Do The Needle Drop

(One of New York's finest, albeit a cult band of sorts, The Del-Lords, will be playing in an unidentified backyard in South County this Saturday afternoon. For those interested, in what will be an undeniable rocking (and special) good time, contact Dan [rootshoot@cox.net].)


The Del-Lords
by Michael Tanaka

For a very long time-- decades, now that I think about it, I’ve been making a semi-annual pilgrimage to a used record shop just outside Hartford, in Weathersfield, Ct.

I go to Ed Krech’s “Integrity n’ Music” mostly for out-of-print and obscure jazz records. That’s his specialty. But over the years I’ve also discovered many hidden treasures tucked away in the bins of the rock section. Now I’m not talking uber-collector shit here—if you just went scrambling off for your copy of “Goldmine” and your rarities want-list, forget it. I’m talking about cool stuff you don’t see much anymore—mostly uncommon and forgotten LP’s that fell through the cracks in the 1980’s when vinyl began its slow death.

Example… a few years ago, while rifling the bins at Integrity, I happened upon the first three Replacements LP’s on Twin-Tone (Sorry, Ma…, Let It Be, and Hootenanny) as well as Tim and a couple of later titles on Sire. Each one was virtually unplayed and under three bucks each. Sure, I’ve got that stuff on cd—who doesn’t? But believe me when I tell you that vinyl really does sound warmer—it sounds better. And in addition, when you drop that needle and start to listen to an analog recording on vinyl, it has a certain magic way of really taking you back.

So a few weeks ago, I hit another major vein in the rock memory mine when I flipped through the bins and uncovered the first three records by the Del-Lords. Now the Del-Lords have come up in conversation many times in the past. My pal Scott Duhamel is a huge fan of both the Dictators and Del-Lords’ Scott Kempner and has long sung the praises of Joan Jett/Steve Earle guitarist Eric Ambel. But like most of you, I suspect, I hadn’t done a lot of in-depth listening to the Del-Lords in close to twenty-plus years. So scoring the first three LP’s by this critically acclaimed, yet relatively unsung band gave me the perfect opportunity to crack open a cold one, do the needle-drop, sit back and listen. And what a treat it was.

Of course, like a nerd, I played the records in order, so when I caught the opening track of the Del-Lords’ first album, Frontier Days, (1984), I was spun around when I heard their hard-rocking cover of “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?” Like a line-drive double off the first pitch, this song comes out of the box strong, with incredibly tight playing, great energy and a muscular sense of swing. And as I listened to the lyrics, I was reminded of how socially conscious Scott Kempner and the boys were—I mean “are.” The song they picked to kick-off their debut, a Ry Cooder cover of a 1929 depression-era folk song (some say it was the first “protest” song) is even more relevant today than it was when the Del-Lords blistered through the track during the reign of Reagan. The song has been done plenty of times before and since-- even Bruce Springsteen added the song to his Seeger Sessions tour and subsequent American Land Edition recording in 2006. I recommend you listen to all three versions— by Cooder, Bruce, and the Del-Lords—and I guarantee the one recorded by the Lords is the one that will make you sit up and take notice. And to make that song your very first album cut—that’s balls.

And there are more Del-Lords songs from Scott Kempner’s pen that tackle tough topics directly, and manage to escape being sappy or sentimental—songs about serious stuff that still rock. “Soldier’s Home,” from the second album, “Johnny Comes Marching Home” is a blatant anti-war statement wrapped in a catchy, hook-laden package, and later in the album, “Against My Will” is a first-person account of a hostage held by terrorists.

But the Del-Lords are far, far more than a rock band with a conscience. In fact, thinking of them in that way sort of does them a disservice. This is a band that just rocks, straight up. in a no-frills, no posturing manner, with great guitar playing totally devoid of typical 1980’s riff-histrionics. This band is, in many ways, less about what they are than about what they are not. Make a list of all the things that annoy you about 80’s rock (synthesizers, fake drums, over-production, over-compression, digital delay, big hair, spandex—you could go on and on), and it is amazing how much of that is not the Del-Lords sound.

You can’t deny the Del-Lords’ ability to rock it in those first three albums, and you can clearly hear the influences of rockabilly, folk, country and punk—all enhanced with clean, uncluttered guitar solos and smart, funny, often tongue-in-cheek lyrics (another hallmark of the earlier, under-appreciated Dictators). In the garage-band flavored, near surf-parody “I Play the Drums” from their first album, Kempner writes of typical rock angst and alienation with deadpan humor: “When I hate everyone / Instead of going for my gun / I play the drums.” And in “The Cool and the Crazy,” on their third record, the first-person song spews self-indulgent hip babble, delivered without a trace of irony: “We’re the outsiders / Watching the whole show. / It’s amazing how much it resembles TV / An L-7 world lost in mediocrity.”

All I can say is that’s beautiful, daddy-O!

But when it’s time to play it straight, honest and cut it close to the bone, Kempner makes it simple and direct. “Judas Kiss” is a great screed about betrayal, and “Pledge of Love” is a love song that, in anyone else’s hands, could dance close to the edge of the corn-field, but listen to the Lords bring it, and it’s pure rock n’ roll.
Those first three Del-Lords records I found were recorded and released in 1984, 1986 and 1988. A live EP and another studio records later, and they were essentially done by 1990. But you can listen to all these great songs again, re-released recently on cd, with lots of cool, additional info and liner notes written by Scott Kempner. And three of the four original members of the band-- Kempner and Eric Ambel on guitars, with Frank Funaro on drums are playing out live again. Last year they played a house concert locally, somewhere in Wakefield, RI, before taking off for a tour of Europe. They’re doing it again this year, and I plan to be there for the house concert show. That’s even better than listening to the LP’s.

There’s a line from The Cool and the Crazy that sums up the Del-Lords in my book— “We don’t follow fashion / Who needs it when you got style.”

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

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Growing Up in Public

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



Eyes Wide Open
By Scott Duhamel


Over a decade, the Harry Potter film series has achieved the unusual, particularly in the light of the vast majority of film franchises. The Potter series, handed off from director to director, peopled with seemingly nearly every other high spangled thespian that Britain has to offer, featuring child actors who’ve grown up in the public and imaginative eye, has somehow maintained an unrelenting quality and no discernable softening of its collective imagery, mythology, or storytelling arc. In short, it will stand out as a notably well-stitched and irrefutably resounding example of commercial cinema at its best, underlined by the long awaited release of the final chapter of the Potter fable, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, an eminently satisfying and actually soul-stirring denouement.

Superbly helmed by David Yates, and well scripted by Steven Kloves, the final installment of the Potter epic is as much a culmination of all things Harry as it is a vivid fulmination on morality and the inevitable end of childhood, with its bespectacled central figure eschewing the tenets of the heroes journey that Joseph Campbell delineated in his seminal The Hero with a Thousand Faces. More importantly, the Potter series, and particularly its final offering, did all this with sumptuous (and consciousness pervading) set pieces, a wonderful sense of scale, and an overall tone of expressiveness mixed with increasing emotion. Daniel Radcliffe, who glided from cherubic charm to enigmatic intensity, will certainly go down, no matter what his on screen future holds, as a formidable film icon, forever held on some exalted higher cinematic plain with the likes of Sean Connery’s James Bond, Clint Eastwood’s The Man with No Name, or Charlie Chaplin’s The Tramp. (Now that’s one weirdly absurd declaration—but one difficult to debate.)

While the Potter films certainly followed and fed from an obvious formula (as all film franchises do), their overall stature grows from the fact that movies, while quite easily seducing both children and adults and both J.K. Rowling readers and those who never picked up the books the films were based on, remained free of voguishness and easy contempo irony, they utilized snappy action and an array of CGI effects yet always kept character and plot as the central fulcrum, and they essentially painted a burnished narrative that was continually speckled with darkness and the intertwined accents of moral obligation and impending devastation of innocence. Yet, the movies twinkled with fabulist gewgaws and magical landscapes, and they fit together like an elaborate but addictive puzzle, always inching towards a collective emotional fission that I simply would never have guessed at upon viewing the first of the series in 2001.

As Potter directors have come and gone—Christopher Columbus, Mike Newell, Alfonso Cauron, David Yates—each with quite distinct styles and sensibilities, the acting troupe has remained steadfast, and anchored by the growing-up-in-public principles, Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Gint. In the crazy quilt of supporting roles many stood out—Gary Oldham, Helena Bonham Carter, Imelda Staunton, Michael Gambon, but none so much as Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort, the embodiment of mythological evil and, by large, a classic movie villain,, and Alan Rickman as Severus Snape, eschewing subtle expressiveness throughout the course of the eight movies.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 is purposefully somber, with a well-crafted grainy and drained color scheme, blips of fascistic ominousness, and the oh-so-familiar central setting of Hogwarts devoid of magic and wonderment and weighed down with sorrow and bleakness. It’s a hugely satisfying end to it all, richly textured and intimate, enriched and poignant. Every once in a while popular art can entertain and imbue, and virtuosity can become part of an integrated and well-conceived vision. It just doesn’t occur nearly often enough.

Be Kind Rewind

(My brother Mark and I grew up a year apart, and shared the same bedroom until we hit the big 18 and respectively hit the road. We were nurtured, educated, and exhilarated by much of the same popcult preoccupations and discoveries, and despite a fairly continual 37 year separation of geographical home bases we remain largely on the same page. He often sends me astute, pithy, extremely erudite movie-movie reactions after viewing some gem or cult classic during the twilight hours, and I’ve decided to post them on a semi-regular basis.)



Do the Noir Part 1
By Mark Duhamel

I thought I’d watch some Film Noir. That particularly cynical pre and post WWII genre of films often imitated and seldom equaled in it’s stark and sometimes unrelentingly bleak view of human nature in subsequent movie making eras. I am a big fan of the lighting, photography, and especially the sensibility of these mostly low budget, B&W films.


The synopses are courtesy of Netflix, which is also responsible for satisfying almost all movie whims. In order of viewing:


I started my foray onto the darkening past with a post-modern take on noir, 1975’s Night Moves, starring Gene Hackman and directed by Arthur Penn from an Alan Sharp script. My brother Scott cites the final scene featuring a seriously wounded Hackman in a small motorboat circling endlessly in a large expanse of ocean as the ultimate cinematic expression of uncertainty and futility. Or something like that.
It put me in the mood to dig deeper underground.








The Naked City (1948)
95 mins

When a model is found drowned in her bathtub, homicide detectives Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) and Jimmy Halloran (Don Taylor) are on the case. Their investigation, the inner workings of the police department and some of the "eight million stories in the Naked City" are explored. Filmed on location in New York City, this classic thriller won Oscars for cinematography and editing and was nominated for a Best Writing Oscar.
Cast:Barry Fitzgerald, Howard Duff, Dorothy Hart, Don Taylor, Frank Conroy, Ted de Corsia, House Jameson, Anne Sargent, Adelaide Klein, Tom Pedi
Director:Jules Dassin

My take: Difficult viewing. Takes real perseverance and commitment to the cause. It is an important film in it’s pioneering use of NYC location shooting and pseudo-documentary style, but in the end; pedestrian.

This Gun For Hire (1942)
81 mins

Phillip Raven (Alan Ladd) is an assassin whose latest murder assignment is paid for with counterfeit money by turncoat Willard Gates. Ellen Graham (Veronica Lake), an entertainer and the girlfriend of the police lieutenant who's trying to bring Raven down, is recruited by the government to probe Gates's illegal activities. When Raven happens to meet Ellen on a train, they use their relationship to get what they want -- and exact revenge.
Cast:Veronica Lake, Robert Preston, Laird Cregar, Alan Ladd, Tully Marshall, Marc Lawrence, Olin Howlin
Director:Frank Tuttle

The opening scene: Alan Ladd (billed as “Introducing Alan Ladd” after a ten year stint of un-credited, bit, and even student film parts) wakes up in a cheap hotel room and glances at his watch; 2:00 PM. He opens a note detailing that someone will be somewhere between 3:00 – 4:00 PM. Then, he checks his gun, an automatic, probably a 45. He gets up to leave but stops when a stray cat scratches at his window. He lets the cat in, gently handling it and opens a can of milk and pours it into a bowl, spilling some on his hand. He leaves the cat and goes to the washroom and just then the cleaning woman enters the room, sees the cat and viciously shoos it away. Alan Ladd returns and seeing the cat cruelty grabs the woman by the shoulder. She turns suddenly and her dress rips. “Get your hands off me you creep! You owe me a dress!” Ladd slaps her back and forth as only happens in films of this era, and orders her out. Next, Ladd enters a cheap apartment house, passing by a very young girl sitting on the steps, complete with polio leg braces, she smiles sweetly and greets him as he ascends the stairs. He summarily executes a man and a woman in an apartment and as he exits, once again encounters the girl who says demurely, “Mister, I dropped my ball.” Ladd sweetly obliges and recovers her ball. This is all within the first 6 minutes or so of film time. Laird Cregar is wonderfully creepy and cowardly, Robert Preston is not particularly memorable and of course Veronica Lake is radiant, smart, sassy and cast in an incredibly unbelievable fiction involving a US Senator, a night club owner, and a national security breach involving a decrepit chemical plant capitalist selling out the USofA. But who cares, she and Ladd pull it off and show that they are both world-class movie stars. It’s not about “acting” for either one, just about presence and shiny charisma.


I Wake Up Screaming (1941)
82 minutes
In this film noir classic, when model and aspiring actress Vicky Lynn (Carole Landis) turns up dead, the evidence points to her manager, Frankie Christopher (Victor Mature), who was recently dumped by his star client. Dogged by a tenacious detective (Laird Cregar), Frankie finds the noose tightening, but Vicky's distrustful sister (Betty Grable) -- whose relationship with Frankie is chilly -- may have information that will clear him.
Cast:Morris Ankrum, Carole Landis, May Beatty, Allyn Joslyn, Chick Chandler, Betty Grable, Victor Mature, Alan Mowbray, Elisha Cook, William Gargan, Laird Cregar
Director:H. Bruce Humberstone

Wow. I’ll say it again, Wow. This is what it’s all about. Substantial performances all around. Victor Mature shines, Laird Cregar is at his creepy, foreboding best, Carole Landis plays a 1940’s version of Paris Hilton to the tee, Betty Grable is believable and satisfying as the good, sensible sister and the lighting is incredibly textured and layered, casting shimmering shadows snaking around evocative light pools. This one represents the darkly illuminated best noir has to offer. Where the title comes from remains an impenetrable mystery.


The Big Clock (1948)
96 minutes
In director John Farrow's noir thriller, crime magazine publisher Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton) tries to pin the murder of his own mistress on the magazine's editor, George Stroud (Ray Milland), after he discovers George coming out of the woman's apartment. Things fall into place as all the signs increasingly point to George as the killer, making it that much easier for Earl to set up the editor to take the fall.
Cast:Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Sullivan, George Macready, Rita Johnson, Elsa Lanchester
Director:John Farrow

I remember this one from years ago, perhaps during film school. I’m almost sure I read about this in Manny Farber’s Farber on Film back in high school. I had seen it before many, many years ago. It is a good example of the noir moral dilemma; a basically good guy who does something not terribly but kinda wrong and from there his whole world slides towards utter disaster and disintegration. In this case, he has a drink with a beautiful woman who is not his wife and stands up to his boss who not so coincidently has a relationship with said beautiful woman. He ends up framed for something he didn’t do but they don’t know it's him. A nice snaky plot-boiler with some twists and admirable turns by Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Sullivan, a spicy Rita Johnson and a very likably earnest Ray Milland.


Appointment with Danger (1951)
90 minutes
This hardboiled crime story stars stoic noir staple Alan Ladd as Al Goddard, a special investigator sent to Gary, Ind., to solve a postal detective's murder and track down the sole witness to the act: shy young nun Sister Augustine (Phyllis Calvert). With her reluctant aid, Goddard learns the identity of the culprits and soon uncovers their gang's plot to pull off a million-dollar mail heist. Jan Sterling is a standout as gun moll Dodie La Verne.
Cast:Alan Ladd, Phyllis Calvert, Paul Steward, Jan Sterling, Jack Webb, Stacy Harris, Harry Morgan, David Wolfe, Dan Riss, Geraldine Wall, George J. Lewis
Director:Lewis Allen


A little strange noirish but squeaky clean copper caper except the cops are actually post office (??) cops, and there’s a nun, and yes, that’s right; Jack Webb and Harry Morgan as bad guy buddies. Alan Ladd goes “undercover” somehow convincing the bad guys he’s a bad guy. I didn’t buy it, but they did. And there’s a nun. Great title huh, they don't make ‘em like they used to.



Union Station (1950)
80 minutes
The same year they appeared together in Sunset Boulevard, William Holden and Nancy Olson co-starred in this classic film noir about a frightened passenger (Olson) who reports two suspicious men aboard a train bound for Chicago's Union Station. When the terminal's police squad learns that the men are armed and involved in a kidnapping scheme, the officer in charge (Holden) enlists the help of a veteran police inspector (Barry Fitzgerald).
Cast:William Holden, Nancy Olson, Barry Fitzgerald, Lyle Bettger, Jan Sterling, Allene Roberts, Herbert Heyes, Landon Dunning
Director:Rudolph Maté


This time it’s a copper caper with train station cops, with William Holden at his cynical, wisecracking, shoot me in the arm I don’t care best. It’s hard to beat William Holden for the noir leading man, no one comes close to his slacker, I don’t care but I really do nonchalance. Except for Robert Mitchum who transcends I don’t care with I don’t fucking care and I think I’m gonna hit you in the face soon.
This one is a kidnap caper. The victim is a sweet, blind, apparently rich girl. It succeeds because the “psychotic” kidnapper is actually pretty clever and stays a step ahead for most of the film. He is of course finally brought to justice by the combined efforts of the implacable William Holden and the plucky and courageous best friend portrayed by Nancy Olson. Barry Fitzgerald is in top form as always. The photography is nothing special, but the Union Station scenes are well staged.

The Word According to Festus

Reprinted from PopKrazy




With the recent passing of that sublime and absolutely natural Westerner James Arness, who will live in perpetuity as the forever able and Zen-master-with-a -six-gun Matt Dillon in endless reels of Gunsmoke episodes ( all truly worth seeing), I thought of one of Matt’s few kindred spirits, Festus, played quite iconically by Ken Curtis.

In the Kitty-Doc-Festus triangle that serves the great independent spirit of the perpetual flinty and eternally taciturn Dillon, Doc (Milburn Stone) functioned as Matt’s most intellectual companion, an equal to ruefully discuss philosophy and occasionally plan strategy with, and of course, just like the Marshall, an ever astute judge of character.

Kitty (Amanda Blake), the red-haired proprietor of The Long Branch, the town’s saloon and elegant (and unsaid) whorehouse, was Matt’s only channel for overt emotion, passion, or sexuality, and she also exists as the foremost manifestation of burgeoning civilization, while she also coexisted as the triangle’s most emotive, hardened but still given to concrete measures of gentility, and—-as all bar owners are—-a quick interpreter of character.

Festus, who came to the show belatedly (after the show departures of Matt’s earlier two ids—Chester (Dennis Weaver)—-the rube that Matt once was, and Quint (Burt Reynolds)--the half-blood native American who was of true Indian heritage the way the symbiotic Matt could never be), was a pure hillbilly and part scoundrel and the embodiment of cornpone digression , yet Matt admired him for his uncompromising ways, his disregard for much of what counted as airs, his unwavering loyalty to those who did the right thing, his surprisingly cat-like ability to leap into action and mayhem, his sharpened gun battle tactics, his high lonesome love of the life’s simplicities, and deep-to-the-bone divining skills of sussing out potentially dangerous characters. Oh yeah, Festus had a helluva way with words, and somehow the Gunsmoke writing staff knew the only Ken Curtis could continually shoot that empty bottle off the fence post:



“ Let’s just cabbage on to them.”

“You’re nuthin’ but an ornery old scudder.”

“Just keep on blabberin’ alluva the time.”

“Righty thoughty of ya.”

“Mighty thoughty of ya.”

“I’ll be on you like ugly on an ape.”

“You better have a hollerin’ kinda of a voice, because he’s 45 miles away.”

“Just like two tumbleweeds, kinda bumpity-bumping across the prairie will directly hit a barbwire fence and just kinda hang up there till there ain’t nuthin left.”

“I’ll pay you back before you can say the rat ran over the roost with a piece of liver in his mouth.”

“What in the name of seventeen billygoats are you doing here?”

“You make me so damned mad I could smoke a pickle.”



“One thang about thinking, it aint like buttermilk…well, you can set it aside for a while and it won’t go bad.”

“It’s seems like some folks is born to lose, it’s the other’s that gotta work at it.”

Lights Off

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



Eyes Wide Open
By Scott Duhamel



Alright, someone stop the bleeding. Well, most comic book heroes don’t actually bleed, but the movies that they are featured in seem largely to be dead on arrival, big punchy exercises in warmed-over mythos accompanied by predictable palette’s of shiny unitards, recycled plot threads, formulaic rock ‘em sock ‘em good vs. evil battles, and warmed over CGI effects. The failures are too numerous to count, the mediocre efforts seem to be mounting, yet comic book movies still seem to be eking out a decent box office life. Green Lantern, the newest, is more middle-of-the road swill, and hopefully another nail in the potential coffin of this out-of-control modern movie genre. In this humble observer’s opinion the genre needs to bite the dust, as soon as possible, before it might become plausible again, or at least watchable.

The Green Lantern character belongs to DC Comics, and after first seeing light in the 40’s he’s been revived and reinvented a few times most notably in 1959, most recently in 2005. He’s one Hal Jordan, a hot shot fighter pilot who becomes the first human selected by the so-called Guardians to be handed an emerald ring powered by a lantern that will allow him to be a sort of intergalactic super cop, with (of course) a motto all his own “Let those who worship Evil’s might, beware my power-Green Lantern’s Light”. Hickory-dickory-dock, right?

Green Lantern is embodied by Ryan Reynolds, he of the sculptured torso and continually sardonic but hypnotizing toothy smile. As bad as the movie is, one can’t really blame Reynolds, who might have been on target casting if the final product had some balls or verve or even went whole hog into the campiness it only hints at. Reynolds’s charm only goes so far, and it can’t bring a pulse to a basically lifeless exercise. Mark Strong, Angela Basset, and Tim Robbins are also wasted in perfunctory parts, although Peter Sarsgaard manages to punch his mortal-into-alien baddie role up with a bit of that ol’ Christopher Walken styled hamminess. Blake Lively, an actress of no discernable talent, fits is seamlessly with the overall tone of substandard hokiness.

When I mentioned that my assignment for this month’s column was Green Lantern, one of my fellow cinephile’s questioned the validity of 650 words or so devoted to such blatantly unfulfilling movie handiwork, offering me his own piquant summation: “Perhaps you could do The Year of the Shitty, Perfunctory, Blatantly Made to Cash In On a Potential Franchise That No One Asked For Comic Book Movie.” In the immortal words of Stan Lee, nuff said.

The ultimate irony for me personally, is that I grew up during the true golden age of comics, the mid 60’s through the mid 70’s and my brother and I were avid collectors and fastidious readers. During that fruitful period one of the biggest complaints among the fanboys (who hadn’t been tagged with the label yet) was how Hollywood just didn’t get it—comics were ripe for natural big screen adaptations, with their visual panache, social undercurrents, and strength of characters. As a pre-teen and then teen I firmly believed this also--the cinematic possibilities for comic book translations were virtually endless, a bold new cinematic form was possible if only the right filmmaker took hold. Alas, outside of the occasional Tim Burton, Richard Donner, Christopher Nolan, Jon Farveau, or Bryan Singer, the well has run dry. What’s next on the comic-into-movie to do list? As one of my long time heroes, Lou Reed once sang, “And me, I just don’t care at all.”

The Westerner

Reprinted from PoP--An Emporium of Popular Culture



Pop Eye
By Scott Duhamel

The slow and steady tracking-shot-into- close-up at the opening credits of the early Gunsmoke years is more than iconic, it is emblematic and will ever be a lasting (and essential) western image in American pop culture. While directly quoting the tracking-shot-into-close-up that steers all Western aficionados dusty souls, that justifiably empyrean big screen vision of John Wayne twirling his shotgun in 1939's Stagecoach, it offers itself up as a brand new (NW) defining image of The Westerner. When Ford spotlighted Wayne, that shot resonates as both the moment that that grand auteur would realize that Wayne was the right figure to represent his western balladry. Gunsmoke’s echoing shot, pulls up to a handsome and sturdy but slightly weathered James Arness (pointed to by Wayne himself after he turned down the potential spotlight dousing offer of a TV series), essentially conveying the simple fact that then iconoclastic, rosy-cheeked, cocksure adventurer of Wayne’s Stagecoach has been replaced by Arness’ Matt Dillon, a man with one foot gradually settling into the winds of oncoming civilization and one foot still planted firmly in the wooly freedoms of expansionism, yet still the lone American adventurer, a sharper, more expedient voice of law and order and right and wrong , an erudite arbitrator of frontier justice, a man who has killed, can kill, will kill, but prefers not to. The Gunsmoke close-up finally focuses on Dillon/Arness’ eyes, and they are the eyes of a nation progressing and receding, from a landscape of little rules but highly defined codes, one populated by individual valor and courage yet poisoned by wantonness and cruelty, with the ever sturdy Westerner forced to question the vagaries of right and wrong in a rapidly changing landscape.

True confession: Growing up I somehow missed the brilliance of Gunsmoke (1955-1975), the smartest, sublimely collective atmospheric (and obviously longest-running) western tale maybe ever told. Certainly individual western s movies had more impact and it’s unarguable that decidedly more overtly artistic westerns were made for the big screen yet Gunsmokes’s lasting impact, and it’s astoundingly continual high level of creativity are something to behold. I missed out on Gunsmoke, as a budding revolutionary and wanna- be hippy, because I knew there was an Arness-Wayne connection and I assumed it to be an onerous political one, and John Wayne was just somehow unacceptable in the turbulent late 60’s and early 70’s.

Years later I would read about Marty Scorsese screening The Searchers to his NYU film class, but prefacing the screening with an impromptu show of firing six shooters just so that his rabidly anti-Wayne film students would settle down for that sublime John Ford film. I missed the weekly imprimatur the Gunsmoke was searing into the collective consciousness, and have had the pleasure of rediscovering the lengthy series with continued viewings in the last few years. Although the show presented itself as hugely traditional, it was, in turns, ribald, self-conscious, cornpone, stark, moving, comical, and outstandingly consistent. Outlaws swung brazenly into town, showgirls had hearts of stone and of gold, the cowpokes were filled with grandeur, whiskey, goldust dreams, American immigrant exuberance, and more than often, just plain broken down.

With the Zen-like Dillon (who, of course, spent time with the Indians and treated with respect from the initial show) often presiding as an onlooker or mere sideman (until there was a call for action) , Gunsmoke’s Dodge City was inhabited by the cagey , flinty and determinedly philosophical Doc (Milburn Stone), the perpetual rube Chester (Dennis Weaver), the occasionally becalmed but raging bull Quint( Burt Reynolds), the red-headed highly astute business women and unabashed mistress Kitty (Amanda Blake), and the quintessential sidekick Festus (Ken Curtis), he of the cracker barrel sentiment, hillbilly rambunctiousness but the wondrous naturalness of a man at peace with his environment (like Dillon), plus a baker’s dozen of regulars from the town drunk to the officious main street businessman, never mind the uncountable appearances of every sort of actor (up-and-coming, down-and-out, character greats, stars that were and stars to be) Hollywood had to offer.

Arness’ Dillon is a stately but full blooded representation of the American Westerner and his whittled down performance, filled with pauses, squints, grunts, asides, and one sentence summations formed an amazingly well-rounded figure, highlighting a performance of depth and maturity. He embodies the transition from the traditional western to the post-western, while the modern world hasn’t fully cast a shadow on his travails, he, the great seer, knows that it is coming, and that his destiny is to help strangle the primitive world the created him and that he has so long embraced. I’ll say it straight up---James Arness' Matt Dillon is a truly tragic hero and one of the most essential starring roles in TV history. RIP James Arness 1923-2011.