Film Review: Rat Fink (1965)

The title of this film does it no favours. The first thing some people will think of are the customized hot rods that go by that name. Everyone else will probably go...huh? It's also known by the title My Soul Runs Naked, which sounds like a volume of Beat poetry, but at least it's more apropos to the plot of the film. What we actually have here is a noir study of a pop star's rise and fall, done with b-movie brutality and urgency. 

The rat fink in question is Lonnie Price, a handsome, but psychopathic, young drifter who becomes an overnight sensation as a singer. We meet him as he hops off a freight train in Los Angeles and escapes from some railway cops, but loses the guitar he was carrying. He finds shelter with a lonely older woman, sleeps with her, and then takes off the next morning after emptying her purse. Lonnie wanders around and comes across a concert venue where a hot new star named Tommy Loomis is playing. Lonnie watches Tommy perform and is instantly jealous and envious at the sight of female fans swooning over him. Later that night, Tommy leaves the concert and suffers a fiery "accident" engineered by Lonnie. A few days later, Lonnie shows up at Tommy's manager's office and wows him with an audition. In no time flat Lonnie is living the decadent pop star lifestyle of the early '60s: whiskey! surfer dude entourage! Thunderbird convertible! His descent is just as swift, marked by boozing, statutory rape, rape, a murder, and ending with a fatal collision. 

The writer/director is James Landis, who also did The Sadist (my review here) two years before, a brilliant micro-budget thriller that's as cold-blooded as they come. Landis brings the same bleakness and nastiness to Rat Fink.  Lonnie is a psychopath before he becomes a star, due to, the film argues, a stern and unloving father who has no regard for his son even after he becomes a success. This dose of pop psychology isn't used to soften our view of Lonnie. He's a thorough bastard, and the film is unflinching (for its time) when it comes to handling scenes of sexual abuse and abortion. If the film has a point of view, it's that stardom doesn't turn people into monsters, stardom attracts monsters. Like many b-movies Rat Fink has a plot that's a bit too jerky, acting that's this close to being professional, and some regrettable dialogue, but it's dark, vicious tone is shockingly at odds with the way pop stars were presented at the time. It wasn't until That'll Be the Day and it's sequel Stardust came along in 1973/74 that there was a similarly grim take on pop stars. Another exceptional element in Rat Fink is the cinematography, courtesy of Vilmos Zsigmond who also shot The Sadist. B-movies aren't supposed to look this good, and the film owes much of its success to his artistry.

Film Review: The Long Goodbye (1973)

One of the notable aspects of American films of the 1970s is that many of the male stars who emerged in that decade looked like the average man in the street. Actors such as Dustin Hoffman, Donald Sutherland, Al Pacino, and Gene Hackman would have been character actors, at best, in the '40s and 50s, but in the '70s they were major stars. None of them were conventionally handsome, some could even be called homely, but they could all act the pants off most of their more handsome contemporaries.

And then we have Elliot Gould. He leaped from character actor to star with back-to-back roles in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) and MASH (1970). Both films were controversial and very plugged in to the zeitgeist. Those two roles gave Gould enough career momentum to carry him through most of the '70s as a bona fide leading man. But unlike Hoffman and the others, all of whom continued as leading men into the '80s and even the '90s, Gould's career in the big leagues was fading out by 1978 when he starred in Matilda, the one and, hopefully, only film about a boxing kangaroo. The Long Goodbye is a reminder of why Gould's career as a leading man had such a short trajectory: he wasn't a very good actor.

The Long Goodbye is based on a Raymond Chandler novel, with Gould playing iconic  P.I. Philip Marlowe in contemporary Los Angeles. The plot doesn't matter a whit because Chandler's stories are primarily about character, atmosphere, attitude, and the city of Los Angeles, which also, in a sense, fills the role of Marlowe's sidekick and sparring partner. Director Robert Altman is attuned to the special flavour of Chandler's work, especially the louche charm of crime in the sunny, palm tree-shaded environs of California's upper classes. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond puts that louche quality up on the screen in spades, and it's reasonable to say that he's the real star of the film. The supporting actors, Sterling Hayden, Nina van Pallandt and Mark Rydell are all excellent, and in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment you can spot Arnold Schwarzenegger as an anonymous heavy.

It's Gould who torpedoes this film. He mumbles dialogue that sounds as though it was ad-libbed, and all of it is horrible. What Gould and Altman were up to isn't clear, but I'd guess they were trying to create a Marlowe who has one foot in the whiskey and water '40s and another in the weed and transcendental meditation '70s. It's a disaster. Marlowe's incessant chatter isn't amusing or clever, and Gould's acting is, tonally speaking, in another galaxy from what his fellow actors are doing. The scenes between Gould and Hayden are torture to watch because the latter is actually acting while the former is riffing on some cross between Popeye at his most garrulous and a stoner. A much, much better actor might have been able to do something with this role, but Gould makes a bad situation much, much worse.

Gould was one those average-looking guys who became a star in the '70s, but his natural pay grade was as a supporting actor. He was best at playing shrewd, urban, fast-talking hustlers, but only in small doses. His other films from that decade are mostly forgettable or forgotten, as are his performances in them. California Split (1974) and Busting (1974) are the exceptions to this rule, but in each case Gould is sharing the acting load with a co-star. Bits and pieces of The Long Goodbye are excellent, but the stumbling, nattering self-indulgence of Gould's performance turns the film into, at most, a curiosity rather than something worth seeking out.