DAILY INCONVENIENCE (REDUX)

Remember that oh-so-friendly term “convenience store”, meaning the corner milk store, the corner drug store, the Ma and Pa joint down the street from your house where you bought your daily newspaper or a pack of smokes? Well, it’s so far from convenient now that those same places are making headaches achier and ulcers ulcier and tempers not-so-tempered. The first part of my daily routine is almost monk-like in its serene simplicity. I leave my house, typically somewhere between 6:00 and 6:30AM, get gas if needed, grab a coffee, and head to the once-upon-a-time-convenience store in order to purchase 2 newspapers and a much needed ten-pack of cigars.That's That. Should take all of a minute and a half, two minutes tops, right? No way jack. Invariably, inevitably, somehow, all-the-time, EVERYGODDAMNDAY, the people in line if front of me seem to be there for one reason: TO SLOW MY DAY DOWN. Are any of these, my fellow life-sucking consumers, in a hurry to do anything or go anywhere? Do they love the vibe of 7-11 or Quik-Mart, or Brooks, or Ma and Pa Land? Do they love the décor, the ambience, the mostly zombie-like employees who both hate their job and their customers?

These time-killers appear as a few distinct types. There is the Senior Citizen A, the type that must, under all circumstances, reach slowly for their hidden away cash, and count out EACH AND EVERY dollar, dime, and penny, making society a better place by always paying with exact change. There is Senior Citizen B, who has learned the first name of the clerk, his or her family situation, whether they route for the Yanks or the Sox, and engages them in full discourse, at great length and detail, about the possibility of rain or sunshine EVERY SINGLE DAY. There is The Great Discounter A, armed with a mountain of clipped coupons, bent and determined to enhance their lives by saving 34 cents a day, even more determined to argue the validity of each coupon till death or savings, whichever comes first. There is The Great Discounter B, with a shopping cart as weapon, filled to the brim with multiple purchases of toilet paper and dish soap, buying bulk to fulfill their dreams and keep their basement shelves stocked with the true necessities of life. Finally, there is my fave, The Gambler, grubby fingers clutching scratch cards and lottery slips, knowing way deep down inside that they’re gonna hit the big one, ever ready and diligent to make the new purchase of that one-way ticket to the American Dream, taking their time at the register for good reason—the choice between a baseball scratch card and the tic-tac-toe one could very well be the diff between dust and gold.

I used to tell my pals that went I finally decided to let the years of accumulated rage kick in I was going to scale the roof of Providence’s Hot Club like a monkey on meth and set up for a sniping spree that would truly jumpstart a Friday night. Changed my mind. Man, when I finally flip my lid, I've decided to don some proper apparel (neat photo op, after all--plus I want my mother to see me in my best light when the tabloids run the story--haveta sport at leastone of my cooler-than-cool shirts), hook myself up with some bows and arrows, stamp them with a clear image of a ticking clock, sprinkle ‘em with gas or paint thinner, torch ‘em up, and stand atop the hood my car in the corner of the CVS on Reservoir Ave in Cranston, RI and pick off every single shopper who goes in or out before 7:00 AM on a random Tuesday or Wednesday, all the while giggling hysterically like Frank Gorshin-on-acid, hypnotically watching the flames leap from the fleeing bodies onto coupon inserts, neat little piles of scratch tics and big bundles of toilet paper. That ought to send a message, right?

Black and White and All Over

There is a piece in the newest Newsweek that shines a light on the dirty practice of rereading (dirty, rotten and tawdry because there is always so much new material begging to be read, and yup, it's a sin not be reading it), revisiting books read once, or even twice, for the easy pleasures of re-enlightenment, confirmation of greatness, or the simple scraping up of the bits and pieces that remain ensconced in daydreams and random back thoughts. Film Noir is a lot like that, the movie genre that isn’t really a genre, movies ill-defined and roughly grouped together because of shared tones, similar themes, certain visual characteristics, and a variety of filmic elements that make this movie pure noir to me and that movie all about noir to you. Like much Hollywood studio product, film noir efforts almost demand repeated viewings—the better to detail the corrosive themes, the atypically descending story arcs, the expressionistic cinematography, the puzzling feel of hypnotic hopelessness that surges through noirs, both minor and major. Thanks to a recent noir gifting from my California-based pallie Mattman, I’ve once again found myself prowling along darkened alleys and ever wet streets, visiting ill-lit docks and crummy second floor office spaces, essentially withdrawing from the healing powers of the sun while twisting my soul in encounters with hardboiled professionals, doppelgangers, femme fatales, and, again and again, world weary saps and suckers. Yeah brother, I’ve spent the last week being black and white all over.

Cry Danger (1951). Dick Powell as Rocky, just out of a five year stint for which he was framed, back to L.A. with revenge and detection in mind, archetypical tight-lipped, hardboiled, grimly determined and thoroughly obsessive. Director Robert Parrish eschews much of the typical nighttime lighting and a large portion of the story unfolds during the day, but it all occurs under a languorous California daytime sky, under which just about everybody in sight is a liar, a con, a betrayer, all of them uncovered in a mere 79 minutes as the extremely deadpan Powell rights his particular wrong in one itty bitty corner of a mouse-trapped world.

Alias Nick Beal (1949). John (father of Mia) Farrow was yet another middle-of-the-road, journeymen type, but as it occurred so often, his abilities arched a little higher while shooting a noir. This is indeed a strange entry, a supernatural noir, with Ray Milland at his crackling, dapper best as the devil-- first tempting and then curdling man-of-the-people politician Thomas Mitchell, and Audrey Trotter as a particularly hard-edged prostitute. The last second, kinda/sorta, positive finale doesn’t come close to erasing the corpulent scent that preceded it.

Wicked Woman (1953). Wop-bop-a-loom-bam, a first time viewing for me, at it knocked me right back. As raw and unfettered as Detour, with Beverly Michaels (writer/director Russell Rouse’s then wife), a platinum blond Amazon who is equal parts repellant and sexy-scary, planting her long legs, two outfits, and totally crooked smile in front of every guy-in-sight’s peepers, reducing the thick-necked and hard-rocked Richard Egan into a strikingly limp noodle. Another sundrenched noir, but hard as rain and sharp as a rusty nail, with only a half dozen settings and slathered with a sticky resonance akin to a just emptied shot glass. So very bad, and also awful (call it The Detour Factor), that it it’s really good, best illustrated by stock character guy, the short. rotund and perennially squeaky Percy Helton’s joyful descent into the dark side, so cool and disturbing that David Lynch probably rewatches this one when he’s eating his Sunday breakfast.

Angel Face (1953). Robert Mitchum was just about carved out for noir—the perpetual guy out of the past, the big dog that winds up kicked around like a sick puppy, the sad-eyed figure of the working class; who in noir (or anywhere else) ever accepted his bleak fate more manfully resigned and than Big Bob? Mitchum seemed readymade for the existential reality of post-World War II America; he in fact stood strong as a wordless cinematic poet in the precipitous slide into nothingness. (That's a mouthful, but really, no kidding.) With the masterful Otto Preminger etching the dark touches of fevered melodrama onto the proceedings, and the otherworldly loveliness of Jean Simmons as psychopathic temptress, this one almost climbs the haunting heights of the Preminger’s true noir classic, Gilda. It’s that close, man.

Criss Cross (1949). Burt Lancaster, as another beautifully macho lost noir soul awash in the wiles of a predatory femme fatale (Yvonne DeCarlo) and the inescapable grips of his own fatalism. It’s a drab world, punctuated only be DeCarlo’s overwhelming sexuality, bursts of violence, and the ripening odor of ill-gotten gains. Robert Rossen (Body and Soul), ably abetted by a near perfect Milkos Rozsa score, frames Lancaster (and the other attendant dark shadows), despite or because of his inherent brute force, as yet another through-the-glass-darkly noir sucker, plunging headfirst into a quagmire of futility. One, among many, of Lancaster voice-overs sings out another line in that long versed siren song of noirs: “From the start, it all went one way.” Baby, ain’t that the cold, hard truth.


(By the way, tip of the dapper hat to Karl Malden, one time steel worker, a stage vet who made the easy transition to movies despite/because of his one-of-a-kind schnoz, a major league supporting player with a true center of gravity, a character guy who could ham it up and grind it down, and one of the few actual actors who made it into The Marlon Brando Respect Club.)

S-S-S-Steely Intensity

The following column is reprinted from the July issue of Providence Monthly (including the stuff my youthful editors somehow deem necessary to leave out)

I Am Christian, See Me Seethe
by Scott Duhamel

One of the sideways compliments actors are often given by film nitcrits like myself is that he or she was so nimble and affecting that he or she just blended (exquisitely, of course) into the director’s overall vision. Or, that said actor or actress managed to meld into the time, the space, the fictional world, the misc-en-scene of said film, never knocking the viewer’s gaze off course, sublimating all that acting charm, talent, charisma, and magical hoo-ha in order to better convey or propel the filmmaker’s overriding intentions. Ain’t no way around it, film has been and will forever be a director’s medium, and sure, there are certain movies that benefit from a modulated performance, even a thoroughly subtle one, but outside of those that purport to be docudramas or cinema verite styled slice-of-lifers, even the unshowiest of acting turns can still be eye-grabbing or emotionally gripping: a few tight and prodding close-ups, a shift of physicality, the merest change of expression, the barely perceived flicker of the eyes can pack quite a wallop even when embedded within a deeply focused and impeccably composed frame.

All of this sprung to mind as I watched the always intriguing and sometimes controversial Christian Bale, going hard and deep with another of his grimmest facades, in the clickety-clack, heavy metal thunder of Terminator Salvation. The movie, a bleak and gray video game substitute for a predictable amusement park ride, is all set design with a virtual digitalized narrative (robo-cinema), a wash-out of a movie dressed up in faux apocalyptic visuals, accompanied by the never ending, irritating sounds of machinery grinding, whizzing, stomping, and shifting. Bale, hardened and scarred, sadly leaves the acting behind (and this is the kind of cyber sci-fi that desperately needs the warm blood of any sorta thespian, albeit B-movie eye-winker, drooling character guy, or ham-on-rye matinee type) ---he‘s like a skull with eyes, lost in the sharp glare of gleaming metal and the din of pop-goes-the-weasel explosions. Face it, that’s just not the full metal Christian Bale jacket that general audiences or Bale cultists want to see.

As one wise guy film maven put it to me, if there’s one thing that Christian Bale does to perfection it is Steely Intensity, but is Steely Intensity the one and only thing that Christian Bale actually does? (Haveta admit, all the heavy duty eye-acting in Terminator Salvation is done with, well, pure Steely Intensity. Of course, yup, his infamous on-set tantrum, an Internet smash, which was delivered with more blood and guts gusto that anything that winds up onscreen in the finished movie, it was indeed a rant delivered with, umm, true Steely Intensity. ) Bale forms an unusual modern day branch of the Brando/DeNiro method acting tree, alongside accent-bending, waist-shifting, facial-hair sprouting brethren like Sean Penn, Little Johnny Depp, and Benicio Del Toro; unusual because he is a Welsh-born English actor, and, like his aforementioned playmates, seemingly more intrigued in finding his inner Lou Costello rather than donning that tights left behind by Lawrence Olivier.

Like the DeNiro of old, Bale is known to tackle a role with full-fledged immersion, losing 60 plus pounds for Brad Anderson’s hardcore psychological thriller The Machinist (2004), subjecting himself to all types of jungle location rigors in Werner Herzog’s finely drawn Rescue Down (2006), and most obviously, chiseling himself into a gleaming slab of man meat as Patrick Batemen in Mary Harron’s outré, and much debated, American Psycho (2000) and then re-bulking into the weirdly acrobatic stolidity (and weirdly real life comic book physical approximation) of Bruce Wayne/Batman in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008). It goes without saying (but I gotta say it), the actor fully inhabited all of these characters, particularly the two he’s most associated with (Batemen-Batman), with an in-yer-veins, absolutely shimmering, positively otherworldly dose of, umm, Steely Intensity.

Before the emergence of the ever-seething, perpetually intense, fully- coiled grown-up Bale on-screen persona, he made a bit of mark as an adolescent actor of some charm in both Newsies (1992) and Swing Kids (1993), after making a truly lasting impression (and demonstrating a then still unformed ability to go to the dark side) as the thirteen-year-old star of Steven Spielberg’s vastly underrated coming-of-age Chinese wartime effort, Empire of the Sun (1987), somehow even holding his own with notorious scene-stealer John Malkovich. Bale’s also deserves credit for memorable turns in Velvet Goldmine (1998)--- fan boyishly intense, Shaft (2000)—villainously intense , The Prestige (2006)---Victorian intense, 3:10 to Yuma (2007)---cowboy intense, and as two of the many faces of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There (2007)---hipper-than-hip intense.

Is Christian Bale fish or fowl, a legitimately charismatic big screen chameleon or a one trick pony? His career is only at mid-stage, with plenty of room for more mad dog frothing, for more spotlight self-flagellation, for more raw seething and anguished perplexity, and maybe (just maybe) a go at comedy or a (gulp) non-meta romantic lead. It’s difficult not to admire a guy who can function as the just-below-the-title star in two separate blockbusting, audience-pleasing, yet slightly off-center, comic book knock-offs, and troll through both films with not much more than a hypnotizing whisper, blazing eyes, and the overall aura of a guy waking up from an extended bender. Next up for Bale? This month’s Michael Mann reinvented gangster ride, Public Enemies, playing the straight man role of dogged pursuer, G-Man Melvin Purvis, to Johnny Depp’s rock star/bad boy John Dillinger. Anyone wanna bet that Bale goes for, at the very least, sheesh,… Steely Intensity?

Michael Jackson 1958-2009

Jacko. He was already gone and now he’s long gone. Gone, gone, gone. Real gone. Infinitely talented, extraordinarily strange, America’s biggest sustained individual pop cult phenomena since Elvis. King of Pop, Little Michael Jackson, Wacko Jacko---which pic gets posted alongside the obit? A true, far-beyond-the-norm childhood prodigy he morphed into an adult whose back-story eventually outweighed his pop cult accomplishments. Springing forth from a more fully formed, highly manufactured star making machinery music biz than the dank carny environs from which his inverted doppelganger The Big E hatched himself, he became the next logical step in the pop biz’s evolutionary chain—-thoroughly understanding the Elvis-Beatles transition—-and singlehandedly wrote the blueprint for unlikely big top pop stardom for peeps like Madonna, Justin Timberlake, or Eminem.
Michael transfused elements of Frankie Lyman, James Brown and (yup) Little Richard and became (a) a soul child lead singer crooning and prancing way out in front of his band mate brothers, (b) then emerging as a ever maturing take-me-serious artist who co-wrote material and helped shape production, (c) transitioning to the progenitor of Thriller (arguably as iconic a recording as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Blond on Blonde, Pet Sounds, or Dark Side of the Moon) and all that became associated with it---moon walking, a single glove, music vid as mini-movie, Elvis-like capital E Entertainer and searing object of obsession, affection, and unfettered emotional connection, (d) and finally a major attraction in The American Wierdo Hall of Fame and all that became associated with that---hair-on-fire, bankruptcy, out-slicking Paul McCartney in order to posses the Beatles songbook, fake marriages, a wholly manufactured 50’s Hollywood styled cover-it-up marital hook up with goddamned Elvis’ daughter (no one, not even Hunter Thompson, Philip K. Dick or Charles Bukowski could have braincrunched that), the butt (get it) of a million radio jocks jokes, the Elephant Man, the chimp, the amusement park fantasy land home, the ultimate living, breathing exemplar of the Peter Pan Syndrome, the melted face, the unsavory whispers and actual courtroom charges, the kiddies in masks, the perpetual comeback that was also lurking around the corner.
Michael and Elvis. One, a redneck who carved out a career by approximating blackness, the other a black manchild who seemed dedicated to erasing all traces of his very own blackness, both waving the hiddy-hiddy-ho, holy, magic , ju-ju stick and transfixing hicks, rubes, churchgoers, sophisticates, rebels, outcasts, boy scouts, gym teachers, and yer mama, with their own VASTNESS, their inner shaman, replete with sparkling baubles, majestic hair styles, hypnotic hip-shaking and otherworldly movements, neither with an iota of self-doubt, inner shame, or actual self-reflection. Both of them perfect fodder for our ever-ever pop-culture starved nation, the American Entertainer as Stageshow Jesus, their respective races and their inherent perspective on race defiantly flowing together, grinding, and somehow mashing, prematurely dead and all laid out in a country forever divided and often defined by race, intermingled forever as fellow race vampires, blazing talents, freaks, and little boys lost.

Psycho Daisies

I just got around to watching last Saturday’s Pushing Daisies television finale, the twenty-second and final episode of one of the stranger hours ever aired on mainstream, network television, a comedic-crime-of-the-week-modern-day-fairy-tale that seemed to combine elements of Tim Burton, Roald, Dahl, David Lynch, Lewis Carroll, Bruno Bettlelheim, Looney Tunes and Pee Wee Herman. While I don’t count myself as someone typically enchanted by pop culture that is certifiably whimsical, particularly if it veers towards preciousness, creator Bryan Fuller’s imaginative concoction did cast me under its peculiar spell; and I can't help but think that a one season run (however truncated---the show debuted with nine episodes in the fall of 2007, returned in 2008, and sputtered out over a handful of episodes the last few weeks), maybe the proper limit for a TV show so breezily fanciful and blatantly affected.

Fuller’s last two television efforts, Showtime’s Dead Like Me and Fox’s Wonderfalls (both, strangely enough lasting a mere 14 episodes), were both cult shows, noted for their quirkiness and Pushing Daisies simple but distinct premise pushes his TV-auteur-of distinction ante up to three notches. Ned (Lee Pace), a pie maker and pie shop proprietor, has the ability to bring the dead momentarily back to life, and he reluctantly utilizes his talents in the service of a throwback money-grubbing gumshoe Emerson Cod (Chi McBride), both further aided by two Pie Hole employees, Charlotte Chuck Charles (Anna Friel), the back-from-the-dead love of his life, and Olive Snook (Kristen Chenoweth) who is head over heels hooked on the pie maker. Throw in Chuck’s two former synchronized swimming stars, now housebound, Aunties (Swoosie Kurtz and Ellen Greene), a constant eye-winking narrator (Jim Dale) seemingly weaned on a steady diet of Fractured Fairy Tales, and the fact that Ned is underlined as an obvious symbol of contemporary isolation and the supremely mannered and never-ending fast-paced dialogue exchanges sound like 40’s screwball comedy lingo pureed through a blender of 60’s marijuana archness , and you got one weirdly original small screen vision.

While the show’s players are more than up for their hybrid-playing tasks, with theater vets Kurtz, Greene, and Chenoweth ably blending caricature, gusto, and parody, McBride scoring as something of a caustic comic find, Friel tripping right along the ever-thin line between perky and precocious, and Pace settling in the eerily passive center of the action, the show unfolds with a buoyantly optimistic tone that gets cauterized with a left-of-center bleakness. The production values are, particularly for TV, out-and- out eye candy, all swirling camerawork, miniature sets, crayola colorings, and Wizard of Oz-meet-Dr. Seuss set designs. Don’t feel too bad if you missed it during its on-and-off run, it’s bound to be one of those DVD discoveries, the sort that makes those buying or renting wonder how they missed it in the first place.

Cat on a Hot Tin New York Roof

John Cassavettes is one of those guys; you are either there or you are not. I always dug him as an actor: a Brandoesque bantam rooster, jumpy and world weary, capable of both straightforward masculine charm and a weirdly internal venom, sharp, angular and little-guy tough, a fast yapper and wheel-spinning guy-on-the perpetual-make possessed with a high degree of self-consciousness, always on the prowl for that 1950's something-something that went beyond chicks, dough, or immediate self-gratification. Greek-American, Long Islander, method actor, cool daddy, filmmaking visionary, American independent, scotch drinker, serial- smoker, hipster, Marty Scorsese/Spike Lee/Jim Jarmusch bellwether, fascinatingly contradictory real life character, and a darn memorable player in features like Crime In the Streets (Don Siegel, 1956), The Killers (Don Siegel, 1964) The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967),Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), Husbands (his own, 1970), “Etude in Black” (one of the finest Columbo episodes, 1972), The Temptest (Paul Mazursky, 1982) and even the absolutely wooly The Fury (Brian DePalma, 1978).

For one year, he was a TV spotlighter, starring in the title role of Johnny Staccacto, jazz pianist/ Greenwhich Village dweller/ and reluctant private eye, on ABC for 27 episodes in 1959-60. While not available as a standard DVD or Netflicker, the series can be had on the internet, and it’s fairly strong in its conception and delivery, despite its relative obscurity. An all-out nourish half hour, Cassavetes as Staccato solves the crimes, upholds the code, boils over with youthful vigor and bravado method posturing while maintaining a thoroughly convincing aura as the coolest of cats and one of the most existential TV dicks, right alongside Harry O and The Rockford Files. Mostly set in a jazz club called Waldos, with beats, bongo players, coppers. gangsters, squares, and searchers aplenty in the take-it-as-it-comes landscape, Cassavetes smokes (literally and figuratively) with the electrifying aplomb of a TV mashed-up James Dean/Humphrey Bogart, and even mixes it up with guns, fisticuffs, and a Korean-war based judo, all the while narrating every episode with a bleak, bleary-eyed, matter-of-fact voice-over that is permeated by shamus-meets-hipster observations and post-40’s self-observant doomier and gloomier revelations. Yeah, the action goes down, the chicks display their captivating make-up, hairdos, and take-a-deep-breath legs, the oh-so-Napoleonic Cassavetes broods, simmers, and continually explodes, with a weirdly expansive id—he gets drunk, lashes out, bats his laser-like southern-European eyelids and utilizes the series as method-acting test case-in yer face and up yer ass, restless and relentless, lonely and unfulfilled, perpetually itchy and irritated; a TV lead with nowhere to go but down the hazy, dazy Nieztchean line. Elmer Bernstein’s soundtrack pounds the jazzy-jazz home while guest stars and Cassavetes buds like Seymour Cassel, Harry Guardino, Cloris Leachman, Rupert Crosse, Val Avery, Martin Landau, John Marley, Lelia Goldoni Paul Stewart, and real life wifey Gena Rowlands (to die for) bring it home, alongside jazzbos like Shelly Manne, Pete Candoli and Red Norvo.

(And a bonus for you art-for-arts-sakes film mavens—he supposedly had a hand in rewriting many of the show, and even directs five episodes. Plus, for true blue cultists, the one-and-only SCTV actually parodied the little-seen series with Joe Flaherty as "Vic Arpeggio.")

RIP David Carradine 1937-2009

Bill’s killed. Caine has self- mutinied. Woody’s bound for the glory hole. Frankenstein has crashed and burned. David Carradine, the most well known scion of the infamous Hollywood family, son of John, brother to Keith and Robert, uncle to Martha Plimpton and Ever Carradine was found dead hanging in a closet in a luxury hotel in Bangkok, with a lasso around his neck, rope around his wrists, and more of it wrapped around his balls, a sad and sudden Eternal Member of the Autoerotic Asphyxiation Club.

Carradine always had a certain aura around him, a Hollywood kid who partied hard yet exuded a Zen-like facade and beatnik-turned-hippy vibe, a remarkably convincing presence in either TV or big screen western landscapes and a cool breeze blowing through countless B-movies and off kilter projects. Children of the 70’s will never forget TV’s Kung Fu (1972-75), a kitsch classic (with the pow-pow, bang-bang, stone-soup near perfect mixed ingredients of action and an overriding theme of non-violence, ancient cultural mumbo-jumb, western codes, peyote-spurred comic book spirtulalism) starring Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine, a half-Chinese Shaolin monk wandering the old west dispensing justice, grasshopper wisdom, and in-yer-neck kicks. But pop culture mavens know him as the guy who starred in the short-lived television version of Shane in 1966, helped launch Marty Scorsese’s career by headlining the low budget drive-in flick Boxcar Bertha 1972), knocked it outta the park as Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby’s Bound For Glory (1976), roared across the midnight screens in Paul Bartel’s Death Race 2000 (1975), got picked by Ingmar Bergman to star in one of the filmmaker’s only English language efforts (1977’s The Serpent’s Egg--a box office bomb quickly discarded but probably worth rescreening), donned the western gear alongside his two brothers in Walter Hill’s often derided The Long Riders (1980), the director and soundtrack writer of the up-till-now obscure labor of love, Americana (1983), the comeback title figure of ultimate film hipster Quentin Tarantino’s two Kill Bill’s (2003 & 2004), and the man who turned in one of the ultimately coolest cameo’s evuhhh in my personal fave film of all-time, Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973).

Carradine also let an epic and continually dramatic life, drinking hard and ingesting psychedelics, engaging in bar fights and behaving badly on film sets, releasing Tai Chi self-help videos, a massive autobiographical tome (Endless Highway), marrying five times, serving two years in the army and appearing for 261 performances in The Royal Hunt of the Sun on Broadway in the mid-sixties.

Like his one-of-a-kind Daddy John (who managed 229 movie appearances), Carradine (with a paltry 145 movies under his own belt, plus countless small screen roles), the actor was a worker, an earner, a dust covered, no frills, earth-centered, blue collar, time-carding, unrequited character actor of the highest order, and a guy like his brothers-in-arms Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton, or Harvey Keitel managed to occasionally transcend his boots-on-the-ground stylings and showcase his highly personalized brand of American weirdness and through-the-bone wooliness inexplicably up above the title. Constantly working in movies good, bad, indifferent and just plain out there, Carradine brought a rare combo of mysticism, masculinity, and bubbling-just-under-the-surface venom to his steely-and-twinkling eyed version of Henry Fonda-gone-counter-culture role-playing, a left field icon and undeniable original, a cinematic runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb.