The Fastest Guitar Alive

You know those really shitty late Elvis movies? Well, if you ever wondered what a worse one would be like, it might be The Fastest Guitar Alive, Roy Orbison's feeble attempt at movie stardom.

This movie was made in 1967. On American movie screens you could see The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, Belle de Jour or this cheap-ass musical/western starring Roy Orbison, a prime example of the kind of crap other films were reacting against. Hell, even Valley of the Dolls is more artful and profound...

Yeah. It's nothing like this poster would lead you to believe.
This movie is a complete product of The Man.

The Fastest Guitar Alive starts out promisingly enough, with the sound of Roy Orbison warbling a tune. We get our first inkling of disaster when we see Sam the Sham listed in the credits and it's not as a musical guest. But here's ol' Roy, pompadour slicked down and flying high, strumming away on his guitar while perched on a medicine show wagon... towing a wagon of maidens behind. By a line that's hanging out the washing, because basically all the women do in this movie is laundry, dancing and a combination move of pouting and stomping their pretty little feet..

Roy Orbison and his wagon and his wimmin are attacked by a bunch of Indians. I can't really say Native Americans, as the "tribe" is quite clearly a bunch of paunchy middle-aged white guys with Jewish vaudeville accents. They also make jokes about Neo-Impressionist warpaint (made even worse by the fact that what they're pointing to as an example is clearly Abstract Expressionism). They "attack," so Orbison presses a button and a rifle barrel emerges from his guitar, he takes a few shots, the Indians flee in terror. The action in The Fastest Guitar Alive will remain at a strictly Wile E. Coyote level.

Oy.

So, anyway, they take the medicine show to San Francisco, where the ladies do a tepid saloon-girl routine about "doing the snuggle-huggle with you" and the boys make a half-assed attempt at peddling snake oil. It turns out that the whole gang aren't whores and con men at all--good thing too, because they all seem to suck at whoring at conning--they're Confederate spies! And we're supposed to think that's a good thing! In the same year the Supreme Court finally struck down laws forbidding interracial marriage and riots happened in over 150 American cities! And you thought women doing laundry and "the snuggle huggle" in the era of Janis Joplin was some passe wack shit...

Anyway, apparently Roy and his crew are out to steal a shipment of Union gold, in some plan that involves Roy Orbison first giving some local general's daughter "guitar lessons" and then putting on a fake beard. This is as good a time as any, and perhaps I should have said it sooner, to point out that Roy Orbison can't act for shit. Put a guitar in his hands, he's a lord. Put a script in his hands, he's a schmuck. He is not helped by the bad story, the lousy writing, the cheap production values, the lame supporting actors...

At the exact same moment, just a few miles up the California coast,
Hunter S. Thompson was doing acid with the Hells Angels.

So, anyway, Roy Orbison and the nitwits manage to steal the gold, squeezing in a few musical numbers before they go--the one where Roy bets a big "war drum," while the girls wander aimlessly--sorry, dance--around in buckskin bikinis belongs in Las Vegas Hillbillys. Then they head for El Paso to turn over their gold to their commander or whatever, with a few rounds of shenanigans along the way. Some bad dudes from San Francisco follow them, trying to get their ornery mitts on the gold. They run across the Nebbish Americans again. Another bad dude shows up when the girls are showerin' and Roy has to run him off.

But they pull into town only to find folks drinking and cheering and carousing in the street. It seems that the war has ended. The men's response: "The war is over. There's nothing left." The women's response: "We're left." One would like to think this is the sensible response to the end of hostility: Women, with their natural practicality and respect for life, are relived that life will continue. However, given the stance of the rest of The Fastest Guitar Alive, it's more likely that they just mean that they can all get hitched now. Elsewhere in America, it was the height of the protests opposing the Vietnam War...

So, what about the gold blah blah? They boys debate whether to keep it, then they decide to turn it in. In the meantime, various folks try to get the gold, leading to more fourth-rate Wile E. Coyote nonsense along with a few more musical numbers. I'd say the one thing the screenwriters for The Fastest Guitar Alive did right was keep the damn thing to 87 minutes.

Anyway, The Fastest Guitar Alive is an attempt to make 50s entertainment in the 60s  and, well, simply not good. Hell, even Elvis himself was leaving Clambake behind for the 68 Comeback Special by now (lawdy). The only redeeming quality is you get to hear some Roy Orbison songs and, frankly, you could do that better with a stereo.

The Quick and the Dead

You gotta hand it to Sharon Stone. Right after Basic Instinct, she could have done any movie she wanted. And so she said, "Make a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western starring me as The Man With No Name and  directed by the guy who did Evil Dead." Ballsy. A flop, but ballsy. And that's why i have a soft spot for The Quick and the Dead: It's what i would have done if i were in her position.

Another thing we gotta hand to La Stone and this is something the money men could have believed in if they could have forseen it: For The Quick and the Dead, Stone insisted on Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe as her co-stars. Both were on the verge of megastardom: Leo two years from Titanic and Unca Russ five out from Gladiator. Of course, Stone's choices of leading man weren't always so ace: See Billy Baldwin and Sylvester Stallone....

So, it's the classic western setup: Small town terrorized by evil town-running dude and his gang of henchmen. Said evil town-running dude is played by Gene Hackman in a shocking piece of stunt casting. I mean, he never plays roles like that...

Anyway, HackMan -- in what i assume is an attempt to increase the local tourist trade -- hosts an annual gun battle. They've got brackets and everything. La Stone aka "The Lady" signs up, along with the usual western movie suspects: Hired gun, tubercular pistolero,Texas braggart, angry Native American, several drunks and the unwashed rapist. And here we also have DiCaprio as cocky sharpshooter "The Kid," aka HackMan's son, as well as Crowe aka "The Preacher," a former gunslinger who has seen the error of his ways.

Stone appears and immediately steals someone's gold, knocks down a saloon manager who says the only place she can get a room is at the whorehouse, tells a gambler to play with himself, tells the convict he needs a bath and is nice to the blind shoeshine boy. It is a world of ridiculous machismo and the men seem less disturbed by the fact that Stone might shoot them than that she is utterly unimpressed with their bullshit. Just stands there, mutely appraising your sorry ass and finding you seriously wanting.

When they won't let her in the contest, she manages to simultaneously show off her pistol skills and save Crowe from a barroom lynching, earning them both a place in the brackets. Did i mention that at one point, she smacks an obnoxious and abusive little boy in the face? Love. Huh.

Yet it's also clear  that Stone isn't quite the heartless killer she pretends to be and is, indeed, slightly overwhelmed by these cold-blooded faceoffs. There's some heavy-handed childhood flashback sequences but they only spell out what she intelligently hints at -- that her silent bravado often hides the fact that she is confused and somewhat frightened by what's going on. For example: In her first faceoff, she is initially nervous, then resolute, then shocked and then covers it all by sticking her tongue down DiCaprio's throat and running off to get shitfaced on cheap whiskey. This is actually pretty much how i lived my life in NYC in the 90s, actually...

More gunfights, more deaths, more threats greeted by mute disdain. Stone gets dressed up in ladydrag to have dinner with HackMan but inexplicably doesn't whack him when she has the chance. And she does a bit much moaning and crying and doubting, although at least she does it in private. In public, she follows the wise edict that when you don't know what to say or do, do and say nothing and let others ascribe profundity to it. (Again: What i would have done in her position.)  You can bet that unwashed rapist is gonna get his though....

As far as our co-stars, Crowe manages to carry of pacifist badass and you can imagine his agent's phone ringing off the damn hook afterward -- hey, this was the 90s, phones still had hooks and Russel Crowe was still hot. Interestingly, there apparently was a scene where he gets in on with Stone that didn't make the final cut. (I can see Stone knowing damn well that it wouldn't, but insisting on shooting it anyway. I'm surprised she even had them put film in the camera.) DiCaprio is annoying but, well, he's supposed to be.

(I have contemplated how much less DiCaprio we'd have to deal with if River Phoenix hadn't died. Both were Oscar-nominated at an early age, but Phoenix was the better actor. And i think of his Gatsby and it makes me sad: Few actors have had the gift for evoking the longing of the outsider that River Phoenix did and i believe his Gatsby would have been the rare filmic portrayal that actually adds something to the literary character. Especially if they'd gotten it fully right and had Charlize Theron as Daisy. But i digress...)

 

 The main problem with The Quick and the Dead is that it's kind of hard for the movie to go anywhere. We're stuck with a series of high-noon gunfights building up to the inevitable faceoff between HackMan and La Stone. In the meanwhile, DiCaprio is arrogant, Crowe is noble, HackMan is a fucking dick and all the other archtypes do as is expected of them.

Sam Raimi's light-yet-violent touch shows up in the propensity for people having sunlight or smoke or small shadowbox-like views seen through the bullet holes just put in them. But The Quick and the Dead could stand a bit more of his trademark goofiness. (Although Crowe does throw down some rather Ash in Evil Dead moves in the climactic gunfight.)

 Still, it's an entertaining film with a bit of humor, a few good performances and a nice twist on the genre. Johnny Guitar, Cat Ballou and Westward the Women were all feminine takes on the western, but they significantly change western conventions to accommodate the ladies: With Freudian catfighting,with the delicate-female-turned-tough plotline, with a sisterhood road movie. But in The Quick and the Dead, it's straight up classic western tropes except for the fact that it changes the gender of the mysterious stranger set on vengeance. Sometimes the small changes are the most radical of all...

Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter

I know what you're thinking: With a title like that, how can it miss? Well, it can. It can miss like the proverbial country mile. It can miss like John Starks in Game 7 of the 1994 NBA Finals. There's good crap and there's bad crap. We are mostly devoted to the good crap but, every now and then, I come not to praise but to warn. So let it be with Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter.

So, we're somewhere in the southwest, where Frankenstein's Daughter has set up in some castle because apparently the lightning is better there. And, as so often happens when the Frankensteins move into the neighborhood, people start disappearing -- or so we are told by "Juanita," a fair young maiden who lives in a pequeno pueblo, or so they tell us, since she seems to be in her late thirties and from somewhere in the Valley.

Cut to a big lunkhead bare-knuckle boxing. He's not Billy the Kid -- the guy in the mustache is Billy the Kid. Hank is the name of his muscular and frequently shirtless companion. Hank boxes, Billy shoots someone. The two somehow wind up enmeshed in a bank robbery but then not in a bank robbery and now some guy wants to turn them in for reward money. The villagers near the castle in Alburquerque or wherever bitch more about lost relatives. Frankenstein's Daughter rants about her grandfather's creation. Yak yak yak yak. Yup, cheesy exploitation movie that suddenly bogs down into a dull talkathon. It's like the Tarantino part of Grindhouse, but worse.

Somehow Lunkhead gets shot and so Jesse James comes to town. Somehow Lunkhead goes to Miss Frankenstein for medical treatment. Both Frankenstein's Daughter and the Hollywood Carhop Senorita are deeply enamored of Jesse James. Usually, when a lady meets a man with a large mustache who always wears a suit and is devoted to his muscular and frequently shirtless companion -- especially when said companion is significantly younger and quite stupid-- she knows better than to be come enamored but, hey, hope springs eternal. And Frankenstein's Daughter does have a classic, Frankensteinian use for a giant, musclebround, brainless guy. She even changes his name from Hank to Igor. In fact, that kind of seems the part of creating a monster she's most adamant about: The name. Well, and the killing. I suppose it's a good thing all the old Frankenstein movies were in black and white -- it spared us knowing that rainbow-striped plastic helmets of the type worn by a metally deficent pre-teen on his birthday we crucial to the "creating new life" process.

Listen, I know it sounds appetizing. But, trust me, it's not. It is a very, very bad film. And not in the Run D.M.C. sense of "bad meaning good," but in the sense of bad meaning just plain shitty. Not even a case of Spanish absinthe and a brick of sour diesel chronic could make Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter bearable. And that's saying a hell of a lot.