Last night we had a very funny (and Veddy Brrrittish!) black comedy with an awesome title, "The Lamp in Assassin Mews"(1962). I had to look up exactly what a mews was. I thought it was a neighborhood but it's more specific than that. It's a street of houses converted from horse stables, or constructed to look like former stables, and in keeping with tradition, the residents of Assassin Mews revere the old-fashioned. In particular, one elderly brother and sister who have lived in the same house for decades resent the intrusion of anything newfangled. "Albert" and "Victoria Potts" (Ian Fleming and Amy Dalby) are protective of the Mews' one remaining gas lamp, and of the man who lights it each night. Their house has gas lighting, no electricity, and they so hate door-to-door salesmen that they've taken to murdering the last three vacuum cleaner peddlers who've come calling! Yes, and they have no qualms about doing so.
The borough council, however, is meeting to modernize Assassin Mews. The local developer (boo, hiss!) thinks it's about time the residents got with the times. He wants sodium lamps installed, and new, mall-style shops. The film even shows suburban English streets with Americanized sidewalk parkways and curbs, and houses that look like San Fernando Valley houses; I didn't know they had those. The council is planning to vote in favor of the modernization, with borough chief "Jack Norton" (Francis Matthews) acting as the point man for the developer, but a citizen's group, led by teacher "Mary Clarke" (Lisa Daniely) is determined to protect the quaint character of the Mews. Albert and Victoria Potts are glad to help. They bake a poison-soaked cake for Norton, and when that doesn't work, white-haired Albert plants a bomb underneath his car. That fails, too, and by now Norton has met with and is trying to charm schoolteacher Clarke, by using a fake name at a town dance. They fall in love, until she finds out he's really Jack Norton from the council, who's leading the modernization effort. Will she be able to stop him from ruining the town, as symbolized by the lone standing gas lamp?
It's all very funny, and right up my alley because I revere the tradition of my Reseda (and my Northridge, too, but development has ruined much of it). Two Bigs, almost Two Huge. Francis Matthews is a great farceur, we saw him recently in "The Battleaxe". Highly recommended, the picture is slightly soft. ////
The previous night, in "Naked Fury"(1959), four safecrackers make their escape after clearing 50,000 pounds in a warehouse job. Young "Johnny" (Kenneth Cope) is driving their car, a sharp sedan. Bossman "Eddy" (Reed de Rouen) tells him to slow down, "we don't wanna attract the cops". It looks like they're gonna make a clean getaway, the only problem is they have an unexpected hostage, "Carol" (Leigh Madison), the daughter of the night watchman they beat and tied up.
Eddy is an American, a tough guy in jeans and leather jacket, but he doesn't want to outright kill Carol. Johnny the driver agrees: "She's too pretty". But something's gonna have to be done about her before the gang leave the country by ship. West Indies big man "Steve" (Tommy Eytle) only went along to get money for his sick kid; he wants nothing to do with murder. Then there's the safecracker himself, "Syd" (Arthur Lovegrove), a cynical parolee who lives at his girlfriend's flat. Boss Eddy is sure the cops'll contact Syd and Johnny, who runs a car shop and is a ladies man/nightclubber with a criminal record. Anytime a robbery goes down, the coppers always check on "the regulars" - guys with records. "Just act nonchalant", Eddy tells them. "The cops have nothing on any of us. Come back here at midnight tomorrow, and we'll head to the dock, the ship will be waiting." Their hideout is an old, five story wood-and-brick waterfront building. The nightwatchman there (an older ex-criminal) is covering them for a fee. He tells Eddy to "be careful on them stairs, they're fallin' apart," which can't be a good omen for later on.
When the others disperse for the night, Eddy has a chance to "make nice" with Carol the pretty hostage, who he tries to reassure to keep her from freaking out. "Listen, baby. I just stole enough money to buy half the world's women. I don't need you, so don't worry." Still, she tries to make three different escapes down those rickety stairs, but Eddy, and later Johnny, catch her every time. Big Steve doesn't like the way they're treating her, and Syd the Safecracker's girlfriend wants in on the take all of a sudden. "I've been waiting five years while you were in prison, you owe me. Get me half your share, or I'm alerting the cops."
The gang starts to fall apart at this point, each once beset by a betrayer (except West Indian Steve, who's just trying to get money for his kid.) When Eddy checks in with the captain of their escape ship - a widebody German - he's informed that the passage fee will now be doubled, as the warehouse night watchman has just died, thus the robbers are now also murderers. "I make the rules now, if you want out of here." The German captain wants 40% of their haul, and he dictates their method of boarding his ship, by rowboat, offshore. Eddy ain't getting much for his escape money. The whole caper is falling apart, that's the metaphor, and you should keep that in mind for the ending, which is unique for a crime film. I'm sure I've never seen it used before. Actor Reed de Rouen has a great name, I think. It's gotta be a play on Road to Ruin, very National Lampoon or punk rock. He's also got a good look, like if you put John Madden in Marlon Brando's clothes, or maybe Dave Madden would be a better example. The movies title couldn't be more of a non-sequitur. There's no "naked" and very little "fury", but it's very well-done for what it is, the old Reservoir Dogs scheme at work, the gang that slowly falls apart. Two Big Thumbs Up with another high recommendation. The picture is razor sharp. ////
And that's all I know. We've gotta get back to 1989, and look at questions as basic as "why did Terry's Mom move him to Concord Square in the first place?" He had a nice little studio apartment there on Darby Street in Northridge. He wasn't being evicted, and Reseda was not a distant-enough change to keep the friends from hanging out and distracting him from working, if that was the goal. Since the Event has systems that are so complex and secretive, and consequences so far reaching, it is not a stretch to speculate that Terry was moved there deliberately by his Mom, because it was a known "sanctioned" sex-and-drugs pad. Now, it would be easy to say, "oh, c'mon Ad." But you have to take into account one huge factor; that the manager of that large complex was in on whatever was being contained (or attempting to be contained) by the bad guys on the night of September 1st, 1989.
You could say she was the first adversarial person I encountered, besides Lillian and Terry, in the entire 12-plus day Event. She proved this by calling not police, which a manager would ordinarily do for a domestic dispute, but by calling two criminal thugs, the leader of which handcuffed me and held a knife to my stomach. He, and by association, the Concord Square manager, who called him (as she'd threatened to), wanted to keep a drugs, sex and porno situation "in house". As we've previously stated, you can't call the cops when you're running a shady building. And the thug very likely called Howard Schaller and alerted him that we were on our way to Northridge Hospital.
Now, it's also true that some drug dealers (and likely some porno people and swinger houses) are unofficially"sanctioned" by the police department, or at least they were in past decades. Shecky, for one, was able to grow a backyard full of high-grade pot plants, the odor of which could be smelled on the sidewalk, for years in late-80s and early-90s. He was able to do this even though he lived just a few blocks from the West Valley police station. He was never nervous about it, or scared, and we're talking dozens of big plants, a whole backyard full. He claimed he'd paid 10k to become what he called "a gardner". He was hinting that he was sanctioned (looked-the-other-way-at), and I believe there were (and maybe still are) drug apartment buildings and sex & porno apartment buildings, and swinger houses, that are also looked the other way at. And the Concord Square manager proved, by her behavior that night, that she was covering something up. Now, would Terry's Mom have known it was this kind of building, and deliberately moved him into a drug house? It seems ridiculous. But we've seen, and shown, that a family like the Smalls had a likely-direct connection to Jared Rappaport (Pat Small). And we've seen that there are sexual secrets involved, that Rappaport was (in his words) a "gigolo" in the neighborhood. It's also interesting that Marshal Lester moved into his Rathburn St. house in 1987, the same year Terry moved to Concord Square.
Would Terry's Mom have deliberately moved him into a shady building like Concord Square? We don't know. But something is up with that move. Maybe Terry knew about the building and requested to be moved there. Or maybe someone else knew about the building and suggested he tell his Mom to move him there. It could seem far fetched until you consider that there was no reason to move him from Darby Street in the first place. Later, of course, when he did get evicted from Concord Square following the Event, he threatened to kill himself, and lo and behold, it was David Birke (will wonders never cease?) who climbed through his window to stop him. David Birke, who never once hung out at Terry's, but whose name would've hit the fan if Terry had gone through with his threat. Well, that's all for now. But I believe there's something "planned in advance" about Terry's move. ////
My blogging music is "Fish Rising" by the great Steve Hillage, my late-night is the St. Matthew Passion by JS Bach (in honor of Good Friday). I hope you are having a very nice week and I send you Tons of Love as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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