Last night, we watched "A Few Good Men", except it was made in 1968 and called "Sergeant Ryker", with Bradford Dillman as Tom Cruise, Lee Marvin playing Jack Nicholson, and a 7 year old Aaron Sorkin in the audience taking notes. "You can't handle the truth!" I always thought Cruise should've walked over to the witness stand, pulled Nicholson up by his collar, then decked him for saying that, especially with that belligerent expression on his face. Nicholson was good right up until about "Five Cheesy Pieces", or maybe "Cuckoo's Nest". After that, he became a cartoon caricature.
Lee Marvin, himself no stranger to smarm, plays "Sgt. Paul Ryker", a Korean War soldier, currently locked up for treason. He's about to be sentenced to hang. His wife "Ann" (Vera Miles) comes to visit him one last time. She's traveled 6000 miles, but doesn't love him, and because of this, she's easy pickins for "Captain David Young" (Dillman), Ryker's JAG prosecutor, whom she's just met and conferred with. Ann overhears Captain Young tell his superior "Major Whitaker" (Peter Graves), that, while Sgt. Ryker is indeed a pinko traitor, Young doesn't think he got a fair trial. "His defense was inept. I walked all over them." Hearing that admission, Ann asks Capt. Young to tell it to the JAG court. "If he didn't get a fair trial, the court should know it! After all, he's facing a death sentence." And, coming from the prosecutor himself, the declaration of an unfair trial should carry some weight.
Capt. Young agrees to do it, but his fellow JAG officers suggest caution. "Are you sure you aren't doing this because his wife's available ?" asks F. Murray Abraham, I mean Murray Hamilton, playing "Captain Appleton", a glad-handing Southerner straight out of Capote. "You should talk," says Young, "with your Korean girls." Appleton's got a new one every week.
There's a lot of folderol about Sgt. Ryker's superior officer, a now-deceased Colonel, who may have been in possession of a written order that will clear Ryker of the charges against him. The problem is that we have no idea what those charges are. The way the plot is structured is pure "Good Men", where the writer doesn't let you know squat until the Eventual Courtroom Sequence. Thank goodness in this flick it only takes us 45 minutes to get there, instead of 2 1/2 hours as in "A Few Good Men" (and 10,000 "Santiagos" and "Code Reds").
The deal in this kind of picture is that the screenwriter thinks he's smarter than the audience, and he wants to let them know it, so he's gonna toy with them and hope the director is competent enough to hold their attention in other ways, so they don't throw in the towel, and here, he mostly succeeds. You go, "Okay, I get it. You aren't gonna tell us why Sgt. Ryker is treasonous. You're gonna be flippant and make us wait."
But the good thing, for us, is that we've already seen Good Men, thanks to Aaron Sorkin, who plagiarized this flick for his own, and once again I must say, if you don't believe me, watch the freaking court trial near the end, when Lee Marvin explodes, and then tell me Jack Nicholson didn't copy directly from it.
Straight up.
Now, Marvin's explosion is nuclear compared to Jack's (which was just asshole-ish), and it doesn't deserve a nose punch like Jack's did, but I mean.....c'mon. Look, I won't pretend I'm a fan of Aaron Sorkin. Is he a hack? Maybe not, but he is a guy who's overly impressed with himself, and it comes through in his too-jargony, clever-on-purpose scripts. I won't go on a tirade about him, because he doesn't warrant one, but - once again (and I AM gonna teach a class about this) - if he didn't steal from this movie to make "Good Men", then my name is Jackie Robinson.
I was praying for Tom Cruise to come in and kick Jack Nicholson's ass, and neither of them are even in this movie! We do finally get an explanation of what went down for Sergeant Ryker to face execution, and it does show, once again (as in another recent Korean War movie), the interpolitical machinations of Asian students who went to college in California, then went back to fight for the fascists in Japan (WW2) or the commies in Korea. But here, the plot and intrigue get overshadowed by our knowledge that Aaron Sorkin ripped this flick off.
Watch it and see. It's not a "maybe". It's for certain.
Two Huge Thumbs for "Sergeant Ryker", even though you have no idea what the crime is until the 45 minute mark. The picture is razor sharp and in color, which we don't prefer (except in exceptionally great motion pictures), and for the first 15 minutes, it has the feel of a TV movie (thanks to F. Murray Abraham's trite acting), but Bradford Dillman does a great Tom Cruise, and Lee Marvin, smarmy or not, actually was in the Marine Corps and won a Purple Heart and is buried at Arlington. ////
The previous night, in a last minute rush, we stumbled upon "The Sin of Nora Moran"(1933), a super pre-Coder about a young woman, Nora of the title, who sits on Death Row awaiting the electric chair. It begins in the office of "District Attorney John Grant" (Alan Dinehart), whose socialite sister "Edith" (Claire Du Brey) rushes into his office after finding a stack of love letters to her husband the Governor, written by a woman named Nora. Edith is inflamed. "You do something about this, John! I want this little tramp destroyed, run out of town." After telling her, "Look Edith, calm down. Let's be honest here; you don't care about Dick (her husband) anymore than I do. We both used him to get where we are. Now, do you want to know who this young woman is?" He then shows her a newspaper with the headline "Killer Nora Moran Set To Be Executed Tomorrow". From there, we proceed in flashback mode as the DA tells his stunned, contrite sister the story of Nora's life.
Born in an orphanage, she was adopted by loving parents, who were killed in an auto accident when she was a teen. Using money they left behind, she trained to become a dancer, but the competition was too stiff, and she had to settle for a job in the circus, working as the lion tamer's girl. But worse, he's a drunk who eventually rapes Nora, scarring her for life. She runs away from the circus, and is living hand to mouth until, at a party, she's introduced to "Dick Crawford" (Paul Cavanaugh). He's handsome, charming, a very nice man. But he's being pushed by DA Grant, his friend, to run for governor. The DA wants to be the power behind the throne. He has no idea that Dick, who's married to his sister Edith, is now seeing Nora, a hard-luck sweetheart. Edith's money-grubbing prompted the affair. She doesn't love Dick; he's just a good-looking prop that she and her brother can use to advance themselves.
The movie now jumps back and forth between dream sequences, in which Nora has nightmares before her pending execution. Her sympathetic prison matron begs her, "Please dear, won't you tell me what really happened?" Nora is hiding something, even to the hour of her death. The dream sequences are intercut with the prison staff's preparations for the execution: shaving Nora's head, adjusting the electric current, the mortician selecting the right size coffin. This is not only grim but almost Lynchian. It's surreal, very anti-death penalty, and in this case I can understand the opposition because The Chair was being used weekly in the 20s and 30s. Probably at least a few innocent men and women got executed. And back then, when women were feminine, it was seen as wrong to execute one, even if she was guilty. I shant get into my views on capital punishment (or maybe I shall), but I just feel, as I've said, that's it's wrong for anyone to chime in who hasn't had a loved one murdered, because if you had, especially your little son or daughter, you might feel differently, or your mom, dad, wife, grandma, etc. Heck, if a guy murdered my dog I'd personally pull the switch. But anyhow.
So, the movie becomes surreal and dreamlike as Nora's final hour nears, and the DA reveals more of the story to his sister, the Governor's wife. I normally give you a lot of plot, and more often than not I reveal the ending, but I'm afraid I cannot do that here. This one is so good - ethereal almost - with an excellent performance by early actress Zita Johann (of Romania), that you're just gonna have to see it for yourself. It gets Two Huge Thumbs Up, bordering on Two Gigantic. It has a 6.7 on IMDB, a very high rating for an unknown early sound flick. But this is what they could do when they went for it 90 years ago. It slightly reminds me of another, more recent, obscure flick: "Obsession" by Brian DePalma from 1977. DePalma disappeared off the face of the Earth, but anyhow, in 1933, Zita Johann was in an auto accident in Hollywood with a car driven by John Huston. She had only minor injuries, but then, the same year, Huston ran over a dancer named Tosca Roulien and killed her. Why didn't he go to jail? It's obvious that John Huston was a massive drunk. But he had good connections, which is what this movie is all about.
If you have connections, nothing happens to you. Except when God gets ahold of you. Then you are toast.
The picture is very good. ////
And that's all I know for tonight. Let's do a Top Ten Keyboards List real quick: You've got your Big Three 1) Keith Emerson, 2) Rick Wakeman, 3) Jon Lord, then you've gotta go with the Two Daves: 4) Dave Sinclair of Caravan and 5) Dave Stewart of Egg, Hatfield, and National Health. After that, you have to have Rick Wright, whose contribution to the Pink Floyd sound cannot be overstated. And you've gotta have Tony Banks at #7 for the same reason. Who, then, should come in at #8? Probably Peter Bardens. It's after that that you get into trouble, because you've still got Mike Pinder (who brought the Mellotron to prominence with The Moody Blues), Kerry Minnear (of Gentle Giant, Ken Hensley (patented organ sound of Uriah Heep), Hugh Banton (Van der Graaf Generator), Tony Kaye and Patrick Moraz (both of Yes). So who do you choose? You only have two slots left. Though he's not a virtuoso, I think I'd have to pick Mike Pinder, because The Moody Blues are incredible, and he is as integral to their sound as Rick Wright is to Pink Floyd's. So that puts Pinder in the #9 slot. At #10, as great as all the remaining choices are, I'm gonna take Hugh Banton, who - again - while not on the level of an Emerson or Wakeman, created an identifiable sound that drove the music of Van der Graaf more than any other instrument except Peter Hammill's voice. And then Kerry Minnear, who is a virtuoso, and a musical genius. But he's a multi-instrumentalist who also excels on xylophone and cello, so for strictly keyboards, the #10 nod goes to Banton. ////
My blogging music was "Pacific Ocean Blue" by Dennis Wilson (really good!), and "Proud Words on a Dusty Shelf" by Ken Hensley (ditto!). My late night is "Rienzi" by Wagner. I hope your week is off to a good start, and I send you Tons of Love, as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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