertaining with a poetry all its own. Well, not entirely its own. Its artistry is in its edgy visuals—like the kinetically edited tv shows of the period—not as kinetic as the flashcard editing we’re seeing so much of these days. There’s a cumulative purpose in this film’s editing style—a dark and lyrical ebb and flow. Its source stems from its inspiration—the brilliant prose of what I would have thought an impossible pulp property to translate into film. Norman Mailer’s serialized novel, An American Dream first appeared in 1964 as a kind of contemporary penny dreadful—a rant about a country’s excess that originally appeared sequentially in several issues of Esquire magazine.
But, I’m beginning to digress here.
For now please allow me to sing the praises of the great William Conrad.
Conrad was a seasoned radio and film actor with a career that survived four decades. He’s probably best know as the voice of the narrator in the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon series. But, he probably scored his greatest success as the corpulent and erudite private dick in the CBS series Canon Unbeknownst to me until only a few years ago, he’d started to dig his heels in both producing and directing some episodes of two iconic Warner Brothers TV series during the late 1950s and early 1960s: Hawaiian Eye and 77 Sunset Strip.
These successful forays into the murk of popular gumshoe TV back then must have led Warner Brothers to entrust him with films possessing more elevated and weightier purplish properties. And so began Conrad’s being reshaped—with just a handful of films produced between 1965 to 1967—as one of our best and most interesting overripe film directors. Not as unsubtle as John Waters and not as tensely restrained as Douglas Sirk. His producing An American Dream was a marriage made in heaven and, in my canon—yes that was a pun intended—of venerated trash—a stylish mid-century pop classic was perfectly realized for our guilty devouring. A not so fresh salad very quickly wilts right before our eyes. A plot that begins by tossing together three crazy main ingredients—a male celebrity bastard who’s willfully supported by justifiable bitch of a sexually frustrated and insanely wealthy wife wallows in emasculation while a dark angel of death posing as a cocktail lounge singer waits in the wings for his final sentencing…All of this seasoned with each character’s spicy associations.
So…Now I’m really digressing…And a bit too over excitedly.
Deep breath…
I’ll look forward to your discreetly joining me here again next week—when I’ll have more to say about the great Eleanor Parker and the cliff that her character so tenuously hangs from prior to her going through the roof…Literally.
Until then…
Be well.
And stay engaged.
