MGM MOD DVD of the Week: Park Row / Laws of Gravity

Along with The Big Red One (1980), Park Row (1952) may be Sam Fuller’s most autobiographical film. It was a labor of love for the scrappy director who made it as a tribute to the journalists he knew as a newsboy in the 1920’s. By the time he was 17, Fuller became a crime reporter in New York City working for the New York Evening Graphic. He attempted to get Park Row made at 20th Century Fox but when studio head Darryl Zanuck wanted to turn it into a musical, Fuller refused and started his own production company, which allowed him to make it without any creative compromises.


Dedicated to American journalism, Park Row takes us back to the early days of newspapers and depicts the bitter rivalry between Charity Hackett (Mary Welch), owner of The Star, and one of her employees Phinneas Mitchell (Gene Evans). He resents her tactics, which include condemning the wrong man to death. As he says at one point, “The day The Star reports the facts Judas Escariot will be sainted.” He dreams of running his own newspaper, free of political influence and that would answer to no one. As luck would have it, a wealthy businessman offers to bankroll Mitchell’s dream.

Mitchell is ambitious and quickly assembles a staff that is equally hungry, chief among them veteran reporter Josiah Davenport (Herbert Heyes) who gets to deliver one of Fuller’s trademark impassioned speeches about journalism: “But a fighting editor is a voice the world needs. A man with ideals.” Mitchell’s The Globe gets off to a strong start with its attention-grabbing headlines which doesn’t sit well with Hackett over at The Star.

Frequent collaborator Gene Evans breaths life into Fuller’s pulpy prose and with an omnipresent cigar and no-nonsense attitude, he is the director’s cinematic alter ego, a blue collar Charles Foster Kane. Evans plays Mitchell as a passionate man, a two-fisted defender of the truth and freedom of speech.

Fuller does an excellent job recreated period details on an extremely low budget right down to the tools of the trade, the clothes that people wore and how they spoke. Park Row takes an authentic look at how newspapers were run in the 1880’s, from copyboys to the editor-in-chief. He shows how an issue of a newspaper is put together in a way that hasn’t been done in many years making this film a valuable historical document. In many respects, Fuller’s film is Citizen Kane (1941) on a much lower budget and scale with Evans playing a Kane-esque newspaperman that influences and sometimes creates the news his paper reports on in typical tabloid journalism fashion. However, where Orson Welles’ film attacked the worst aspects of tabloid journalism, Fuller also celebrates its best aspects – call him a cynical idealist. He spends more time showing the actual process of putting together a newspaper and the hard work involved as well as the cutthroat competition that arises among rival papers.

 

Nick Gomez’s Laws of Gravity (1992) was part of an exciting crop of American independent films to come out in the early to mid-1990’s and arguably the best of the Mean Streets (1973) wannabes to be made. It also featured a cast of young, up and coming actors that would go on to solid careers in film and television. Peter Greene and Edie Falco are probably the two most well-known to come out of this film but Adam Trese (Law & Order: Criminal Intent) and Paul Schulze (The Sopranos) also have prolific careers as regular character actors on T.V.


Set on the gritty streets of New York City, Laws of Gravity is about the relationship between two friends – Jimmy (Peter Greene) and Jon (Adam Trese), two small-time crooks that deal in stolen goods. Jimmy is the responsible one while Jon is the wild card always getting into trouble. When we meet them, Jon has skipped out on his court date for a shoplifting charge because he didn’t feel like showing up. Naturally, this doesn’t sit well with his girlfriend Celia (Arabella Field). Jimmy has problems of his own – he owes a sizable chunk of money to local tough guy Sal (Saul Stein) who’s breathing down his neck. As luck would have it, Jimmy and Jon’s friend Frankie (Paul Schulze) rolls back into town with a bunch of guns he wants to sell. Jon and Jimmy see this as an opportunity to make some fast, easy money but of course it doesn’t go as well as they planned. As Jon’s behavior gets increasingly erratic, Jimmy has to make a decision whether to stick by his friend and risk his future or cut him loose and focus on his own problems.

Gomez does a good job showing how a good-natured conversation can turn into a shouting match when Jon gets annoyed with Celia’s nagging criticisms. The dialogue and the way the scene is shot – cinema verite style – feels like we are intruding on an intimate conversation between real people. Gomez employs a restless hand-held camera, which replicates Jon’s anxious energy. He’s a schemer always looking to make some easy money and doesn’t care about who he pisses off.

Based on his solid work in Laws of Gravity, it’s amazing that Peter Greene isn’t a bigger star. He has had small but memorable parts in classic films like Pulp Fiction (1994) and The Usual Suspects (1995) but nothing as substantial as Laws of Gravity (although, there is his startling turn in the little seen Clean, Shaven). He has natural charisma and brings an authenticity to the role of Jimmy that is impressive to watch. This was also an early role for Edie Falco and she demonstrates considerable acting chops. It is easy to see why she has become such an accomplished actress.

Jimmy and Jon are constantly roaming the streets pulling petty crimes like shoplifting but to what end? They get into arguments that break into fights where nobody wins. These guys seem to have little aspirations and are content to live in the moment. Laws of Gravity is a fascinating slice of life look at people just trying to get by any way they can. It depicts the unstable relationship between two men and how it affects their friends and family. Gomez really captures how people from this social strata speak and act. His film is an under-appreciated gem waiting to be discovered and will hopefully find new life thanks to MGM’s MOD program.

 

DVD of the Week: Shock Corridor/The Naked Kiss: Criterion Collection

Samuel Fuller was one of the quintessential genre directors working in Hollywood during the 1950s as he brought his trademark two-fisted gusto to genres like the film noir (Pickup on South Street), the war film (The Steel Helmet), and the western (Forty Guns). In the early 1960s, he managed to independently finance two pulp masterpieces, Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964). On the surface, they are unabashed genre films but lurking underneath Fuller injected powerful commentaries on then-contemporary social issues. In the case of Shock Corridor, he used the premise of a reporter going undercover as a patient in a mental hospital to investigate a murder to comment on the issue of racism in America.


Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) is a reporter for the Daily Globe newspaper and who dreams of winning the Pulitzer Prize by committing himself to a mental hospital in order to solve a murder. His girlfriend stripper Cathy (Constance Towers) is worried that being surrounded by all kinds of crazy people will have a bad effect on him. As she tells him at one point, she’s “fed up playing Greek chorus to your rehearsed nightmare.” Cathy is the voice of reason to Johnny’s cocky hubris, telling him, “Don’t be Moses leading your lunatics to the Pulitzer Prize.” But of course, he doesn’t listen and is confident that he can pull this off while also getting his fame and fortune.

Once inside, Johnny meets a colorful collection of patients, like the man who thinks he’s an Italian opera singer, a man proud of being impotent, another one who believes he’s a general in the American Civil War, and, most intriguingly, an African-American who believes he’s a racist white man. Naturally, prolonged exposure to all of this madness begins to put the zap on Johnny as he gradually loses touch with reality. Fuller, the master of heightened melodrama, cranks it up another notch with this film as evident in the scenes where Cathy tries to get Johnny out of the hospital after six weeks, or when he finally snaps his cap, culminating in a show-stopping sequence that only Fuller could get away with.

At times, Shock Corridor resembles a horror film, like when Johnny wanders into a room full of female patients that swarm and attack him while he screams in terror. Fuller’s film is a fascinating look at what Barton Fink (1991) called, “the life of the mind,” and the thin line between sanity and madness.

As Robert Polito wisely observes in the DVD liner notes for the Criterion Collection edition of The Naked Kiss (1964), Samuel Fuller’s film fuses the melodrama of Douglas Sirk with the pulpy prose of Russ Meyer. The result is what Polito calls a “noirish fairy tale” as a former prostitute relocates to suburbia in an attempt to reinvent herself. However, all kinds of dirty secrets lurk underneath the town’s all-American surface.

The film opens in typical Fuller fashion as Kelly (Towers) beats her drunken pimp with her purse. The director cuts back and forth from both combatants’ point-of-view and then comes the punchline: the pimp reaches out and grabs Kelly’s hair and it’s a wig (?!) revealing her bald head! Welcome to The Naked Kiss. She beats him into submission only so she can take the money he owes her. If this ballsy prologue doesn’t grab you then nothing will.

Two years later, Kelly relocates to Grantville, a nice-enough looking town where local police detective Griff (Anthony Eisley) runs a punk out of town but at least has the decency to give the guy a couple of bucks before sending him packing on a bus. Kelly has reinvented herself as a saleslady for Angel Foam champagne, a beverage that “goes down like liquid gold and it comes up like slow dynamite.”

She and Griff meet at the bus terminal and hit it off immediately. After a one-night stand, he sends her packing – he has no illusions about who she is – but Kelly ignores him and goes to stay at a boarding house in town. She reinvents herself yet again by getting a job as a nurse’s aide in the children’s ward at the local hospital, much to Griff’s chagrin. Kelly soon finds her new way of life threatened by a terrible secret harbored by one of the townsfolk.

In Shock Corridor (1963), Constance Towers had a supporting role but with The Naked Kiss, Fuller cast her as the lead and she’s fantastic as a woman with a checkered past trying to start over. She demonstrates quite a good range as an actress, from the tough dame in the prologue, to the empathetic caregiver working with children at the hospital. Towers gets you to sympathize with Kelly and care about what happens to her. With The Naked Kiss, Fuller shows a slightly softer side but his film is still populated by tough-talking characters. It’s a pulp B-movie with a heart and anchored by a rock solid performance by Towers.

Special Features:

Included on the Shock Corridor DVD is the excellent documentary, The Typewriter, the Rife and the Movie Camera, about the life and career of Fuller with the likes of Tim Robbins, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, and Martin Scorsese talking about the man’s influence on them and others. Fuller is as gleefully hard-boiled as his films as he discusses his philosophy about life and cinema, which, not surprisingly, are the same.

There is an interview with actress Constance Towers done in 2007. She talks about how she met Fuller, her impressions of him and what it was like working on his films, most notably, Shock Corridor.

Finally, included is a theatrical trailer.

On The Naked Kiss DVD, there is an interview with Samuel Fuller from the French television program Cinema Cinemas in 1987. He looks over old photographs of himself and recounts colorful anecdotes about his life and working on various films.

“The South Bank Show: Sam Fuller” is a 30-minute interview from a British talk show from 1983. He is interviewed in his home in a room jam-packed with books and screenplays, many of which were never filmed.

There is an interview with actress Constance Towers done in 2007. She recounts her parents’ reaction to playing a prostitute in The Naked Kiss. She also talks about the film’s dynamic opening and how it was achieved. This is an excellent interview and she is an engaging subject.

Also included is an interview with Fuller for Cineastes de Notre Temps, a French T.V. show in 1967. There is some fantastic vintage footage of the man talking about his life and films.

Finally, included is a theatrical trailer.