A Movie A Day: PAYDAY (1973) If I was a man I’d ball you, too. God knows you’re easy enough.
Published at: Dec. 29, 2008, 2:17 a.m. CST by quint
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with today’s installment of A Movie A Day.
[For those now joining us, A Movie A Day is my attempt at filling in gaps in my film knowledge. My DVD collection is thousands strong, many of them films I haven’t seen yet, but picked up as I scoured used DVD stores. Each day I’ll pull a previously unseen film from my collection or from my DVR and discuss it here. Each movie will have some sort of connection to the one before it, be it cast or crew member.]
For this installment we follow over THE SILENT PARTNER’s director Daryl Duke to today’s low budget character flick starring the great Rip Torn: PAYDAY.
This is a favorite of Moriarty’s and I know he was excited for me to finally get to it, so I’m going to have start by saying… Mori, take a seat… I know this might hit you hard, but I really, really didn’t like this movie. It’s okay, we can still be friends. You are a caring and loving soul and good mate. You have a beautiful family and are a wonderful human being. I just don’t dig on this one.
And I love Rip Torn. God, do I love Rip Torn. I grew up on THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW and flicks like BEASTMASTER and DEFENDING YOUR LIFE. I love Rip Torn and he is really good in this movie, which is a big compliment to him. I’d love to see him get the chance to have more leading roles like this, but the filmmaking and script just grated on me.
Basically you have a film about a second rate country singer traveling the south being a womanizing bastard, drinking, fucking, fighting and shooting his way through 100 some odd minutes. There’s no real story to the movie, but there doesn’t have to be one. Some of my favorite films are character studies and Rip Torn’s Maury Dann is certainly an interesting character, just one that I could never really connect with.
Maybe it’s my complete lack of anything resembling fandom for honkytonk music or the fact that I’m a little worn out by the “troubled life of musicians” story by now… or maybe it’s just that Duke’s filmmaking wasn’t up to par and Don Carpenter wrote characters that I just didn’t care about.
I can say that Rip Torn plays it for all its worth and I respect what he did in the movie, I just don’t like it. Greasy, dirty, horny and a little to the left of normal… it’s a nice complex character and Torn chews the scenery for all it is worth, but none of that really matters if you can’t get into the story.
There is an appealing aesthetic to the movie, a raw early ‘70s bit of realism that is something I usually dig as well. And don’t get me wrong. I love the rampant nudity and extreme language and moments of random violence, but it just never gelled for me in this movie.
It seems to go from Rip Torn being a dick to his groupie girlfriend, then being charming to the new groupie girlfriend, then getting some Wild Turkey to drink, then going hunting, then fucking his new groupie girlfriend while his old groupie girlfriend sleeps next to them in the Caddy to him drinking Schlitz to a guy getting stabbed and then the finale, which isn’t altogether unexpected, without much connecting tissues. Shit just happens.
Which is perfectly fine and good, this time it just didn’t work for me.
Final Thoughts: What we have here is a great lead performance left in the hands of people who didn’t know how to capitalize on it. Unlike in Duke’s THE SILENT PARTNER, he doesn’t have a great Curtis Hanson script to build on and we’re left with a good performance in a sloppily made movie that doesn’t seem to go anyplace. Now, I’m sure if I saw this movie at another point in my life or when I was in a different mood or something I’d have more patience with it. It definitely has an audience, I’m just not a member of it. Rip Torn is still the man and the US poster (the first below the DVD cover) was great, though!
Here’s what we have lined up for the next week:
Sunday, December 28th: A STRANGER IS WATCHING (1982)
Monday, December 29th: THE NEW KIDS (1985)
Tuesday, December 30th: SERIAL (1980)
Wednesday, December 31st: THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (1970)
Thursday, January 1st: IRMA LA DOUCE (1963)
Friday, January 2nd: THE PRISONER OF SECOND AVENUE (1974)
Saturday, January 3rd: THE GOODBYE GIRL (1977)
I'm going to go ahead and start up my write-up of A STRANGER IS WATCHING, following over Mr. Rip Torn, and post that tonight, which gets me up to current. When I hit that one I'll also make sure to post the remaining titles left in A Movie A Day, going up to the final movie of the column to give you guys an idea of what's left. See you folks a little later for Sean S. Cunningham's A STRANGER IS WATCHING!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com