Becoming Baltimorons

I don’t know what there is about Baltimore that makes it such a funky film mecca. But Baltimore spawned Barry Levinson, whose first film, Diner (1982), was an homage to his young adult years hanging out in the city of this birth. Levinson quickly moved on to bigger and better things, and won an Oscar for directing 1988’s Rain Man, primarily set against the bright lights of Las Vegas. But he returned to his Baltimore roots for 1987’s Tin Men, 1990’s Avalon, and 1999’s Liberty Heights, while also pursuing a major directorial career elsewhere.

  Levinson may have mostly traded his hometown for mainstream Hollywood, but John Waters never left. Each of his deliberately trashy movies (which include such titles as Pink Flamingos, Polyester, and Cecil B. Demented) is set in Baltimore, where he has assembled a loyal stock company of acolytes.

 I bring up all of this because I’ve just seen an amiable new indie called The Baltimorons, directed by Jay Duplass, and co-written by Duplass with Michael Strassner, who also plays the overstuffed but totally endearing lead. Strassner, a Baltimore native, portrays to perfection a sadsack comedian and improv actor who—having finally achieved sobriety—is trying hard to turn his life around. It all happens on Christmas Eve in Baltimore. When Strassner’s Cliff breaks a tooth and needs an emergency dental appointment, he has no idea that he and the one dentist who’ll meet his needs will soon be off on an odyssey through Baltimore that becomes—surprise!—downright romantic.

 The Baltimore we encounter in John Waters films and on TV’s The Wire leans heavily toward the down-and-dirty side of the Charm City. Think tacky trailer parks, and worse. But in The Baltimorons (named after Cliff’s stage soubriquet), the city is filmed with loving eyes. Yes, the Christmas lights on the rowhouses may look slightly tacky, but the Inner Harbor at night gleams with promise. It’s enough to make us want to jump on a plane—or better still a boat—and see that majestic bridge for ourselves. (Admittedly, I believe it’s the bridge that collapsed after a container ship rammed it in 2024, so The Baltimorons allows us to turn back the clock. The disaster, with its tragic loss of life, is addressed in the film’s credits.)

 I’d be remiss if I didn’t hail the performance of Liz Larsen, a veteran character actress who’s not usually in the spotlight. We first meet her as a no-nonsense dental professional, then gradually come to appreciate what life has done to her, and how badly she needs something positive to happen, especially on Christmas Eve. Under Cliff’s tutelage, she gradually reveals (via a trip to a comedy club followed by a late-night cruise in her ex-husband’s fishing trawler) a madcap side we didn’t at first suspect. Is love blooming? Well, sort of—though this may be the most unlikely pairing since Harold and Maude.

 This modest indie isn’t perfect. The whole relationship between Cliff and his recent fiancée is never fully explained: why is she so exceedingly loyal to a jobless loser like him? And comedies that kick off with a failed suicide attempt are not exactly original. Still, it’s always a pleasure to see a small film that tugs at the heartstrings. Jay Duplass, who often works with younger brother Mark, is a former actor (TV’s Transparent). Both brothers were inspired early on by the work of another pair of brothers, Ethan and Joel Coen, especially their dark but exceedingly comic Raising Arizona. As a Coen Brothers fan myself, I wish the Duplass duo long, happy creative lives.

 

  

 

 

Ferreting Out The Best Films I’ve Never Seen

While looking for something completely different at my local library, I came across a book I couldn’t resist. It was written by journalist Robert K. Elder, as a follow-up to his 2011 volume, The Film that Changed My Life. For that book, which garnered respectful reviews from film geeks like Leonard Maltin, Elder interviewed working directors about the films that had helped mold their own aesthetic.  In 2013, Elder was back with a sequel of sorts, The Best Film You’ve Never Seen. Talking mostly to those directors he had featured in his previous book, Elder here sussed out a list of obscure films that (for whatever reason) we movie lovers should know better.

 Part of the fun of The Best Film You’ve Never Seen is discovering movies about which we have little or no prior knowledge. The always perverse Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse) makes a good case for an obscure indie called The Honeymoon Killers. And John Waters, the celebrated purveyor of deliberately skanky films like Pink Flamingos, argues persuasively that the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton misfire known as Boom! can be a source of viewer delight.  The book has also alerted me to the dubious joys of Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

 Some of the directors’ choices are surprising. Several selected big studio productions from bygone eras. The late Peter Bogdanovich, who always had a passion for the stylistics of long ago, endorsed a 1932 Ernst Lubitsch gem, Trouble in Paradise. I’ve seen this frothy film about con artists and thieves, and can vouch for its charm. (Notably, it was selected in 1991 for inclusion in the National Film Registry.) I guess its age makes it obscure to most of today’s moviegoers, but what about Richard Curtis’s selection, Breaking Away? This amiable coming-of-age comedy about bicycle racing in Bloomington, Indiana, won an Academy Award for its Steve Tesich screenplay, and was nominated for four other Oscars, including Best Picture. I enjoy realizing that Curtis, known for such very English romantic farces as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually, is enamored of Tesich and Peter Yates’ cozy slice of Americana.

 It's fitting, I guess, that Bill Condon—best recalled for splashy Hollywood musicals like Chicago and Dreamgirls—would endorse Bob Fosse’s first screen directorial effort, Sweet Charity. But who would have guessed that Kevin Smith, the outrageous indie director of Clerks, would have a thing for Fred Zinnemann’s (and Paul Scofield’s) 1966 Best-Picture winner,  A Man for All Seasons? It seems that Smith’s Catholic school education, and the efforts of one particular nun, have made him passionate about Sir Thomas More’s doomed efforts to save the One True Church back during the reign of Henry VIII. Smith has high praise for the filmmaking as well as the subject matter, which he expresses in very Kevin Smith fashion. Book author Elder asks the question; “You’ve said that A Man for All Seasons is ‘porn for somebody who loves language.’ How does it differ from regular, missionary-position dialogue in other movies?” And here is Smith’s reply: “Because every line of dialogue is a close-up jizz shot to some degree or a really great close-up on double penetration.”  (You can’t get much more eloquent than that.)

 Reading this book has made me eager to check out some films I’ve only heard of, like Frank Perry’s The Swimmer and Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running (produced in the same year as his great triumph, Gigi).  And I’ll be pondering Henry Jaglom’s take on his friend and mentor Orson Welles’ F for Fake, which Jaglom tantalizingly calls “the most autobiographical of Orson’s films.”

 

Maryland Is For Movies (in Gene Meyer's new book)

Maryland is an oddly shaped state that coils around our nation’s capital. West Coasters tend to think of it as a series of bedroom communities that house the Washington elite in swanky suburbia. It also, has a Civil War connection, a booming tech industry, and a reputation for freshly caught shellfish. Remember the bumper stickers of some years back? If Virginia Is For Lovers, Maryland Is For Crabs.

 When thinking of Maryland, those of us with movie connections focus on Baltimore, birthplace of two writer/directors who’ve made their mark on film history. Barry Levinson set his first four films in Baltimore, reflecting aspects of his own growing-up years in Diner (1982), Tin Men (1987), Avalon (1990), and Liberty Heights (1999). Eventually Levinson moved on to other locales for such hit films as The Natural, the Oscar-winning Rain Man,  and the hilariously prescient Wag the Dog. Meanwhile, filmmaker John Waters has always stayed close to his Baltimore roots, in such strange and uproarious cult classics as Pink Flamingos (1972), Polyester (1981), and Hairspray (1988). The last of these was eventually transformed into a Tony-winning Broadway musical, which in turn became a hit film: its peppy opening number is “Good Morning, Baltimore.”

 My knowledge of Maryland may be limited, but not so my colleague Eugene L. Meyer, who for years has written about the delights of his home state in Maryland Life magazine and the Washington Post. His new book is Hidden Maryland: In Search of America in Miniature. Roaming the state, Gene uncovers all sorts of Maryland quirks and secrets. What I took away was that even in Maryland, you’re never too far from dreams of Hollywood. Gene warmly profiles the owner of Vera’s White Sands Restaurant, a “Kon Tiki tacky” Polynesian restaurant in Calvert County. Miss Vera (who, alas, recently passed on at age 92) loved to reminisce for her clientele about her glamour days in the Hollywood Hills, down the road from Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Gene also writes about tiny Delmar, spanning the Delaware-Maryland border: it was the birthplace of William Alland, who played the reporter doing a post-mortem investigation of Orson Welles’ character in Citizen Kane.

Some genuine Hollywood figures still make their homes in Maryland. A blue-collar section of Montgomery County is the stomping ground of crime novelist George Pelecanos, who won multiple awards for his work as a writer and producer on TV’s The Wire. Pelecanos’s knowledge of the seedy underbelly of cities like Baltimore has led to his involvement with a number of other TV projects, including Tremé (about New Orleans), The Deuce (New York City), and D.C. Noir.

 One highlight of Gene’s book is a piece called “Everyman Tony Mendez Comes In From the Cold.”  It seems that Mendez, a soft-spoken guy now living in retirement in Washington County’s Pleasant Valley, was once a CIA spymaster so crafty that in 1980, at the height of the Iranian hostage crisis, he managed to extricate six American diplomats from the U.S. Embassy in Teheran. Posing as the production manager for a fake film company, he and his team arrived in Iran purporting to scout locations for a sci-fi flick, to be called Argo. (That title was based on a crude knock-knock joke then making the rounds of his office.) In the course of their “location scout,” Mendez and company managed to smuggle out the six frightened Americans who’d been in hiding for months.  

 If Argo sounds familiar, it’s because in 2012 an actual Hollywood film was made, chronicling Mendez’s exploits. He was played on screen by Ben Affleck, who also directed. Alas, Mendez himself passed on due to complications from Parkinson's in 2019.  Gene had interviewed him in 2012, and still treasures the autograph Mendez gave him, written with a shaky hand.  

 

What’s Faster, Pussycat? (An All-American 4th of July Gorefest)

If I hadn’t worked for Roger Corman for so many years, I probably wouldn’t be a fan of Faster, Pussycat1 Kill! Kill! This is a movie that has the great  Corman virtues: it’s fast-paced, it’s concise, and it packs a wallop. To be clear, this is not a Corman film. It was shot in 1965 by exploitation king Russ Meyer, who also concocted the original story, what there is of it. 

In terms of personal style, Russ Meyer can almost be considered the anti-Corman. Roger in his prime projected the aura of an English professor or a hip minister. Meyer, a combat cameraman during World War II, was a self-proclaimed man among men, who was married three times but seemed most at home hanging out with his old military buddies. Clearly turned on by tough, sexy women with oversized breasts, Meyer in film after film indulged his personal obsessions, once saying, “I don't pretend to be some kind of sensitive artist. Give me a movie where a car crashes into a building and the driver gets stabbed by a bosomy blonde, who gets carried away by a dwarf musician.”

Before he passed away in 2004, Meyer directed 29 films, with titles like Mudhoney, Supervixens, and Wild Gals of the Naked West. In 1970, at a time when camp was flourishing, he was actually hired by Twentieth Century Fox to shoot a relatively big-budget film, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, as a follow-up to Fox’s crowd-pleasing Valley of the Dolls. (Roger Ebert, a Russ Meyer devotee, wrote the script.) But Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! remains the closest Meyer has come to making a classic. The story, such as it is, involves three tough, sexy young women (with, natch, oversized breasts) who are out seeking thrills in the California desert. Stumbling upon an innocent young couple, they make short work of the guy and abduct his female companion. Then there’s a crippled old man who has a hidden cache of money as well as a mentally disabled son. What happens thereafter is not pretty, though good triumphs over evil at the very end.

Among the cast, the standout (in more ways than one) is the witchy and bosomy Tura Satana, whose exotic looks and background led her to a career as an exotic dancer (and, it is said, a romance with Elvis Presley). Trained in martial arts, she is frequently given credit for supplying many of the film’s best lines and visuals. Both before and after her death in 2011, Satana inspired homages of many sorts. In the film, her #1 victim, young Linda, is played by the sixteen-year-old Susan Bernard, whose protective mother had the challenge of watching over her on the set. It’s Bernard’s death on June 21 of this year (after a long career in B-movies) that has encouraged me to return to her very lurid debut film.   .

   

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill, shot in black and white on a $45,000 budget, was not successful when it opened, but it quickly became an exploitation classic. Though initially critics (other than Roger Ebert) were scornful, many have come around.  John Waters, in typically over-the-top fashion, has said the film is “beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future.”  There are still frequent references to it within pop culture^{, .} On The Simpsons, for instance, an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon is titled Foster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!  It took a reviewer on IMDB to give it the perfect accolade: “the Citizen Kane of trash cinema.”