Gigolo and Warriors Together Again, With a Special Thanks to Cinema Du Meep

As I've mentioned here before, Paramount did a nice little job of promoting one of their earlier properties, The Warriors, during a scene in Par's American Gigolo.  Other than the same studio, there isn't much they share, save for both having watershed synth-based scores that remain awesome 30+ years later.

Recently, over at his Facebook feed, where he manages to unearth one cool vintage newspaper ad or marquee picture after another, Cinema Du Meep posted a December 1980 ad featuring--you guessed it -Warriors and Gigolo on the same bill.  Curiously, Warriors, the earlier film by a year, appears as the first feature.  

This was actually a traveling double-bill put together by Paramount and which opened simultaneously at several local theaters, as you can see in the below New York listing.

In this old thread on the Warriors website, posters mention that the "VGV" ("Varrio Grande Vista") graffiti on the Warriors sign above is the tag of a gang portrayed in the LA-set 1979 gang feature Boulevard Nights, which you can see here.  So, it appears there was a little East Coast / West Coast rivalry which pre-dates Biggie and 2Pac.

Films Within Films: The Hunting Party in The Honkers

Rodeo man Lew Lathrop (James Coburn) passes a marquee advertising The Hunting Party, produced by Arthur Gardner, Jules V. Levy, and Arnold Laven, in The Honkers, also produced by Gardner, Levy, and Laven (is that a law office or a producing team?)

Honkers director and co-write Steve Ihnat, best known as a '60s character actor in things like Siegel's Madigan where he played the unhinged villain, died tragically in Cannes of a heart attack while promoting one of his films, just days before the theatrical premiere of The Honkers.  As for the film, it is another in a long line of--mostly forgotten--'70s character studies of flawed or bad men who often exist, work, and play in milieus that hold onto increasingly outdated modes of masculinity.  Honkers meanders and repeats itself a little too much for my liking, but concludes in a very satisfyingly (and era-appropriate) downbeat manner.  It has some really good, but not falsely sentimental, scenes between Coburn and onscreen son Ted Eccles, along with a lot of interesting local--Carlsbad, NM--color, the exploits of real-life rodeo king Larry Mahan, the welcome presence of Slim Pickens doing what he usually does, and an extremely young, pre-Scientologist Anne Archer as an oil scion who dresses like an Indian princess and drives a Ferrari.

Both Honkers and The Hunting Party feature prolific '70s character player Mitchell Ryan, familiar mostly from Westerns and disguised Westerns such as Monte Walsh, Electra Glide in Blue, and High Plains Drifter, and other superior fare such as The Friends of Eddie Coyle.  Another of those good faces we often struggle to match with a name.

Films Within Films...or, Jurgensen x2

In the 1977 telefilm Contract on Cherry Street, cop Michael Nouri awaits c.i. Steve Inwood at the Queensboro Plaza subway station.  Note the tattered subway poster for William Friedkin's Sorcerer, also released in '77, to the right of Nouri. 

Yes, it's yet another example of this most exciting kind of synergy, this time Friedkin's Sorcerer turns up, in a way, in "dirty old New York" cop telefilm Contract on Cherry Street.  Interestingly, NYPD detective turned actor / consultant / producer Randy Jurgensen appears in both Contract on Cherry Street and Sorcerer.  Jurgensen broke into the movie game as a consultant on The French Connection...he was one of the cops who broke the case, along with Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso.

He also appeared on screen, for the first time, in French Connection in a humorous role as the sergeant in the police garage.  In that film, Gene Hackman would win an Academy Award for playing Egan surrogate Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle.  Two years later, Robert Duvall would essay another Egan-inspired character, Eddie Ryan, in Badge 373.  Logically, Jurgensen appears in the latter film, as well, as a cop alongside Duvall, in the finale at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Jurgensen's connection with Sorcerer and French Connection star Roy Scheider would carry over to The Seven-Ups and Still of the Night.  With Friedkin, he would collaborate on French Connection, Sorcerer, The Brink's Job, and Cruising.  Jurgensen's undercover work in the '60s in the gay community of Greenwich Village, and the cases related to those assignments, directly inspired the narrative of Cruising.

Essentially, if you've seen a New York City-set, '70s policier or two, you've almost certainly seen some of Jurgensen's work, whether it be in front of or behind the camera.

Sorcerer remains at the center of a lawsuit put forth by Friedkin, charging the two studios who financed the picture, Universal and Paramount, with withholding profits owed to him and mismanaging the distribution and stewardship of the film...in short: both studios plead ignorance as to who controls Sorcerer, which has kept it out of circulation on home video and the repertory circuit as of late.  Friedkin tweets that an end is in sight to the litigation.

Jurgensen plays movie trivia games with his partners, which include Frank Sinatra, over the airwaves in Contract on Cherry Street.

Jurgensen counsels Roy Scheider in Sorcerer.  Note the very pronounced collar Jurgensen sports in each screen shot.

More Cult Films Within Films

Roy Scheider drags on a cigarette as he brings a slice of pizza to a freezing Gene Hackman in The French Connection.  The corner behind him (or is it a kiosk of sorts?) is plastered with Gimme Shelter flyers.  Interestingly, Gimme Shelter was distributed by Fox in the U.K., which also distributed French Connection.  U.K. lobby card, pictured above, has Fox copyright, if you look closely.

When Cult Films Appear Within Cult Films

When a film scene plays out in front of a movie theater or in pre-Giuliani Times Square, I'm probably not the only cinephile who squints at the television set in order to read the marquee(s) or determine the one-sheet in the display. Of course, I really love it when the film within a film is a particular favorite of mine and /or a cult film.

Here are a couple of examples of "cult films within cult films," which I also happened to catch on 35mm within the last half year or so. Both examples hark back to a time when neighborhood theaters that played one film at a time were commonplace and the exterior and lobby were transformed into visual paeans to that film.

Darker Than Amber in Dusty and Sweets McGee:

The poster to the left of the ticket booth is different from the final one-sheet and resembles the key art in the British quad. The tagline reads, "If Travis McGee puts his life on the line, it's not going to be for free." Incidentally, we can also see a poster for what appears to be a stage production of Hair, just to the right of the man in brown leather.

British Quad (paired with Figures in a Landscape):

U.S. one-sheet:

Italian locandina:

The Warriors in American Gigolo

Most of the time, I'm sure the film advertising that appears within other films comes down to chance, but in the case of The Warriors and American Gigolo, the Warriors advertising prominently appears throughout the scene; my thought is that it's not a coincidence that The Warriors, and not The Wanderers, for example, is the film in the background given that both were produced and released by Paramount. To think I had the opportunity to ask Paul Schrader such an important question at a recent screening of Gigolo...and didn't do it.