Vintage Newspaper Ad: Southern Comfort (1981, Walter Hill)

I dig that Cinema Group logo, seen in the lower left corner of the ad, and reminiscent of the Filmways logo from the same year.

In honor of Mr. Hill's latest theatrical feature, Bullet to the Head, and the recent Blu-ray of Southern Comfort, courtesy of Second Sight.  I had the pleasure of seeing a 35mm print of the film earlier this week accompanied by a post-screening discussion and q & a with the director.

Watching this film for the first time in years the other day, I found myself thinking of my late father and how he would have enjoyed this film, its ambiance, its directness, and the perfectly attuned score by Ry Cooder.  Then I realized that I probably had watched the film, or at least part of it, in the company of Dad, via this laserdisc, which I no longer have, but which got a lot of play in my teen years. 

The screening also reminded me how much I like Powers Boothe in this film and pretty much whenever I see him on film or television.  Considering his talents and screen presence, the man did not get enough feature film (sole) lead opportunities in his prime, aside from Boorman's The Emerald Forest, a film I have strong memories of seeing tv spots and prints ads for, but which I never actually watched.  This rekindled admiration for the actor brought me back to my dad, as I suddenly had a memory of him saying something like, "I like that Powers Boothe.  Good actor."  Which brought to me to an even earlier memory (circa 1983) of watching Boothe as Philip Marlowe, with my dad, on the (first) HBO original drama Philip Marlowe, Private Eye.  As I've written here before, anyone who's lost a loved one probably has one or two things they'd like to do with, or say to, that person more than anything else.  The cinephile in me just wants to sit down and watch a "Dad movie"--Southern Comfort will do--with Dad.

The Real Fun City - '69

My aunt and uncle recently located some old 8mm home movies and had them transferred to video.  In that cache was a reel apparently shot by my late father in John Lindsay's New York, or "Fun City," as it would come to be known thanks to a much-ridiculed Lindsay soundbite, sometime in mid to late 1969.  Dad would have been 21 then.  Theater displays for Easy Rider (released in July '69) and Popi (May '69) and a news ticker reporting on "Kennedy's auto accident" give us a pretty concrete idea of when this was photographed (likely July).  I can't tell exactly where all this was shot, but there are some distinct Harlem locations such as the Apollo (James Brown!) and a block of apartments that reminds me of similar shots in Ashby's The Landlord (a film shot primarily in Park Slope, Brooklyn).

There's a humorous streak that I can detect in this reel, which jibes with my dad's personality, as I remember him.  And, I sense an appreciation of day-to-day life and interesting faces that I think was passed down to my brother and me, manifested in our shared passion for the photographic arts and the impulse to document things through those mediums.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this film is the way the camera captures the faces of the people--many times the subjects engage with the camera, whether to smile or duck away (as in the case of a Hasidic man).  In other words, it's as if the act of filming and being filmed is a pretty big deal, even to hardened, seen-it-all New Yorkers.  It may be that people weren't so accustomed to being filmed or taped, as video cameras were years away and I'm guessing even 8mm cameras were not so commonplace.  I'm assuming the cost of shooting even on Super 8 would have been fairly costly due to the expense of blank film and then the processing and development of the film.  In any event, my dad managed to pack quite a bit into his 6+ minutes seen here.  A few seconds were lost, unfortunately, to some ugly video noise that occurred during the film-to-video transfer.

Harry Boy Was Here

"Hey, see if they have Julie Christie and Robert Blake in there."  That was my father Harry's first question when I showed him my new copy of Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia.  The book, which has not been updated since its initial late 1995 publishing, did have entries for both actors. Dad excitedly told me about two of his favorite films when he was a young man, Tell Them Willie Boy is Here and Electra Glide in Blue both starring the diminutive Blake, who, Dad also told me, had made quite a career as a guest on Johnny's Carson's couch in the '70s.  I don't remember what he said about Christie, but her appeal, is obvious, I think.  I was intrigued, as my father and I had rarely bonded over anything other than sports, but I was 17 and didn't fully appreciate the fact that my dad was reaching out to me.  

In less than a year he became sick with non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and we lost him in December of '96.  He would have been 61 this past Friday.  In my teenage years, we clashed quite a bit as I saw him as gruff and uncommunicative.  He was a home builder and I could see his working class qualities, but it wasn't until after he died that I was able to recognize the deep-seated love of film and music he had developed as a young man of the '60s and '70s.  He had been a great admirer of the European directors who came of age following the New Wave, particularly Bernardo Bertolucci. Long after he'd cut his shoulder-length hair, he took my mom to the arthouse theater, whether in Montclair or at the Paris in the city, to see each new Bertolucci film.  Stealing Beauty was the last one he saw.  He would regularly read the Arts and Leisure section on Sundays and tell me about emerging filmmakers that he'd learned about.  I remember him talking about Robert Rodriguez one time when El Mariachi was being released. Going through his extensive collection of mostly Latin and avant garde jazz LPs, I was curious about Mikis Theodorakis' soundtrack to Z and Giorgio Moroder's American Gigolo. He told me about The Conformist and The Spider's Stratagem.  Unfortunately, these moments never led to a sustained dialogue between us.

It was only after he passed away that I sought out all the films and filmmakers that I knew he liked and, later, others that I thought might be "Dad movies."  It became my way of memorializing him in a most personal way.  When I finally saw Tell Them Willie Boy is Here, I was struck by Dad's resemblance to star Robert Blake (pre-plastic surgery).  It was so uncanny that my aunt was prompted to nickname Dad "Harry Boy."  When I was in college, I envied my friends who would go home for breaks and go out to the movies with their fathers and, to this day, it remains the one thing I wish I could do with my dad again.  Electra Glide in Blue, maybe, or Petulia...